Literary Ruralism (Part XVII) Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

A year after it was published in fall, 2018, I recently started reading Sarah Smarsh's Heartland:  A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.  Smarsh is writing--in memoir format, with some political commentary--about many of the same phenomena I've been writing about for more than a dozen years--including the white working class, rural America, and institutional and government neglect of both.  She's also writing about rural women, one of my first rural topics, starting with Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural (2007).  I'm going to excerpt here just a few things Smarsh said about rural women in her memoir, and I'll come back to some of our other overlapping interests in future posts.

I was fortunate to have a kind father in a place where women's bodies were vulnerable for being rural, for being poor, for being women.  I grew up listening to Betty (maternal grandmother) console my cousins, aunts, and family friends as they sat at the kitchen table after a beating.  They might have a black eye from a fist or sticky hospital-tape residue on their forearms from an emergency room visit after being knocked unconscious with a baseball bat.  On my mom's side of the family, that sort of terror was a tradition. (p. 78, emphasis/bold mine)

Smarsh goes on to document in some detail several generations of dysfunction, including domestic violence against her grandmother Betty and her great-grandmother Dorothy.  Her own mother was Jeannie, the daughter of Betty and ne'er do well Ray, who was only occasionally in the picture physically, but who nevertheless left a psychological mark.

Betty, too, would grow up to marry abusive men, and that chaos would shape Jeanie's early life.  But when it was Jeanie's turn to become a wife and mother, she somehow managed to pick a man who respected her.  The violence was in her.  I felt it every day in words or slaps.  But mostly she kept her distance.  And, crucially, she didn't choose men who would physically torment her or her children.  

Thus, for all the perils I remember about being little, within the context of my family I had relative safety in my own house.  Not just that, but a gentle father who loved me deeply.  That may well be the difference between Jeannie's life and mine, what allowed me to escape other family cycles she wouldn't--addiction, teen pregnancy, lack of a college degree.  (p. 81)

Related to all of this I will simply refer to my articles on rural women regarding a number of topics that Smarsh takes up head on or alludes to:  abortion access (here and here), domestic violence, and termination of parental rights.  This piece also speaks to the vulnerability associated with living remote from law enforcement, and this is a more theoretical treatment of the vulnerability of rural women.  Oh, and perhaps more salient is this from 2018:  The Women Feminism Forgot:  Rural and Working Class White Women in the Era of Trump.

Speaking of politics, something Smarsh reveals in the book is that her mother voted for Carter in 1980 (the year Sarah was born), for Reagan in 1984 (because the consensus was that he was a "good president").  As for Smarsh, she admits to having voted for Bush in 2000, the first presidential election in which she was eligible to vote.  In this regard, I appreciate some things Smarsh said in a podcast I heard:  she is the same person she was growing up, but as a journalist with a masters from Columbia University, she simply has access to different information than she had back then.  Based on what I've read, I gather she's a Bernie Sanders fan these days.