RWSA NEWSLETTER June 2021

Reflections on the RWSA’s 14th Triennial Conference 11-14 May during COVID

During 11-15 May 2021, 221 people gathered at the RWSA 14th Triennial Conference, hosted by the University of Guelph. This was the RWSA’s first virtual conference and a great success. The conference theme, Kitchen Table Talk to Global Forum, attracted people from fourteen countries who shared their research about rural women, food, and other issues on the table: activism, feminism, social justice, mental health, innovation, community development, and cultural expression — both historical and

contemporary — locally and globally.

For two years, the Local Arrangement Committee (LAC) had been making plans to hold the conference on the University of Guelph campus in Canada. They had arranged pre- and post-conference tours, performers, special dining events, and raised $40,000 in cash and in-kind sponsorship. Then the pandemic hit in March of 2020 and these much-anticipated events were replaced with uncertainty and risk. It was no longer feasible to meet in person. No vaccine existed, some people had lost funding and were worried about their jobs, and others were not able to travel internationally. Organizers did not want to put participants at risk. Outright cancellation was not good for the organization, as six years would have passed before the next scheduled conference. Postponing it to 2022 raised questions about whether the economy and travel would be normalized by then.

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The RWSA decided to go virtual, and the great pivot began. The Program Committee notified panelists of the decision and the LAC renegotiated with sponsors and performers and cancelled tours and venues. The LAC created a conference website and selected Hopin as a virtual hosting platform because it was supported by the University of Guelph and had session rooms, a stage, an expo hall, AND attendees could chat with a friend, network with colleagues, and make new contacts, valued informal experiences that are the hallmark of RWSA conferences.

The conference began with the launch of A Taste of Backstories: The Kitchen Table Talk Cookbook which featured our members’ heirloom recipes, storytelling, and scholarly content.

Special events throughout the week included keynote speaker Métis Dr. Kim Anderson’s presentation on Indigenous “Kitchen Table Methodologies,” food as a tool of colonization, and making a territorial acknowledgement a practice.

Rural Women’s Studies Association Newsletter 2 In a special plenary session, panelists and the audience discussed how COVID-19 was affecting rural women. Another plenary addressed mentorship and development networks. Performances included music therapist Mary Parkinson who told her family’s rural life story through period music, and the week ended with theatre artist Taylor Graham and her students presenting excerpts from the Canadian classic play The Farm Show. Throughout the week, the expo hall featured culinary collections, rural organizations, farm yoga, and historical mini documentaries.

Going virtual was the right decision. It gave presenters and organizers the security of knowing they could plan the event occurred according to our triennial schedule, without risk to participants and with less expense for the organization and attendees. Our attendance doubled, as with no travel and accommodation costs, more people joined who might otherwise have found it too expensive. The reach of the conference extended making our conference theme “Kitchen Table Talk to Global Forum” even more meaningful as people joined in the discussion from France, Australia, Nigeria, India, Netherlands, Argentina, Canada, the U.S., and other countries.

The experience had its challenges and some unexpected advantages too. We had to work with a world clock as the program took shape. Participants needed training within the virtual environment and with varying home equipment and internet access sometimes struggled to upload their slides and videos. Such challenges pulled people together as we helped each other. Once familiar with the online environment, participants engaged in lively discussions in thirty-five sessions, thematic break-times, and in the lounge area. Displays and live demonstrations took place in the expo area. We missed the opportunity to hug friends, the bus tours, the Saturday morning trip to the market, those chance encounters in the cafeteria lineup, and dinners on the town, but the online experience provided advantages beyond those listed above. One could knit while listening to a panel from the comfort of their home office and no one needed to pack a suitcase, stand in long airport lineups, or struggle with sleepless nights in a strange bed.

Altogether people found the experience rewarding so that future conference organizers are considering the possibility of hybrid conferences.

