Rural Women: New Roles for the New Century?
Abstract
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... Insufficient wages, few or no benefits, and little opportunity for advancement are hallmarks of rural employment. Two-thirds of rural adults work in the manufacturing or service sectors (USDA Economic Research Service, 1997), which are characterized by low wages and a lack of stability and benefits (McLaughlin & Coleman-Jensen, 2008;Slack & Jensen, 2004;Tickamyer & Henderson, 2003;Ziebarth & Tigges, 2003). Many employment opportunities are part-time or seasonal (McLaughlin & Coleman-Jensen, 2008;Slack & Jensen, 2004;Ziebarth & Tigges, 2003). ...
... Rural women who work outside the home face particular structural disadvantages in securing and keeping employment (Pruitt, 2007b;Tickamyer & Henderson, 2003). ...
... Workplace gender separation is pronounced in rural areas, where even college-educated women work primarily in female-dominated fields (Bescher-Donnelly & Smith, 1981;Miewald & McCann, 2004;Struthers & Bokemeier, 2003). Acknowledging that some women have entered previously male-dominated fields, Tickamyer and Henderson (2003) observe that these advances involve so few women as to be largely symbolic. Genderbased wage discrepancies are also common; in 2000, rural women earned as little as 61% of their male counterparts with comparable schooling (Gibbs & Parker, 2001). ...
This essay, an entry for the on-line Sloan Work and Family Encyclopedia, provides an overview of work-family challenges in the context of rural America. Among the issues addressed are lack of economic diversification and opportunity; deficits in human capital; the dearth of childcare, transportation and other services that facilitate employment; and the deeply entrenched character of gender roles in rural societies. The entry discusses not only concerns related to rural socioeconomic disadvantage, but also those arising from the distances that separate rural residents from work, educational opportunities, and services. The essay notes that rural families are sometimes disserved by policies and regulations that reflect urban agendas and may be unworkable for rural residents, in the context of rural economies. It suggests the need for more systematic, national sampling and a case-comparative approach to location-based studies. Such data collection and analysis would permit generalization across rural places, while also enhancing our understanding of the variety among such communities.
... Gender could also affect rural adolescents' aspirations and expectations (Brown, Copeland, Costello, Erkanli, & Worthman, 2009). Because job opportunities in rural communities are often limited for women (Tickamyer & Henderson, 2003), girls' occupational and educational expectations could be more constrained, and thus more closely connected, than boys'. ...
... Additionally, girls in our sample reported higher educational expectations than boys, consistent with research on rural youth from the last three decades (e.g., Chenoweth & Galliher, 2004;Elder & Conger, 2000). Because occupational opportunities for women are limited in rural areas, especially for those without a college education (Tickamyer & Henderson, 2003), girls who plan to pursue high status occupations must also earn the necessary educational credentials. ...
... With full acknowledgment of the complex diversity in and across rural communities in the United States, we propose that the aforementioned sociospatial and economic aspects of rurality may uniquely impact how rural individuals think about and interact with the mental health care system. Drawing on Ann R. Tickamyer and Debra A. Henderson's (2003) attention to the "deepseated local affiliations and loyalties" of rural women in the United States (p. 112; see also Walker and Logan 2018), we recognize that a shared, lived experience of place-the "local affiliation" and all it signifies-is likely significant for establishing rapport between rural patients and their rural mental health providers. ...
This manuscript examines how a shared sociospatial or “rural” identity may uniquely facilitate mental health care delivery. In particular, we consider the significant but largely unexplored role that domestic violence center staff, whom we term “Reputational Provider-Experts” or RPEs, play in addressing the mental health needs of rural women who have experienced intimate partner violence. Using data collected through semi-structured individual and focus group interviews with RPEs across 12 counties and four tribal reservations in northern Wisconsin ( N = 15), we detail the sociospatial commonalities that enable RPEs to provide trusted, sustained mental health support to rural women. Because these advocates are rural community members whose approach implicitly appeals to local norms and values, we argue that they represent rurally concordant providers. In this way, rurality emerges as a meaningful and novel form of patient-provider concordance, one with critical relevance to addressing the rural mental health crisis in the United States.
