Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural

Angela Harris argued almost two decades ago that, "to energize legal theory, we need to subvert it with narratives and stories, accounts of the particular, the different, the hitherto silenced. I have sought to do precisely that here: to surface the stories of rural women, one group who have been overlooked, misunderstood, and thus silenced. Rural women have been silenced not only because of the lack of power that stems from socioeconomic disadvantage, but also because of their physical distance from public places, from centers of power, from services, and from opportunities of all sorts. The deepest atrocities of their everyday lives have often gone unseen, without legal redress, due in part to that geographic isolation, but also because of our society's pervasive urban presumption.