Description
Sanchez 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 Sanchez's 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.
About the Author
Maria Sanchez is a Spanish writer and field veterinarian and the author of Cuaderno de campo (Field Notebook), Almaciga: Un vivero de palabras de nuestro medio rural (Seedbed), and Tierra de mujeres: Una mirada intima 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 Cordoba, Spain.
Reviews
Praise for Land of Women
"A passionate 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
"Sanchez's 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 women's historical roles in rural communities." - Foreword Reviews
"Writer and veterinarian Maria Sanchez 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, Sanchez draws on her own history to measure how much the earth is also a woman's 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, didn't 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 Pais
"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 Aragon
"Maria Sanchez asks us to consider the silent contribution of women in rural areas free from nostalgia, bucolic sentiments, and prejudice." - El Mundo
"Maria Sanchez recovers the trace of the women in her life-in 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
"Sanchez's 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, there's still soil under the concrete." La Vanguardia
"With Land of Women, Maria Sanchez has become an essential writer to read." - El Cultural
"Faced with a feminism that is highlighted through social media, Maria Sanchez 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 book-political, pure, and sincere. There are few books as necessary as this." - El Confidencial
"Land of Women is personal and unique-a 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 Maria 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, Sanchez gives voice to all of those anonymous figures who work and nourish the fields." - Cristina Sanchez-Andrade
"This is more than a book. It's 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
Book Information
ISBN 9781595349637
Author Maria Sanchez
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Trinity University Press,U.S.
Publisher Trinity University Press,U.S.