... Gender matters when considering how the features of rural settings impact the formation of future aspirations and expectations. Nationally, research on gender and adolescents' future aspirations and expectations varies, with some studies finding little to no differences by gender Mello 2008), some finding that girls are more optimistic and confident about their futures than boys (Agger et al. 2018;Beal and Crockett 2013;Byun et al. 2012;Meece et al. 2014) and others finding that boys are at an advantage in terms of future orientation (Luzzo and McWhirter 2001;Tickamyer and Henderson 2003). Gender may function differently in rural communities, as boys in rural contexts may benefit from more traditional gender role expectations and a perception of greater job availability in male-dominated sectors like agriculture and manufacturing (Johnson et al. 2005). ...
Adolescents' future aspirations and expectations influence the decisions they make as they transition into adulthood. However, less is known about how specific sociocultural factors interact with the formation of future aspirations and expectations and their association with goal attainment in emerging adulthood. The present study begins to fill this gap by using person-centered analysis with high school students (N = 517; 53% female; 92% white) from a rural county undergoing significant economic transition. Its aim was to identify future orientation profiles based on adolescent-reported future aspirations and expectations for success in both education and career. Four latent profiles were identified and labeled: universally high aspirations and expectations; low college aspirations and expectations; lower aspirations than expectations; and universally low aspirations and expectations. Significant gender differences were found. High school males were less likely to be in the universally high profile and more likely to be in the universally low and low college aspirations and expectations profiles. Future orientation profile placement was associated with differences in adolescent experiences in family, school, and community contexts as well as their work and education status and future residential aspirations in emerging adulthood. The findings inform future research and applied efforts focused on rural youth's preparation for adult roles, and on retaining rural youth, a necessity for the vitality of rural communities.
... On the other hand, men report more positive perceptions of economic opportunities in their home communities and a higher desire to live in the same home state as adults Meece et al. 2013Meece et al. , 2014. Researchers have speculated that this genderdifferentiated trend is likely due to the fact that rural areas offer fewer job opportunities to women than to men (Johnson et al. 2005;Tickamyer and Henderson 2003). However, to our knowledge, no studies have examined how gendered patterns of rural identity and perceptions of job opportunities shape actual educational behaviors and enrollments (as opposed to aspirations or plans). ...
Despite the large contingent of students living in rural areas, existing research on the processes that precede the college enrollment of rural adolescents is limited. With a particular focus on gender, this study investigated rural adolescents’ perceptions of family and place and how these perceptions related to their educational aspirations and subsequent college enrollment using a nationwide sample of rural adolescents (N = 3,456; 52.5% female). Female adolescents reported higher academic achievement, educational aspirations, parental expectations, and family responsibility and enrolled in two- and four-year institutions at greater rates compared to male adolescents, who reported significantly higher rural identity and perceptions of job opportunities in the rural community. Utilizing a multiple group moderated mediation approach, the results provided evidence that adolescents’ increased perceptions of their parents’ educational expectations were associated with increased educational aspirations and college enrollment and that adolescents’ increased perceptions of job opportunities in their rural community were associated with decreased educational aspirations. In addition, the results showed that gender moderated the relation between perceptions of job opportunities in the rural community and postsecondary enrollment. These findings highlight how the developmental resources of family and place relate to adolescents’ educational aspirations and subsequent postsecondary enrollment.
... One of the more visible effects is how economic restructuring has produced significant declines in job opportunities for men in rural areas while women's employment has markedly increased, often in low-paying jobs. In some rural communities the majority of women with children have become primary or sole providers for their families, which adds stress to family life as women supplant men as the traditional income earners in many homes (Bauer & Dolan, 2011;Harvey 1993;Snyder & McLaughlin, 2004;Tickamyer & Henderson, 2003). Other effects similar to those witnessed in low-income urban families include significant rises in single-parent households, nonmarital cohabitation, and multiple-partner fertility (Burton, 2014;. ...
A common assertion in the family science literature is that low-income single mothers are increasingly retreating from marriage but still vaunt it as their ultimate relationship goal. To explain this paradox, scholars frequently cite inadequacies in men's marriageability, financial instability, and conflictual romantic relationships as primary forces in mothers' decisions not to marry. We propose an alternative reasoning for this paradox using symbolic interactionist theory and perspectives on poverty and uncertainty. Specifically, we highlight the contradictions between what women say about their desires to marry and what they actually do when the opportunity presents itself. We use exemplar cases from a longitudinal ethnographic study of low-income rural mothers to demonstrate our reasoning. Implications for future research and theory development are discussed.