Catharine Wilson (Co-Chair 2015-2021 and Conference Host)

Rural Women’s Studies Association Newsletter 3 Backstories: The Kitchen Table Talk Cookbook The Rural Women's Studies Association is proud to announce the publication of Backstories: The Kitchen Table Talk Cookbook.

Sharing recipes is a form of intimate conversation that nourishes body and soul, family and community. Backstories: The Kitchen Table Talk Cookbook integrates formal scholarship with informal reflections, analyses of recipe books with heirloom recipes, and text with images to emphasize the ways that economics, politics, and personal meaning come together to shape our changing relationships with food. By embracing elements of history, rural studies, and women’s studies, this volume offers a unique perspective by relating food history with social dynamics. It is sure to inspire eclectic dining and conversations.

With over 20 contributors and 60 selections, Backstories takes the reader from the East Coast’s Delmarva Peninsula to the American and Canadian Midwest, the Mexican-American border, to Hawaii and beyond and situate the kitchen across a range of cultural and historical contexts. Edited by Cynthia C. Prescott and Maureen S. Thompson, this innovative academic cookbook is available now as a free download; paperback copies available for $20 USD (plus shipping & handling).

Paperback copies autographed by co-editor Cynthia Prescott are available for shipping anywhere in the USA as a fundraiser for RWSA. Proceeds of orders placed via the RWSA website benefit RWSA's Jensen- Neth Fund. Paperbacks are also available for direct shipping worldwide.

RWSA Blog Announcement Did you know that RWSA has its very own blog? Its purpose is to improve the visibility of rural women’s studies research and activism around the world. The blog has been less active in recent months, but we are looking to return to weekly or biweekly posts. Posts range from roughly 200 to 2,000 words. Timeline is flexible. Bring your ideas to Cindy Prescott at [email protected].

Opportunity - Postdoctoral Fellowship in Women’s History in the Pacific West http://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=61460 Application s due June 30, 2021!

AHS News The Agricultural History Society recently announced that it has honored RWSA members Catharine Wilson and Valerie Grim by naming them as Fellows of the Society.

Rural Women’s Studies Association Newsletter 4 RWSA 2024

RWSA 2024 will be hosted by Arkansas State University (A-State). A-State is located in Jonesboro, the largest city in northeast Arkansas with 76, 000+ people and is an hour away from Memphis, Tennessee and two hours away from Little Rock. The recently built Embassy Suites by Hilton Jonesboro Red Wolf Convention Center (https://www.hilton.com/en/hotels/jbrjoes-embassy-suites-jonesboro-red-wolf-convention-center/) is located on A- State's campus.

Situated on Crowley's Ridge and serving as the gateway to the Arkansas Delta, Jonesboro and the surrounding area offers such important rural historical sites as the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum (Southern Tenant Farmers Museum (astate.edu)), the Pfeiffer-Hemingway Museum and Educational Center (https://hemingway.astate.edu/), the Parkin Archeological State Park (https://www.arkansasstateparks.com/parks/parkin-archeological-state-park), and the Historic Dyess Colony | Boyhood Home (astate.edu)). The ASU Regional Farmers Market (http://www.asuregionalfarmersmarket.org/), is also open on Saturdays from May to October from 7 am to 1 pm!

RWSA 2027 RWSA 2027 will be hosted by the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota. A leader in online education, UND will support RWSA's efforts to host "hybrid" conferences, combining in-person and virtual formats. Grand Forks is located on the North Dakota- border, 75 miles north of Fargo, ND, and 150 miles south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The "Grand Cities" are home to "Olive Garden Lady" Marilyn Hagerty and Molly Yeh, star of . You can read about them in the new RWSA cookbook!

Rural Women’s Studies Association Newsletter 5 Member News New Books

In Making Circles, Barney Nelson unveils working-class cowboy culture through the eyes of one who has lived the life she chronicles. From living on ranch camps to surviving both cowboy school and graduate school, Nelson’s story is a journey through time and place, pointing out that cowboys inhabit every continent and century, from Lakota Indians and Hawaiian paniolos to Argentine gauchos and Australian ringers, from Pegasus to Cervantes and Tolstoy. Even Thoreau called himself a cowboy.

