Wild Mares
Subtitle: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life
By: Dianna Hunter
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2018
Place of publication: Minnesota, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9781517902667
Subjects: Farm life; Lesbians; Women farmers
Description: "Dianna Hunter was a softball-loving, working-class tomboy in North Dakota, surviving the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Mutually Assured Destruction in the shadow of a strategic air command base. Communists and antiwar hippies were the enemy, but lesbians were a threat, too: they were unhealthy, criminal, and downright insane. It took Dianna a while to figure out that she was one, a little longer to discover how she fit in with her new communities in the city and the countryside. This is her story--a frank account by turns comic and painful of a well-behaved Midwestern girl finding her way through polite denial and repression and running head-on into the eye-opening events of the 1960s and '70s before landing on a dairy farm. A bumpy route takes Dianna to the Twin Cities, then to rural Minnesota and Wisconsin as--by way of the antiwar movement, women's liberation, and a dose of lesbian feminism--she and her friends try to establish a rural utopia free of sexual oppression, violence, materialism, environmental degradation--and men. They dream big, love as they see fit, and make do until they don't. Dianna buys a dairy farm and, with it, a new set of problems thanks to the Reagan-era farm crisis. A firsthand account of the lesbian feminist movement at its inception, Wild Mares is a deeply personal, wryly wise, and always engaging view of identity politics lived and learned in real life and, literally, on the ground, flourishing in the fertile soil of a struggling dairy farm in the American heartland."--Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-238).
Table of contents: title: Prologue; title: The Great Man and the Dead Cow; title: MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World; title: They Can't Kill Us All (Can They?); title: A Room of My Own; title: Getting There; title: The First Lesbian Conference; title: Country Lesbian Manifesto; title: The Trouble with Land; title: Suzanne Takes You Down; title: Family of Woman; title: Women, Horses, and Other Embodied Spirits; title: Lurk-in-the-Ditch; title: Another Dance and a Funeral; title: At the Speed of Hooves; title: Rising Moon; title: Making Hay; title: Mel's Place (Dick Pulls Us Through); title: Del Lago; title: Thundering Ice, Talking Spirits; title: Ravenna's Refuge; title: Dancing Leads to This; title: Divorce and Dispossession; title: Going, Going, Gone.