... A distinctive feature of settler colonies like Canada, Australia and the U.S. is that the gender order is typically more pronounced in rural than it is in the urban settlements, with fewer women engaged in public office or the politics of the public sphere (Hogg and Carrington 2006;Little 2002;Tickamyer and Henderson 2003). How this gender order shapes patterns of masculinity and violence in rural contexts is addressed in this special edition. ...
One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands—feminist, cultural and green—has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in both the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.
... As noted earlier, there have been significant declines in job opportunities for men in rural areas, while women's employment has markedly increased (Smith, 2008). In some communities the majority of women with children have become primary and/or sole providers for their families, adding stress to family life as women supplant men as the traditional income-earners in many homes (Harvey, 1993;Nelson, 2005;Tickamyer & Henderson, 2003). The physical and mental wellbeing of all concerned in these situations has suffered. ...
Rural America is commonly viewed as a repository of virtuous and patriotic values, deeply rooted in a proud immigrant history of farmers and industrious working-class White ethnics from northern Europe. These views are not always consistent with the population and socioeconomic realities of rural terrains. Exceptions to these stereotypes are self-evident among large poor racial/ethnic minorities residing in rural ghettos in the “dirty” South and among poor Whites living in remote, mountainous areas of Appalachia. For these disadvantaged populations, sociocultural and economic isolation, a lack of quality education, too few jobs, and poor health have taken a human toll, generation after generation. Moreover, the past several decades have brought dramatic shifts in the spatial distribution and magnitude of poverty in these areas. And, America’s persistent racial inequalities have continued to fester as rural communities become home to urban-origin racial minority migrants and immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. As a result, the face of rural America has changed, quite literally. In this article, we address the primary question these changes pose: How will shifting inequalities anchored in poverty and race shape health disparities in a “new” rural America? Guided by fundamental cause theory, we explore the scope and sources of poverty and race inequalities in rural America, how patterns in these inequalities are transduced within families, and what these inequalities mean for the future of health disparities within and across rural U.S. terrains. Our goal is to review and interrogate the extant literature on this topic with the intent of offering recommendations for future research.
... For example, rural schools often endure resource inequality, in many cases comparable to urban schools (Roscigno, Tomaskovic-Devey, and Crowley 2006). In addition, because of deindustrialization some rural locations (including those in Appalachia, the site for this study) are experiencing increasing job losses, concentrated poverty, and increasing crime (Lichter, Roscigno, and Condron 2003;Sherman 2006;Tickamyer and Henderson 2003). This structural context parallels the place-based inequalities affecting schooling in many urban, inner-city areas (Fine and Weis 1998;Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer 2007;Wilson 1996). ...
Research with predominately minority, urban students has documented an educational “gender gap,” where girls tend to be more likely to go to college, make higher grades, and aspire to higher status occupations than boys. We know less, however, about inequality, gender, and schooling in rural contexts. Does a similar gap emerge among the rural poor? How does gender shape the educational experiences of rural students? This article explores these questions by drawing on participant observation and student interviews at a predominately white and low-income rural high school. I find a substantial gap favoring girls in this context, and I analyze how understandings of masculinity shaped schooling using the theory of hegemonic masculinity. The findings suggest that boys' underachievement is actually rooted in masculine dominance and related to particular constructions of gender and social class.
... Although some families fled rural areas as economic prospects deteriorated, many others remained, and coped. In the wake of these macroeconomic changes, rural families themselves underwent a destabilizing transformation (Tickamyer and Henderson 2004). In a departure from their historically more traditional family norms and structures, rural families have experienced a significant retreat from marriage and rise in marital instability, yielding similar family patterns in rural and urban areas by the end of the twentieth century (Albrecht and Albrecht 2004;Lichter and McLaughlin 1995;MacTavish and Salamon 2004;McLaughlin, Gardner, and Lichter 1999;McLaughlin, Lichter, and Johnston 1993;Snyder and McLaughlin 2004). ...
The economic restructuring in rural areas in recent decades has been accompanied by rising marital instability. To examine the implications of the increase in divorce for the health of rural women, we examine how marital status predicts adequacy of health insurance coverage and health care access, and whether these factors help to account for the documented association between divorce and later illness. Analyzing longitudinal data from a cohort of over 400 married and recently divorced rural Iowan women, we decompose the total effect of divorce on physical illness a decade later using structural equation modeling. Divorced women are less likely to report adequate health insurance in the years following divorce, inhibiting their access to medical care and threatening their physical health. Full-time employment acts as a buffer against insurance loss for divorced women. The growth of marital instability in rural areas has had significant ramifications for women's health; the decline of adequate health insurance coverage following divorce explains a component of the association between divorced status and poorer long-term health outcomes.