Nelson's story is both personal and expansive, guiding the reader in circles around the modern West, from Montana to Mexico. Along the way, she celebrates the many characters she has encountered and considers role models. Unafraid to challenge the status quo, Nelson fearlessly defends embattled ranchers as well as the humanities, while speaking truth to the powerful forces of environmentalism, tourism, and urban voters.

Both a primer for aspiring journalists and an insider’s reflection on horse and ranching cultures, this tour de force memoir honors the practice of writing and its manifold benefits: embracing solitude, avoiding boredom, and accepting aging and death as part of human and animal life. Full of valuable tips, lessons learned and taught, and far-ranging musings on philosophy and poetry, Making Circles demonstrates brilliantly the value and meaning of the term “cowboy journalist.”

Jodey Nurse is an L. R. Wilson Assistant Professor at the Wilson Institute for Canadian History currently researching the history of Canada's supply-managed dairy, egg, and poultry industries. Central to her work is the examination of asymmetrical power relations among stakeholders in agricultural marketing systems and the polarized agricultural policies that have emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She also studies and writes about women in agricultural organizations and rural society more generally, and this fall McGill-Queen’s University Press will be publishing her first monograph based on her Ph.D. research, Cultivating Community: Women and Agricultural Fairs in Ontario.

Rural Women’s Studies Association Newsletter 6 Walter A. Jackson’s Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in Sweden and America, 1898-1945 was issued by Routledge/Taylor & Francis recently. Grey Osterud edited this work over the six years after the author, with whom Grey had been working for about six months, was killed when he was hit by a truck while riding his bicycle home from his office in a freak snowstorm in Chapel Hill. Rachida Chbihi Jackson, his widow, asked Grey to see if she could produce a publishable manuscript from his drafts, and his lifelong friend managed to download the files from the thumb drive in his backpack to supplement the files he had sent her. She had multiple drafts of some chapters, outlines of others, and notes on and scans of sources to work with. The dual biography focuses on the Myrdals’ productive collaboration on social policy questions and their reflections on their relationship, which they eventually realized fell far short of the egalitarian partnership they had intended.

What does this book have to do with gender and the transition to capitalism in rural societies? Both Gunnar and Alva came from rural families, one landowning and the other landless; both grew up in Stockholm but retained close ties to their families’ rural homes. Alva spent her teenage years on a small farm that had been passed down along the female line in her mother’s family and did all types of farm tasks, although she much preferred reading. The resonances of agrarian ideas regarding the economic and social value of married women’s productive labor were strong in Sweden before WWII, shaping the Social Democratic Party’s platform and, in particular, Alva’s proposals for welfare and labor policies that would enable women to combine motherhood with employment. In that respect, then, this book sheds light on the subject of the last chapter of Lena Sommestad’s book (2019), which focuses on the role that rural women’s organizations and their alliances with reformers like Alva Myrdal played in the construction of the two-breadwinner model of the Swedish welfare state during the interwar period.

The first major study to consider Black women's activism in rural Arkansas, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps foregrounds activists' quest to improve Black communities through language and foodways as well as politics and community organizing. In reexamining these efforts, Cherisse Jones-Branch lifts many important figures out of obscurity, positioning them squarely within Arkansas's agrarian history.

The Black women activists highlighted here include home demonstration agents employed by the Arkansas Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service and Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers, all of whom possessed an acute understanding of the difficulties that African faced in rural spaces. Examining these activists through a historical lens, Jones-Branch reveals how educated, middle- class Black women worked with their less-educated rural sisters to create all- female spaces where they confronted economic, educational, public health, political, and theological concerns free from white regulation and interference.

Centered on the period between 1914 and 1965, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps brings long-overdue attention to an important chapter in Arkansas history, spotlighting a group of Black women activists who uplifted their communities while subverting the formidable structures of white supremacy.

