ABSTRACT
Rural women's lives have changed in many ways in response to shifts in gender divisions of labor and environmental degradation. Use of ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic variables insufficiently captures the complicated positions of rural women of different classes, races, ethnicities, and sexualities. Urban-centered feminist scholarship and activism generates particular problems for feminist rural scholars. Rural women often handle their problems using less obviously confrontational strategies than urban feminist activists. Global restructuring and changes in patriarchal forms in rural areas continually reshape rural women's lives. Rural women's situated knowledge and daily work with crops, animals, land, and forests provide them with particular angles of vision concerning the natural world that clearly differ from urban women's or men's perspectives. Further in-depth studies of women's knowledge of land, plants, animals, and social relations in various local contexts would enhance feminist scholars' understandings of food and environmental situations.
