A little while back, I was gifted Sarah Smarsh’s She Come by It Natural which is, appropriate to its subject matter, a mighty little book of essays about how Dolly Parton’s songs and public persona work to define a rural feminism, even though rural women might not want to use the term because it isn’t theirs.
Smarsh addresses the dominant narrative of rural places as inherently sexist saying,
Political headlines were fixating on a hateful, sexist version of rural, working-class America that I did not recognize. Dolly’s music and life contained what I wanted to say about class, gender, and my female forebears: That country music by women was the formative feminist text of my life.
At the time I read She Come By It Natural, I don’t think this sank in right away. But like Smarsh, I was a reader who rarely could find my contemporary rural working class reality reflected back to me from the pages of a book. But, also like Smarsh, I did find it by the radio dial and pouring out from my speakers.
I was a reader, when I could get ahold of something to read, and literature showed me places I’d never seen. Another art form, though, showed me my own place: country music. Its sincere lyrics and familiar accent confirmed, with triumph and sorrow, that my home—invisible or ridiculed elsewhere in news and popular culture—deserved to be known, and that it was complicated and good.
Needless to say, it’s a brilliant collection, and I highly recommend!
One of the things I love most about She Come By It Natural is that Smarsh writes about how she and her Grandma Betty saw themselves and their life in Parton’s songs. For them, those songs were mirrors of life in much the way I hope the rural literature I include on the Literacy In Place book list will be.
After finishing Smarsh’s essays, I’ve continued to let her ideas percolate in the back of my mind. And as part of a different project, I started listening to a lot of the 90s country I came up on. At first, it was a lot of dudes: Garth Brooks, John Michael Montgomery, Daryll Singletary, etc. But eventually Jo Dee Messina, Shania Twain, Deana Carter, etc began popping up on the Pandora station I created.
And I realized something.
Just as Smarsh and Grandma Betty got to see their identities as rural women represented in a feminist way by Dolly Parton, the women of 90s country helped me to build my rural feminist identity. Without thought or effort, I could still sing along, remembering every word.
Picture, if you will, thirteen-year-old me belting out Jo Dee Messina’s “I Want a Man Who Stands Beside Me”
I said I want a man who stands beside me
Not in front of or behind me
Give me two arms that wanna hold me
Not own me
And I will give all the love in my heart
And then belting it out again as a 37-year-old woman driving her daughter home from preschool. Explaining the patriarchy to the inquisitive 4-year-old in the back seat, thinking the image of standing beside is such a great metaphor for folks who think that feminists are angry man-haters looking for any chance to burn their bras and knit fun boob shaped toboggans for winter. Which can be fun and useful activities, to be sure.
The next song in my journey of 90s rural feminism was another Messina hit, “Bye Bye.”
Bye bye love, I’ll catch you later
Got a lead foot down on my accelerator and the rear view mirror torn off
I ain’t never lookin’ back and that’s a fact
I’ve tried all I can imagine
I’ve begged and pleaded in true lover’s fashion
I’ve got pride I’m takin’ it for a ride
Bye bye, bye bye my baby, bye bye
I cannot describe to you the joy I felt in singing this song at the top of my lungs both then and now, and the appreciation I have for the song that taught me that I can leave a toxic or even just unhappy relationship. That there’s no use in being tied to a man who doesn’t make time for or commitment to me. In rural places, it’s sometimes easy to believe that you won’t ever find anybody else because the pickin’s are slim and so you take what you can get, but “Bye Bye” (and a good chunk of Messina’s catalog) taught me that settling isn’t where it’s at.
Next up on my car-performance set list was Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine.” To be honest some of the items on her list of qualities seemed a little silly to me, even as a young teenager, but there was such power in her voice and power in that she knew what she wanted and wouldn’t settle for less than that.
Any man of mine better be proud of me
Even when I’m ugly, he still better love me
And I can be late for a date that’s fine
But he better be on time
The date line in particular always seemed unfair, but this was a woman who knew herself. Knew what she wanted. And knew that she wouldn’t settle for anything different than that.
Staying in Twain’s catalog in my line of covers was “That Don’t Impress Me Much”. I always enjoyed the hyperbole in this song (though I may not have known that was the term for it at the time) because it drives home the point that we should seek partners that bring us joy and that they may not be Brad Pitt or Elvis or have expensive cars.
