From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community

Innovative and engaging, From the Garden Club explores how older women in a rural town use literacy to shape their lives and community. Deftly weaving elements of memoir with scholarly theory, Charlotte Hogg describes the lives of her grandmother and other women in her hometown of Paxton, Nebraska. The literacy practices of these women—writing news articles and memoirs, working at the library, and participating in extension clubs and the Garden Club—exemplify the complexities within rural communities often unseen or dismissed by locals and outsiders as “only” women’s work.

Combining conversations with these women with their writing, Hogg describes and analyzes the ways they both embrace and challenge traditional notions of place and identity. Drawing on ethnographic research, composition theory, literacy studies, and regionalism, Hogg demonstrates how these women use literacy to evoke and sustain a sense of place and heritage for members of the community, to educate the citizens of Paxton, and to nourish themselves as learners, readers, and writers. Hogg relies as much on the older women, whom she richly portrays, as on interdisciplinary sources in considering how rural culture is created and sustained.