... This perspective-that gains in gender equality come at a cost-dovetails with the perspective in criminology that liberation and strain have uniquely shaped women's violence and offending trends (Hunnicutt and Broidy 2004). Sex-role attitudes of women and men in rural areas continue to be more traditional than in urban areas (Tickamyer and Henderson 2003). Familial violence is more likely to occur in contexts where men with traditional sex-role attitudes are unemployed and women are employedconditions increasingly prevalent in rural areas. ...
Two durable criminological patterns have been higher violence rates in urban compared to rural areas and by males compared to females. To derive and evaluate hypotheses related to correspondence across place and sex groups in changes in violence trends, we draw on a spatial-inequality perspective that attends to the geographic distribution of inequalities at the subnational scale, as well as to recent extensions of social-disorganization theory to variation in rural and female violence rates. Our study's focus is on systematically delineating the extent and timing of change in female and male violence trends, the rural-urban violence gap, and the gender gap. We apply epidemiological joinpoint techniques to Uniform Crime Reports arrest data from completely rural to highly urbanized settings for several violent offenses (homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and misdemeanor assault) between 1981 and 2006. Female and male violence rates in rural to urban settings generally followed the same course over 25 years. Analyses generally indicated parallel violence trends of rural and urban females and males and only subtle changes in the rural-urban and gender gaps in serious violence. Serious violence became somewhat less concentrated in urban centers owing to more sizable urban rate declines after the mid-1990s. In all contexts, the gender gap in assault arrests narrowed, but the female share of serious violence (homicide, robbery) remained much the same; this result suggests change in the social control of minor violence by females across rural and urban settings.
This chapter documents the transformation of rural families through an examination of two of the most important changes in American family life—changes in family structure and changes in women’s employment and family breadwinning—from 1970 to 2009, using Current Population Survey (CPS) data. Particular attention is paid to variations between families living in rural areas, central cities, and suburban places. We identify trends in marriage and divorce, the rise in single motherhood, and decreased fertility. Additionally, we examine the rising diversity of families resulting from increased educational attainment and greater female labor force participation. Finally, we discuss the implications of these changes in family structure and family employment patterns for income inequality and poverty. Over time, we find that rural families increasingly resemble urban families, but important differences remain.
Standing Our Ground: Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal examines women's efforts to end mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. Mountaintop removal coal mining, which involves demolishing the tops of hills and mountains to provide access to coal seams, is one of the most significant environmental threats in Appalachia, where it is most commonly practiced. The Appalachian women featured in Barry's book have firsthand experience with the negative impacts of Big Coal in West Virginia. Through their work in organizations such as the Coal River Mountain Watch and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, they fight to save their mountain communities by promoting the development of alternative energy resources. Barry's engaging and original work reveals how women's tireless organizing efforts have made mountaintop removal a global political and environmental issue and laid the groundwork for a robust environmental justice movement in central Appalachia.
More than thirty million Americans live in small, out-of-the-way places. Many of them could have chosen to join the vast majority of Americans who live in cities and suburbs. They could live closer to better paying jobs, more convenient shopping, a wider range of educational opportunities, and more robust health care. But they have opted to live differently. InSmall-Town America, we meet factory workers, shop owners, retirees, teachers, clergy, and mayors--residents who show neighborliness in small ways, but who also worry about everything from school closings and their children's futures to the ups and downs of the local economy. Drawing on more than seven hundred in-depth interviews in hundreds of towns across America and three decades of census data, Robert Wuthnow shows the fragility of community in small towns. He covers a host of topics, including the symbols and rituals of small-town life, the roles of formal and informal leaders, the social role of religious congregations, the perception of moral and economic decline, and the myriad ways residents in small towns make sense of their own lives. Wuthnow also tackles difficult issues such as class and race, abortion, homosexuality, and substance abuse.