I’ve known a few guys who thought they were pretty smart
But you’ve got being right down to an art
You think you’re a genius, you drive me up the wall
You’re a regular original, a know-it-all
Oh, oh, you think you’re special
Oh, oh, you think you’re something else
Okay, so you’re a rocket scientist
That don’t impress me much
So you got the brain but have you got the touch
Don’t get me wrong, yeah I think you’re alright
But that won’t keep me warm in the middle of the night
That don’t impress me much
Then surprisingly, Garth Brooks coms on with a song I’ve never heard before, “That Girl is a Cowboy”. Though it is still dominated by the male gaze which bothers me, “That Girl is a Cowboy” at least acknowledges that women can and often do what folks would classify as men’s work on farms and ranches.
Sometimes the best cowboys
Ain’t cowboys at all
She’s got my back
Even when it’s against the wall
When I need a friend
She’s the guy I call
‘Cause sometimes the best cowboys
Ain’t cowboys at all
There’s just something that a cowgirl has
Ain’t no cowboys got
Man she’s something when she’s one of the boys
But something else
Any time she’s not
And that was definitely true for me.
For example, I’ve always been on the upper end of the growth curve and came up, for a time, raised by a mama who was mostly on her own. This meant that I was push-mowing our acre yard and helping to mark hogs as an eight-year-old. I retell the hog-marking story all the time to the tune of my mom’s laughter as I complain about it. We always end it with the fact that I’d asked, while holding a piece of plywood near as big as I was, why none of my siblings had to help mark (to be fair, they were 6 and 3) and Mom said, “Because I’m afraid the sows will knock ‘em down.” That’s always my turn to laugh when I say, “But what was I? Chopped liver?”
She never says it, but the truth of the matter was that my mom always had a better handle on my strength than what I did – knew what I could handle and how to push even when I didn’t want to or think I could. And wanted me to know that I didn’t need no man to survive and thrive in the world—that I had a strong body and mind and the only person who would ever take care of me was me.
And she’s still doing it. The first kid she asked to ride in/learn how to drive the skid steer was my girl and not one of the boys (see featured image).
And that’s (part of) what rural feminism is. Even though my mom would never call it that. I used to tell people she’d raised me like a boy – to be strong and to take care of myself, but it always felt wrong. Felt like it didn’t capture the whole picture. Which it didn’t because she raised me like a rural girl which can look a lot like boy to folks who aren’t rural (and sometimes even if they are). I’m still thinking about how place and rurality layer with gender performance, but this is where I am so far.
So, you might be wondering what all this has to do with teaching? After all, this is an education blog.
A little while back I was giving a talk at UIndy’s Early College Summit where I told a story that I tell often about a couple of my rural students who proclaimed they were non-readers and refused to read Chopin’s The Awakening but confessed they loved and wanted to read Where the Red Fern Grows again.
One of the teachers attending my session asked a brilliant question. “Instead of abandoning The Awakening and other canonical works like it, do you think there was a way you could have taught it that might have tapped into those students’ rural lives and interests?”
Now, I’m still a firm believer that rural students deserve to read complex depictions of their contemporary ruralities in English class, but I also understand that access to rural books in rural places can be limited, so this audience member got me thinking. And the idea of rural feminism resurfaced in connection to the early feminism depicted in The Awakening, Chopin’s own back story, and the opportunity to juxtapose it with other types of feminism, especially rural ones.
So, if I were to teach that unit again, I might include one of Smarsh’s essays and one or more of these songs – maybe even let students suggest some that they feel exemplifies rural ideas of gender equity – so that we can dig into feminism and equity in turn of the century New Orleans as well as our own place and time.
We could even watch and perform multimodal analyses of the music videos to think about how the images and videography align with or contradict the lyrics of the song. And I’d definitely allow them space to write and think about what it means to them to be rural and boy; rural and girl; rural and nonbinary, etc. I’m so sad I didn’t think to do it before.
Country music has long been a center for rural stories and rural identity development (whether the artists are rural or not; see Alan Jackson’s “Gone Country”), and I’m just starting to realize how much it taught me about myself as a rural person and as a rural feminist.
I’m sure there are a ton of songs I’m missing. Please help me out and put your country feminist favorites (90s or otherwise) in the comments.
More posts to come…
Dr. Parton's Literacy In Place 