Swine Flu, Small Farms, and the Women’s Institute
Here we go again. The situation seems to have been dragging on for weeks, so it’s hard to remember that a week ago swine flu had barely been heard of. My friend David Lida’s column in the New York Times suggests something of the psychological ups and downs people living in Mexico have been going through. And a great blog post by another friend Paul gives a perspective on a different part of Mexico.
No news and no work means conspiracy theories. I am constitutionally averse to these. What I know about epidemics from years teaching history of science and medicine and from my husband’s work on risk some years back is helpful. The evolution and spread of viruses is hard to predict. Better safe than sorry, even if safe means in retrospect that many people say what was all the fuss about.
Meantime, looking over my posts for the last few days, I realize that I keep coming back to the point that it is the people in remote rural locations who are some of the poorest, who have the least access to medical care, to schooling, to paying jobs to supplement their subsistence farming. And this ties in another thread on this blog, the thread that questions whether the current enthusiasm for small farms is well founded.
Small remote rural communities have always had this problem. The Homestead Act in the United States and the settlement of Australia and Canada had many, many benefits, some of which commentators such as Adam and Cindy have pointed out. But one disadvantage was the isolated life which often hit women particularly hard.
And women could be ingenious in addressing that problem. In 1897 Canadian farm women founded the Women’s Institute, an organization that spread widely and that has done a great deal of good. In the next post, I’m putting up a piece I wrote about fifteen years ago about my mother’s experience with the Women’s Institute. It’s nice to have something cheery to end a gloomy week.
