![]() ![]() The Midwest, in turn, sheds light on a rich tradition of rural organizing. From 'Associated Farmers' front groups of the 1930s through Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, we follow the roots of authoritarian rural populism now re-emergent with Trump. California, we show, has been a principal site for honing the discourses, strategies, and tactics of consolidating right-wing power in the US. ![]() ![]() We ask: Why do the politics of the rural US seem so regressive at this current moment? What explains the rise and growth of white supremacist language, organization, action, and power? Looking to histories of small farmer and farm labor organizing in two key agricultural regions – California and the Midwest – we find some answers. In this paper, we interrogate the politics of rural places in generating both support for and struggle against authoritarian populism. The 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president came as a surprise to many people – but generally not to farmers and rural communities. Through careful attention to what women made of the land they owned, we can better understand gender and power in a settler colonialist society. Using cases spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we explore landholding from the perspectives of Dakota and Scandinavian immigrant women on the northern Plains and African American women in the South. Ownership enabled them to cultivate land to support the family, rent it out for income, and exercise the leverage it provided them throughout their lives. Native American, African American, and immigrant women obtained land in a variety of ways: allotment, purchase, homesteading, and inheritance. The ownership of land shapes the resources that women and men can differentially obtain, control, and utilize. Access to productive property is especially important to women in marginalized, subjugated, or newly arrived racial-ethnic groups. In rural societies, equity in land is key to women’s position, much as wage labor is in urban, industrial society. ![]()
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