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RWSA Officers Cont. About the RWSA Emerging Professional & Graduate Student Founded in 1998 as an outgrowth of the Sixth Coordinators Conference on Rural and Farm Women in Historical Maggie Weber, University of Wisconsin-Eau Perspective, the Rural Women’s Studies Association Claire is an international organization for the Kendra DeHart, Sul Ross State University advancement and promotion of farm and rural Karissa Patton, University of Saskatchewan women’s gender studies in historical perspective. Diane McKenzie, University of Lethbridge The Association aims to encourage research, to promote existing and forthcoming scholarship, and Newsletter Editor to establish and maintain links with contemporary Margaret Thomas Evans, Indiana University East farm and rural women’s organizations. The RWSA aims to encourage scholars from different Fundraising disciplinary backgrounds and countries to Cynthia Prescott, University of North Dakota communicate about their research and all other Sara Morris, University of Kansas activities that are supportive to the Association’s goals. Web Master

Katherine Jellison, Ohio University RWSA Officers https://www.ohio.edu/cas/history/institutes-associations/rwsa/ Co-Chairs Cherisse Jones-Branch, Arkansas State University Cynthia Prescott, University of North Dakota Social Media Coordinators Cynthia Prescott, University of North Dakota Co-Secretaries Maggie Weber, University of Wisconsin-Eau Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Iowa State University Claire Lynne Benson, UMass Boston

Treasurer Share Your Work on the RWSA Blog Jenny Barker-Devine, College https://ruralwomensstudies.wordpress.com/ We invite submissions to the RWSA blog, which International Membership and Communication publishes on a wide range of topics related to rural Coordinators women, gender and sexuality. We publish Pacific – Katie Cooper of Te Papa Tongarewa/ scholarship and book reviews as well as more Museum of New Zealand informal reflections. We also seek to highlight rural Canada – Jodey Nurse, University of Waterloo activism. Posts typically range from about 200 to Europe – Margreet van der Burg, Wageningen 2,000 words. Send submissions and queries to University, Holland & Tanya Watson, National Cynthia Prescott at [email protected] University of Ireland Send Us Your News! Africa – Olubunmi Ashimolowo, University of RWSA members would appreciate hearing of your Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria & Oluwaseun Boye, accomplishments, awards, changes in employment, Ogun State Government U.S. – Tracey Hanshew, Washington State TC & publications, and research discoveries or needs. We Yvette Blair-Lavallais, Memphis Theological welcome announcements from institutions and Seminary organizations regarding historical holdings, job South America – openings, and events. Send submissions to Margaret Asia – Thomas Evans [email protected]

We plan to have two issues per year – fall and spring.

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RURAL WOMEN’S STUDIES ASSOCIATION MEMBERSHIP FORM

MEMBER INFORMATION

FIRST NAME LAST NAME

AFFILIATION

MAILING ADDRESS (please circle: Work or Home)

CITY STATE ZIP / COUNTRY CODE

COUNTRY E-MAIL PHONE FAX

MEMBERSHIP AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO RWSA:

ANNUAL DUES are $10.00 for students, non-academics, and adjunct and part-time faculty; $25.00 for tenure-track faculty; and $50.00 for contributing members.

JOAN JENSEN-MARY NETH FUND: RWSA welcomes contributions to the Joan Jensen-Mary Neth Fund to help offset registration fees for invited speakers and international participants. Memorials may be made to the Fund as well. Please designate the name of the person being memorialized.

DUES: ______(Please circle: Annual $10; Annual $25; Contributing $50)

JENSEN-NETH FUND: ______IN MEMORY OF ______

TOTAL ENCLOSED: ______

Please mail a personal check or international money order made out to RWSA to:

Jenny Barker-Devine, RWSA Treasurer Dept. of History, Illinois College 1101 W. College Avenue Jacksonville, IL 62650

(RWSA is a 501C-3 non-profit organization and all donations are tax deductible.)

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