Land of Women

(Paperback)

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Description

Mara Snchez is obsessed with what she cannot see. As a field veterinarian following in the footsteps of generations before her, she travels the countryside of Spain bearing witness to a life eroding before her eyeswords, practices, and people slipping away because of depopulation, exploitation of natural resources, inadequate environmental policies, and development encroaching on farmland and villages. Snchez, the first woman in her family to dedicate herself to what has traditionally been a male-dominated profession, rebuffs the bucolic narrative of rural life often written byand for consumption bypeople in cities, describing the multilayered social complexity of people who are proud, resilient, and often misunderstood.

Snchez interweaves family stories of three generations with reflections on science and literature. She focuses especially on the often dismissed and undervalued generations of women who have forgone education and independence to work the land and tend to family. In doing so, she asks difficult questions about gender equity and labor. Part memoir and part rural feminist manifesto, Land of Women acknowledges the sacrifices of Snchezs female ancestors who enabled her to become the woman she is.

A bestseller in Spain, Land of Women promises to ignite conversations about the treatment and perception of rural communities everywhere.

Reviews

Praise for Land of Women

"Apassionate and touching book...Land of Women may be a small book, but it is mighty. It gives a voice to rural women and speaks truths long hidden." Christian Science Monitor

"Snchezs prose is both lyrical and nebulous, resulting in a deep, personal cultural history that digs into areas not often discussed...a moving feminist account of womens historical roles in rural communities."Foreword Reviews

"Writer and veterinarian Mara Snchez celebrates the women of her world, quiet workers of an ultrapatriarchal campaign. As indispensable as they are invisible. As omnipresent as they are silent. In this feminist and poetic manifesto, Snchez draws on her own history to measure how much the earth is also a womans affair. Le Monde

This book does not talk about the women who will fill the city streets. It speaks of a rural feminism . . . that remembers the strong and wise women who worked the land without raising their voices. Time Out

Narrated with agility, lucidity, forcefulness, and tenderness. There is knowledge, pride, vitality, and fantastic energy in this memoir about the women who, against the tide of history, didnt leave their family homes or their land, the ones who stayed with their men (or without them) in the rural area, the ones who resisted the exodus to the cities. El Pas

Land of Women is a beautiful tribute to the genealogy of women who came before, women with hands that molded the earth and who were part of the earth. El Heraldo de Aragn

Mara Snchez asks us to consider the silent contribution of women in rural areas free from nostalgia, bucolic sentiments, and prejudice. El Mundo

Mara Snchez recovers the trace of the women in her lifein her learning, in the field, and in the home. As with the feminist movement, she turns our attention to that which was invisible to us until now. Zenda

Land of Women launches a harangue against urban snobbery: no more stigmatizing the people of the countryside and ignoring their workers. Eldiario

Snchezs ferocity echoes Elena Ferrante. Aysmptote

An expression of intimate and familiar memory endowed with a great poetic strength. ABC Sevilla

An essential [book] that focuses on the compelling need to expand feminist discourse so that it affects not only women in big cities but also those in rural areas. It deserves to be read by everyone. After all, theres still soil under the concrete. La Vanguardia

With Land of Women, Mara Snchez has become an essential writer to read. El Cultural

Faced with a feminism that is highlighted through social media, Mara Snchez knows that outside the cities, agriculture is an assumption without consideration. She gives feminist voice to the field. El Cultural

Land of Women urges us to reconnect with the rural world, especially its women, and to tell our stories free of shame. ABC Cultura

An epic bookpolitical, pure, and sincere. There are few books as necessary as this. El Confidencial

Land of Women is personal and uniquea book that cannot be defined under any one label. A book that is born from mourning. A book of trial and vindication. A book of intimate and collective memory. Anna Mara Iglesia

Land of Women is simultaneously everything I do not know and everything I love: my midwife great-grandmother, my literature teacher grandmother, my historian mother, them, me, us, all different, together. Luna Miguel

Rooted in our landscape, suffused with tenderness and courage, Snchez gives voice to all of those anonymous figures who work and nourish the fields. Cristina Snchez-Andrade

This is more than a book. Its a piece of the earth, of the land, of life itself. Aleix Costa

Land of Women is truth: truth and caring, truth and vigor, truth and consciousness, truth and reality. Sergio Sancor

Author Bio

Mara Snchezis a Spanish writer and field veterinarian and the author ofCuaderno de campo (Field Notebook), Almciga: Un vivero de palabras de nuestro medio rural (Seedbed), andTierra de mujeres: Una mirada ntima y familiar al mundo rural(Land of Women), a bestseller in Spain, with translations into French and German. Her poetry and prose have been translated into French, Portuguese, English, and German, and she is a regular contributor to publications on literature, feminism, and rural culture. She lives in Crdoba, Spain.