writing women back into the countryside: a book

[makespaceforgirls]

I mentioned on the play equipment thread that I was writing a book about women and the countryside and didn't want to derail that conversation, so for anyone who is interested, here's a bit about it.

The book is based around me walking two of the oldest roads in England, the Ridgeway, which runs along the chalk of Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Dorset and the Harrow Way, which runs from Andover to Devon via Stonehenge. It's in part about me getting my courage back to walk alone, and about why women feel threatened in the countryside, but it's also about why women in general are meant to be at home, or in the garden, about how the countryside is not a 'natural' thing, and how so many men walk all over the countryside for books and women don't.

On a more lateral tack, it also looks at why archaeology is done by men and through men's eyes, how almost every walk I take is done to the accompaniment of gunshot because the army are everywhere around me (see also the countryside is not natural), why John Betjeman was a terrible husband and how he would have been torn to shreds on MN and much else besides.

There are some very short excerpts from it on this website:

tenderfoot.co.uk/s-walker-text/

It's just gone off to be read by someone else. I have no idea whether it is brilliant or an insane cheese dream that only I would read. We will see;

If anyone wants to read a chapter or two, I'd be happy to oblige.

Absolutely agree about men's books and the barely mentioned wives and children - there is much to like about Robert McFarlane's books for example, but they also enrage me as he takes lengthy jaunts with male friends for many days to for eg the wilds of Scotland. He is mid-forties and has three children... His wife (also an academic) and three children are barely mentioned

Thanks for the tag makespaces looking forward to reading it!

I read the essay in the Economist and so much rang true, I've just taken up running and am sticking to reasonably populated pavements with lighting. There's no way I'd run round the park close to me with woods and no lights at night.

Thank you for this. It would make a wonderful TV series.

I love this idea OP!
Sorry if this has been mentioned but I bought this for my daughter's... shop.historicenvironment.scot/where-are-the-women

*daughters

@SuseB I am so glad it's not just me. Honestly, he is one of the main reasons I wrote the book because I was so sick of Manly Men Walking Out without even thinking about after school clubs or whatever.

I did read a worse one though - and I genuinely can't remember the name of it because it enraged me so much - in which the Gentle Author moves his entirely family to a rugged bit of the south west, then goes out for endless long walks. At one point he returns to the still unrenovated house to the domestic scene of children on the trampoline while his wife digs the potato patch. I still don't understand why she didn't brain him with the spade. This book also contains the scene in which an elderly woman - who is pretty much the only woman apart from his wife in the whole book - shows him round the house which used to belong to an Eminent Male Poet, and I felt it was a symbol for the whole sodding book.

Have you read Kathleen Jamie on Robert McFarlane as the Lone Enraptured Male? She nails it.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n05/kathleen-jamie/a-lone-enraptured-male

And @ArabellaScott, I do find Nan Shepherd a bit too lone enraptured female, but Kathleen Jamie is probably my favourite nature writer of all, because she writes about her view of birds from over the washing machine, and of walks to and from school. Cannot recommend her books too highly.

@Highwoman I LOVE that, and am going to buy it for my scottish friend right now!

[quote makespaceforgirls]**@Hollyhocksarenotmessy* To some degree @ErrolTheDragon* is right, and it's a personal narrative, but there is a lot of research in there as well, although it's more about the way in which men 'police' women going outside - Rachel Hewitt writes and tweets about this very well - and the history of this. Also the way in which the vast majority of nature books are about men walking out, while some barely mentioned wife stays at home doing the actual family work. Also, in a more metaphorical way, I walked a lot of the way around and across Salisbury Plain, so it's about meeting that maleness head on.

As for archaeology, I can give you a lot of links but the following is pretty much true:

senior archaeologists are still mostly men

too much archaeology is written from the point of view of men, in a way which can be distorting

conventional stereotypes of what is male and female are used to interpret times which may have thought very differently about sex and gender and archaeology is often used to reinforce these stereotypes even today

subjects which are perceived as male get investigated far more than those seen as 'female'

Female archaeologists spend a lot of time being cross about all of this because it is really quite regressive[/quote]
Now it does sound interesting

@springdale1

Me and nearly all of my friends and family work in agriculture and rural land management - whether actually farming the land, managing the land, working in conservation or as agronomists and I can’t say that I think any of us feel threatened. Agriculture is an entirely different place now, my ag uni had a pretty much equal split of females and males.

I feel far more unsafe or threatened walking in cities and towns!

This with bells on. I lived in London for years, then in very rural parts of Wales. Currently much more urban but thinking about a move to rural Ireland. This narrative that women who live in the country stay at home and women are too scared to walk on their own is a townie's perspective on the lives of others.

Like you, Springdale, I know female farmers, female foresters, female stone-wallers, female vets who do nothing but large-animal work on farms, women who run smallholdings and market gardens and rural businesses — and many of them women living alone in areas that townies would think were remote.

Please stop spreading the message that women feel alone and frightened in the countryside. Many of us long for an open moor or a deserted beach.

@Shedbuilder it is just such an odd concept to me. I’ve looked up writer Rachel Hewitt that OP talks about and it doesn’t seem relevant to people who actually live and work in the countryside. She interviews marine biologists, ultra runners and paleontologists for her book. Not groups of people I’d interview for views about being women i rural spaces.

