Land of Women
María Sánchez is obsessed with what she cannot see. As a field veterinarian following in the footsteps of generations before her, she travels the countryside of Spain bearing witness to a life eroding before her eyes—words, practices, and people slipping away because of depopulation, exploitation of natural resources, inadequate environmental policies, and development encroaching on farmland and villages. Sánchez, the first woman in her family to dedicate herself to what has traditionally been a male-dominated profession, rebuffs the bucolic narrative of rural life often written by—and for consumption by—people in cities, describing the multilayered social complexity of people who are proud, resilient, and often misunderstood.
Sánchez interweaves family stories of three generations with reflections on science and literature. She focuses especially on the often dismissed and undervalued generations of women who have forgone education and independence to work the land and tend to family. In doing so, she asks difficult questions about gender equity and labor. Part memoir and part rural feminist manifesto, Land of Women acknowledges the sacrifices of Sánchez’s female ancestors who enabled her to become the woman she is.
A bestseller in Spain, Land of Women promises to ignite conversations about the treatment and perception of rural communities everywhere.
María Sánchez
is a Spanish writer and field veterinarian and the author of Cuaderno de campo (Field Notebook), Almáciga: Un vivero de palabras de nuestro medio rural (Seedbed), and Tierra de mujeres: Una mirada íntima y familiar al mundo rural (Land of Women), a bestseller in Spain, with translations into French and German. Her poetry and prose have been translated into French, Portuguese, English, and German, and she is a regular contributor to publications on literature, feminism, and rural culture. She lives in Córdoba, Spain.
