Land of Women

by María Sánchez, Curtis Bauer (Translator)

Overview

María Sánchez 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 eyes—words, practices, and people slipping away because of depopulation, exploitation of natural resources, inadequate environmental policies, and development encroaching on farmland and villages. Sánchez, 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 by—and for consumption by—people in cities, describing the multilayered social complexity of people who are proud, resilient, and often misunderstood.

Sánchez 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 Sánchez’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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595349637
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

María Sánchez is a Spanish writer and field veterinarian and the author of Cuaderno de campo (Field Notebook), Almáciga: Un vivero de palabras de nuestro medio rural (Seedbed), and Tierra de mujeres: Una mirada íntima 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 Córdoba, Spain.

Curtis Bauer is an American writer and translator. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently American Selfie. He has translated poetry and prose from Spanish for Fabio Morábito, Luis Muñoz, Juan Antonio González Iglesias, and Jeannette L. Clariond, including Image of Absence, which received the 2020 International Latino Book Award for the Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks and translations editor for The Common. He teaches comparative literature and creative writing at Texas Tech Universityin Lubbock.

Read an Excerpt

María Sánchez  / Land of Women

Translated by Curtis Bauer

Excerpt (from final transmitted manuscript - has not been copyedited yet)

[WC -= 1416]

I am a woman who is a third generation: my grandfather was a veterinarian, my father is a veterinarian and so am I. I am the first granddaughter, the first daughter, the first niece. But also la primera veterinaria, the first woman veterinarian. I come from a family that has always been linked to the land and to animals, to extensive livestock production. My childhood is full of cork oaks, holm oaks and olive trees, a few vegetable gardens, root cellars and a lot of animals. As a child, I always looked up to them. The men were the voice and the arm of the house. In fact, I wanted to be one of them. As a little girl and until I was well into my teens, I hated dresses, the hair my mother insisted I wear long and comb, and the dolls I was supposed to play with. I wanted to be strong, I ran fearlessly behind the herd and I fell again and again when I bravely steered around the tracks, too wide for my bike, which remained in the lanes a while after the tractors passed. I was always the first one to appear when my grandfather or my father needed help. I wanted to be like them. To show them that I was as strong and as ready as they were. Because if there is something that is clear to us from a young age it is this. Men of blood and earth never cry, they are not afraid, they are never wrong. They always know what needs to be done. Always.

At that age, the women in my home were like ghosts who roamed the house, appearing and disappearing. They were invisible. Sisters of an only child, as the Portuguese writer Agustina Bessa-Luís once said about her childhood. Sisters of strong men. Invisible women in the shadow of a brother. In the shadow and at the service of a brother, a father, a husband, of their own sons. And this couldn’t be more accurate and, at the same time, more painful. Because this is the story of our country and of so many others: women who remained in the shadows and without a voice, orbiting around the star of the house, who kept quiet and gave in; loyal, patient, good mothers, cleaning gravesites, sidewalks and facades, saturating their hands with whitewash and lye every year, knowers of remedies, ceremonies and lullabies; witches, teachers, sisters, speaking softly among themselves, becoming shelter and nourishment; turning into, over the years, another unnoticed room, into an artery inherent  to the house.

But who are the ones telling the stories of women? Who worries about rescuing our grandmothers and mothers from that world they were confined to, from that quiet room, in miniature, reducing them to mere companions, exemplary wives and good mothers? Why have we normalized a narrative of our history where they are not participants? Who has seized their spaces and voice? Who really writes about them? Why aren’t these women the ones who write about our rural community? 

Many things have had to happen and a lot of time has had to pass so I could know the stories of the women in my family, to be able to delve into them, recognize myself there and feel proud. To be unashamed to ask questions and get to know them, and also know myself, after all. The houses have had to remain empty, absurd with their little picture frames, with them always looking at me. Many of them have had to go away and never come back. Sometimes without looking back, without leaving even the faintest trace on the ground for us to follow in their footsteps. Maybe as daughters we have woken up a bit late, but at last we are questioning and making demands, we are using our voice to take control. Now that I look back and think about it, I can’t help noticing a feeling like a wall clock pendulum swinging between rage and guilt. Why didn't they occupy a prominent place among my mentors? Why weren’t they ever the example I wanted to follow? Why, as a child, didn't I want to be like them?