Aaron Gilbreath focuses on the perceptions of people about Gove County, Kansas and decline in the population in the region. Rural depopulation occurs for a myriad of reasons ranging from global economic forces to the cultural pressures to be 'cool' applied to youth by national media outlets. Most of my informants argued that, for a person to be successful or even happy on the Great Plains, they had to be willing to go without most luxuries. They equated the required asceticism with males and masculinity, and in contrast, associated urban luxuries with women and femininity. Place-myths certainly can and do have positive aspects. It is beneficial to feel part of a community, for example, even more so if one feels that that community has worth and imparts beneficial social values onto its members.
The book introduces us to a cohort of women miners at a large underground coal mine in southern West Virginia, where women entered the workforce in the late 1970s after mining jobs began opening up for women throughout the Appalachian coalfields. The work goes beyond anecdotal evidence to provide complex and penetrating analyses of qualitative data. Based on in-depth interviews with including social relations among men and women, professional advancement, and union participation. She also explores the ways in which women adapt to mining culture, developing strategies for both resistance and accommodation to an overwhelmingly male-dominated world. 1 app.
With a comparative case study of the social welfare systems of an urban and a rural county in the United States, I explore variation in local welfare implementation by examining organisational strategies.1 Service provision in the rural county is less diverse and less effective than in the urban county due to place-based factors; however, in the urban county more financial resources and capacity translates into more regulation of the clientele as well as resistance to neoliberal practices. Organisations whose existence depends upon benevolent elites adapt to their funding requirements by regulating clients of social services, including tactics of surveillance, elaborate verification, and restriction. The enforcement of low-wage work that is bracketed by national policy is highly constraining, but can be challenged through a welfare organisation when the right conditions are present for an empowered grassroots approach. These findings are situated within the more general literature on the changing governance of welfare.
Using ethnographic and interview data, this article explores how labor market transformations affect gender norms and family life in a rural community that has historically been tied to a single industry. It argues that the gender strategies pursued by couples heavily impact their relationships and families. Flexibility with regard to gender norms is key to creating stable relationships in a context of labor market change that threatens the existing gender order. For couples that are tied rigidly to traditional breadwinner/homemaker gender roles, men's inabilities to be the sole providers create marital and family tensions. On the other hand, couples in which men are able to refocus their conceptions of masculinity on more attainable goals such as active parenting experience less strife and more satisfaction. The research finds that rural men are more flexible with regard to masculine identity than found by previous scholars, particularly with regard to conceptions of fatherhood. The article explores in depth the processes and discourses that facilitate flexible gender identities in this conservative rural community.
Understanding rural contexts is foundational to our discussion of rural low-income families’ employment opportunities and
challenges. This chapter considers four major areas from rural low-income family research: (a) a description of rural America,
(b) an understanding of rural contexts, (c) a listing of possible opportunities for the future, and (d) challenges for current
and future research. Some of the voices from the qualitative portion of the Rural Families Speak (RFS
) study are included in these sections to support and illustrate the issues at the individual and family level and the perceptions
of the rural macrosystem and community level.
KeywordsEmployment-Future research opportunities-Rural context-Rural definitions-Rural diversity-Rural families-Rural Families Speak (RFS
)
When we think about the impact of place on poor mental health outcomes our thoughts are often anchored in images of how urban ghettos’ influence the prevalence of problem behaviors and violence among individuals and families who reside within them. Within the last decade, however, social scientists have increasingly turned their attention to the emergence of rural ghettos and the concomitant rise of mental health problems in these environments. Rural ghettos are residentially segregated places that have high concentrations of disadvantage and contextual stigma. They exist within small, geographically isolated towns and their adjacent pastoral communities. Ghettos take different forms including dilapidated tracts of housing, subsidized housing projects, and run-down trailer parks on the outskirts of town. They are also parts of larger ecologies of local residents who reside in protected and affluent spaces on their geographic peripheries.
In this chapter, we explore the impact of place on mental health by examining the role of the rural ghetto in shaping the well-being of its residents and those who live in close proximity. We discuss the role of two dimensions of place that are endemic to understanding the influences of rural ghettos on mental health – location as morality and as identity. We argue that emerging ghettoized sections of rural communities have presented challenges to residents’ perceptions, beliefs, and practices regarding their “rural moral codes” and their “rural place identities.” These challenges are products of changing local landscapes (e.g., the disruption of routine social relations through diminished work opportunities) and stigmatizations as “undesirable living spaces” that compromise the mental health of those who reside within a rural ghetto as well as those who live outside of a ghettos’ borders.
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