A wry memoir of growing up, coming out, and going back to the land as a lesbian feminist in the rural Midwest of the 1960s and 70s
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.
Genre: Autobiography/Biography; Coming Out; Memoir
Subjects: Farm Life - United States; Lesbians - United States; Women Farmers - United States
Publication History
| ISBN | 9781517902667 |
|---|---|
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Publication Date | March 13, 2018 |
| Publisher | University of Minnesota Press |
| Format | Trade Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 248 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Not Rated |
| ISBN | 9781452957029 |
|---|---|
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Publication Date | April 10, 2018 |
| Publisher | U of Minnesota Press |
| Format | Digital/E-Book |
| No. of Pages | 248 |
| Language | English |
| Notes | Finalist, 2019 Minnesota Book Awards, Memoir & Creative Nonfiction. Setting: North Dakota, the Twin Cities, rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, 1960s to 1980s. Print edition ISBN 9781517902667. |