It seems strange, now that we are fortunate to live in a feminist society, to ask such an obvious question. But looking back at our homes we find similar stories. Everything that entered the house, the important, the joyous and the great achievements, the good news, always came from the same voice. They told us that the man was the only one who worked, that he was the one who deserved to rest when he got home. We silenced and moved to the shadows those who did the housework, those who rolled up their sleeves and skirts in our towns, those who helped with the farrowing, those who worked in the garden, took care of the chickens, picked olives; we put them in the shadows. They were removed from the light so that the center of attention and the foundations of the house always illuminated the man, so the rest of us wouldn’t look away, or lose our focus. We understood, as a matter of course, that our mothers and grandmothers would take care of everything and could do everything: the house, the caregiving, the children, the fields, the animals. We took away their stories and thought nothing of it. We let the men be the ones to speak, those who continued to lead the way for the rest of us. These women, our grandmothers, our mothers, our aunts, we saw them as something both strange and familiar, something close but belonging to another galaxy, with another sense of time and another demeanor. They talked to us and told us things, but we didn’t understand them, because we simply didn’t listen to them. The standards that we’d been given to that point were established almost entirely by the male gender.

How do you write about what you don’t value? How do you remove from the shadow what is placed there and left there as if it were something normal? How do you rewrite them? How do you give them back the voice and the words they’ve always had but which has not been heard or even considered? How can we include them in our stories if in our language and our narratives they’ve never held a protagonist’s role?

Not everything is reduced to the domestic sphere. This isolation of women is a disease that has managed to spread through all strata. I feel like someone who discovers rooms in an abandoned house and goes in, room by room lifting the sheets that cover the furniture and looks for a reflection in the windows and mirrors. No. It's not just the house I grew up in. The infection reached every layer of my life: school, university, my job.

The books surrounding me as I grew up, all those notes and reference manuals I spent so many hours with in the library, animal and bird guides, all those novels, stories and poems, everything, practically in their entirety, written by the same sex. All those I admired and followed: scientists, ecologists, thinkers, veterinarians, shepherds, farmers, day laborers, livestock producers, conservationists, educators, all of them, everyone, absolutely all of them, men.

My grandfather. My father. My uncles. Those who worked in the fields and those I was close to so I could be like them. The hours glued to the television watching the documentaries of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente. So many passages by Miguel Delibes. The poems of Federico García Lorca. Wanting to write like Julio Llamazares when I first read Yellow Rain. The animals that never stopped howling in the poems by Ted Hughes. The birds that lived with a quote from Shakespeare in Peterson's guide. Like the birds that John Audubon killed to then be able to more easily paint them. The humanist and veterinarian from Cordoba, Castejón. Also the one who was President of the republic in exile, and who became the first veterinarian to recognize and value the livestock native to our territory, Gordón Ordás. That endearing saga full of creatures great and small by the Englishman James Herriot. My grandfather's old veterinary books and manuals in French, always written by men. Like the pictures of cows he brought back from his trips to Canada. There were always smiling men who posed with their animals, the protagonists, owners, caretakers.

 

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction: An Invisible Narrative

*Part One*

A Genealogy of the Field

A Feminism of Sisters and the Land

The Caring Hand

The Emptied Spain 

For a Living Rural Community

*Part Two*

Three Women

Great Great Grandmother: Cork Oak

Grandmother: Garden

 Mamá - Olive Tree

Vocabulary

A Note about the Cover Photograph

A Note from the Translator

Editorial 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

"Sánchez’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 María Sánchez 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, Sánchez 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 País​ 

“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 Aragón

“María Sánchez asks us to consider the silent contribution of women in rural areas free from nostalgia, bucolic sentiments, and prejudice.”​ — El Mundo

“María Sánchez 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

“Sánchez’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, María Sánchez has become an essential writer to read.”​ — El Cultural

“Faced with a feminism that is highlighted through social media, María Sánchez 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 María 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, Sánchez gives voice to all of those anonymous figures who work and nourish the fields.”​ — Cristina Sánchez-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

From the Publisher