Writing women into back-to-the-land: feminism, appropriation, and identity in the 1970s magazine Country Women

This chapter considers ways that mutually reinforcing oppressive ideologies including racism and a hierarchical human/nature binary remained unchallenged in the feminist back-to-the-land publication Country Women (1973-–1979), a reader-contributed newsletter that explored feminist issues and gendered assumptions alongside articles for the back-to-the-land farmer. The feminists of Country Women exposed the ways that the back-to-the-land movement exploited women’s labor. Yet, their reflexive dependence on a human/nature hierarchical binary and racial/ethnic appropriation meant these women used nature as the raw material and ethnic cultures as tools for self-empowerment rather than the dismantlement of oppressive systems and the construction of egalitarian ones.