Nearly half of all farmland in the U.S. is owned by women - 295,000 of them. In an enterprise traditionally dominated by men, they are taking a lead role in overhauling a complex, often dysfunctional food system. This book features the stories of eight women farmers who persevere despite treacherous weather and erratic commodities markets. Smart, independent, hard-working and politically astute, they explain in their own words how and why they chose, and continue to choose, farming.

In spite of living often unspeakably hard, endlessly challenging lives, rural folks, no matter how poor, remain tirelessly optimistic and believe things will get better next year. One struggling farmer explained it this way: "Sometimes I feel like a jackass in a hailstorm - I just have to stand here and take it...but what the hell - it'll stop hailing sooner or later". Trying to survive on the richest farmland in America has produced some of the nation's poorest people. Yet, this book argues, as pertains to rural poverty, the usual definitions and criteria don't always apply, the known predictors of poverty don't necessarily hold up -and rural people save themselves again and again, because they know no one else will. The book also refutes the common image of the poor as lazy slackers who don't want to work. In reality, the rural heartland is populated by fiercely independent, politically astute, extremely hard-working men and women who possess a wide array of useful skills - and who struggle year over year to stay afloat in small-town economies that rise and fall on the whims of remote farm policy decisions, a volatile world-wide marketplace, and Mother Nature, who is a fickle, wildly unpredictable business partner.

Despite a massive overhaul during the 1990s, the American welfare system remains based on a business model that is most concerned with the bottom line. Crafted by male-dominated legislative bodies of elected officials who most likely never had to choose between paying the rent or feeding their kids, the established welfare policies primarily protect the popular programs that ensure the re-election of career public officials. This intriguing volume offers a feminist perspective on the 21st century war on poverty, illustrated by the words of women forced to live every day with social policies they had no voice in developing. Topics include the struggles of daily life, crime, health care, education, employment, and a discussion of capitalism, inequality, greed, and moral obligation in a free society. In the unrestrained pursuit of wealth, this work shows that America has created a vast poverty problem, making the rich richer and forcing the poor into the forgotten class.

"I'm not giving up- and neither should you," Hillary Clinton implored her supporters following her surprising defeat in the 2016 presidential election. Taking these words to heart, on January 21, 2017 millions of women-and men-across America, angry that a misogynist had been elected President of the United States, marched in protest. Women around the world joined them in this first mass action of a new women's political resistance movement. This book, written in the unique voices of 36 women resistors who are participating in a growing, women-led, effort to "make America great again" on their terms, represents the first chapter in the emerging story of this movement. Speaking truth to power on widely diverse topics, essayists and interviewees include a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice; an award-winning feminist theologian; a New Mexico assistant Attorney General; a naturalized Muslim-American; warhorse activists who previously fought for reproductive, civil and immigrant rights; first time protestors; and ordinary women of good will who, frightened about the political environment their granddaughters and great-granddaughters will inherit, decided to take action. Their voices echo the sisterhood of determined women, and men, everywhere who love America and stand in solidarity over their concern for its future.