ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on rural women's organisation, and shows how a set of scrapbooks produced by the group document further changes in the countryside, from the influx of members from the new middle class residents of the village, to the appearance of pylons in the landscape. It also focuses on the visual elements of the scrapbooks, specifically the use of collage as a medium and its potential for revealing the lived experience of different yet intertwined realities. The chapter explores the relationship between the personal and seemingly trivial aspects of the everyday and the larger, narratives of modernity which they also express. It discusses the archives of the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI), in order to reconstruct the history and intentions around the creation of the scrapbooks. The chapter draws together these local and national women's networks by thinking through the idea of the network as embodied by another rural network: the national grid.