My last two houses were rural, my last a mile from the road and the only house down the track. Before that a hamlet 30 minutes from the nearest shop in the Lake District. I rarely locked my doors and felt much safer than I do living, coincidentally on the Salisbury Plains.

I do walk alone - in fact the whole thread of the book is me doing long ish walks entirely on my own. But I had plenty of women say to me that they would never do that, they'd far rather walk in a town.

And I'm not frightened of nature at all or being on my own but I am scared by lone men loitering in white vans, or walking near me in isolated areas. Which seems quite sensible really.

But I don't think generalising works. Plenty of women do work alone and walk alone, but others wouldn't camp or walk on their own ever; some are scared of camping at the end of their garden.

Also, it's not about rural women being kept at home, it's about the writers and artists walking out all over and leaving their wives with the children and the run down house; it's about the way that archaeological stereotypes put women in the roundhouse and men out on the road; it's about the way in which, as Rachel Hewitt relates, men feel threatened by women out in the countryside or town and do, sometimes, harass them. And the fact that there have been women writing about the countryside and somehow we forget them but remember the men.

Re: being outside without street lights. I heard someone remark that young men from the inner cities who were sent to Vietnam, were terrified of the dark. They had never experienced it. I also heard the same from someone who took tough inner city kids camping. I feel safer in darkness from human predators but more vulnerable to 4 legged ones.

I don’t like walking by myself in the countryside - but it’s more about cows and loneliness than anything else. I love walking with my mum or my kids, and miss it so much. I’ll do night buses in London and a walk home with much less trepidation than a solo countryside walk that’s not on lanes.

I feel safe and happy walking alone in the hills but I am always aware that a lone woman is an oddball and I only have to peek at the map to have some helpful bloke wanting to direct me which does make me self conscious

For various reasons women are much less likely than men to roam alone, or even I. Female only groups and also much less likely to be in charge of navigation or pace in a group

Safety , confidence , other pressures. When dd was small I got a much more negative reaction from friends and family than the ex ever did if I took a day to myself in the hill

I've been thinking about this today and your 'men walking out' are no different to male mountaineers, trans-Atlantic rowers, round the world cyclists, artists or poets but also all those everyday blokes with ordinary jobs, who take up marathon running, cycling, golf, or club cricket, as soon as their first baby is born. (Plenty of source material on 'the cyclists' on MN!). I mean it's just ordinary, everyday male selfishness and sexism, not anything specific to walking.

Then there's the urban / rural split, which is about what people are familiar with.

Then there seems to be something of a class element, if the author you mention interviews 'marine biologists, ultra runners and paleontologists', so mostly professionals working within inherently MC institutions, visiting the countryside for fieldwork, viewing it an an object of study, something other; rather than the rural dwellers for whom those research 'fields' are home and workplace.

I'm open to persuasion and quite interested, I'm just not immediately seeing anything specific to walking, in the points you've made here.

Woods though. There've been a few threads on here, demonstrating how crazy people are about woods. Walk all you like but do not walk through woods (or the bogeyman will get you!).

I grew up on the edge of rural land and went lots of places alone as a child and young woman without a second thought. It's only in later life I leaned to be afraid of being alone. Not alone as in solitude - I love to travel alone and be in nature - but alone as in no-one being there to help if you came across some dodgy man. Perhaps I've lived in cities too long.
I'm also an archaeology graduate and despite there being an even mix of men and women on my course (over twenty years ago) what you say about archaeology rings true.

I'm so enjoying this discussion.

I love the 'lone enraptured Male's concept, because it's so true, and the ability of men to take off and let someone else run their real life in the meantime.

There are women doing extraordinary things. But they don't end up with a tv series out of their passions.

I love walking alone. I feel like I'm too old to care much now but was more reluctant in my younger days. Will have a read over the weekend, OP.

I've recently read one of Kathleen Jamie's book and it was really lovely. She's obviously at home outdoors and explores and engages with nature, but her home and domestic life are always there in the background too. I found her writing really engaging.
Watching with interest as this is a topic close to my heart too. Engagement and contact with the outdoors, especially the wilder places is less frequently done by women alone.
Women runners have quite a lot to say on this issue too..

Fab thread! I went in a writing course with Kathleen Jamie once and it was so good. I love walking out in my own, too. I deliberately didn’t watch the Blair witch project as I didn’t want to be scared in the woods! Will have a look at your blog op.

This woman recently finished around the world solo ..,quite dramatic at times

www.piphare.com/

It sounds magnificent. And very sellable, if you get the tone right.

Interesting thread and ideas.

OP have you read "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed (?).

She walked for weeks alone in the US and talks a bit about being a woman alone hiking - one dodgy/scarey experience but the rest all good iirc.

Good luck with the book!

I have two woman friends who are both fearless travellers. they walk alone all over the world and encounter hostility with real calm - they have extricated themselves from really dangerous scrapes several times. I don't know how they do it. I used to jibber just walking alone in a nearby woodland, although since lockdown everyone else has discovered it too so these days I'm usually surrounded by women with cockerpoos.

@jamaisjedors

Interesting thread and ideas.

OP have you read "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed (?).

She walked for weeks alone in the US and talks a bit about being a woman alone hiking - one dodgy/scarey experience but the rest all good iirc.

Good luck with the book!

I loved that book. And the film.