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VICKIE STURGEON: The following edition of The Poet's Perspective is presented as it was broadcast over KRSW's regional magazine, Home for the Weekend. The Poet's Perspective was funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities Commission.

HELEN HINTON: By the time I married, I wanted a little time to do just the things I wanted. It's hard work to go through four years of college and three years of law school. And by that time, you're mature. And after that time, you begin to wonder whether you want to undertake the responsibility, whether you're not just a little too old to do a good job and still have anything for yourself. And it's a selfish thing, but no, I don't regret not having children.

[GRAM PARSONS, "SHE"]

(SINGING) She, she came from the land of the cotton

A land that was nearly forgotten by everyone

And she, she worked and she slaved so hard

A big old field was her backyard in the delta sun

Oh, but she sure could sing

NANCY PADDOCK: So I think there were women that hid away from the entire woman's role or maybe parts of it, who wanted to find a way of being that wasn't locked into any of the roles or any of the stereotypes. We would, every once in a while, when we were interviewing people, run into someone who had lived alone all of her life and had chose that really by the way she interacted with people. I met several women who sewed a lot. And this poem is an attempt to make a composite. It's called "The Pulse of Needles."

Wedding quilts for all her sisters,

Young brothers quilt-wrapped when they came of age,

The satin christening coverlets for every godchild keep her lap full.

And she is caught up in her sewing,

When each loved one has been covered by her silent song.

She never married.

She chose a soft geometry.

Refusing the children that would have left her,

Refusing the hardness of a man,

Her time is measured in no hours or seasons.

She marks instead the pulse of needles

Threading through the days,

Her body, focused on that point,

Achieves a distance, a hibernation in the jaws of life.

But in her dream, red blood drops into her lap,

From where the needle pierces cloth,

Cloth that cushions, insulates against the cold patterns that break the fevers of beds,

Cover them over with ordered shapes,

To hide the dying stars that do not burn,

Flowers that never seed or drop their petals.

(SINGING) Oh, she sure could sing

VICKIE STURGEON: This edition of The Poet's Perspective focusing on women of the countryside began with a comment from Helen Hinton of Olivia and a poem by Nancy Paddock. The program continues exploring the feelings and impressions of rural women, their joy and hard work, the rewarding ties with family and the land contrasted with the loneliness and isolation of living in the country.

Those feelings will be reflected through the oral history that's been collected by Joe and Nancy Paddock, regional poets for Southwest Minnesota. Joe and Nancy will also be reading some of their own poetry, as well as the works of others. And we'll hear about the psychological problems facing the modern farm wife and about two women from Olivia who have ventured outside the typical role of women in our small towns.

One of the strongest images we may have of the small town woman is that of the lady. And indeed, the task of transmitting most cultural traditions and protecting the moral fiber of the community was often left to the women.

JOE PADDOCK: If they happen to be, I think, of the poorer classes of people, they moved immediately into the mother-nurturer thing, and hard work was their lot. But if they happen to be-- I think when we're talking about rural women, we're talking about small town women in the rural setting, too. And if they happen to be of the middle class in the small town, they weren't exactly allowed to remain sexy.

But they exhibited or expressed their personalities through this thing that we talked about earlier, the teacup syndrome or whatever-- themselves as the lady. And this was a completely another very strong thing they had to deal with. For instance, a lady wouldn't be a drinker. And I have a little anecdote, again, coming from an interview. Jeanette Hendrickson told me this story, and she didn't tell me who she was talking about. It goes this way.

I don't want to mention any names, but I don't know when anything has tickled me as much. We had one lady who was very prim, precise, very nice person. And she was not a drinker at all, never did. They were teetotalers, you might say. And she was coming down with a terrible cold. And her husband was a businessman who'd been given a quart of whiskey for Christmas. It had been on the shelf, and she hadn't thought anything about it at all.

And so when she was coming down with this terrible cold, they told her, well, take some whiskey. That'll do your cold good. So she didn't know anything about it, had never taken any. So she got a water glass, and she put in a pretty good dose. Well, just after she'd taken it, the minister came to call. Well, she said, I remember him coming, but I don't remember him going. And she says, I do wish I knew what I said.

OK, an awful lot of the strength of that anecdote depends on our having this archetypal understanding of what the lady-- the proper lady is.

NANCY PADDOCK: I'm reminded when you say that about Ida smith, who is in the oral history that we did in Olivia. And she was talking about growing up on the farm with a family with 13 children and how her mother was such a happy woman. She said she cooked, and she just had scads of company. She was a good, good mother and a good lady. She really was. She enjoyed people. She enjoyed cooking and embroidery.

In her later years, she had cataracts on her eyes. She had that corrected. But she had one good eye. And she'd sit there and embroider like you wouldn't believe. And she liked to read. She liked poetry. Every time she'd find a poem of some type, she'd clip it up. She had just boxes of them.

Now, with my father, I can't ever remember that he wished he could have been doing something other than what he was doing. Never. I don't know where I got it from, but I always felt like I could have been or probably should have been doing something other than what I was.

JOE PADDOCK: Ida's mother was apparently a well-adjusted, very happy, healthy person, and still is, again, a woman about 90 years old. And her father-- but in her case, why-- there's a case of a situation where someone very obviously should have had a chance to go to college or develop certain lines in her life that were never possible for her.

I think there was another type of woman, though, who wasn't very socially acceptable, who was the female character. And these women frequently maybe were made so by a man who insisted that they get out and work hard on the farm just like the men. There was a woman in Olivia named Bertha Erickson, known as Big Bertha. And I have a little anecdote about her.

Bertha was a great big person, very fat. She had diabetes. But she said she was going to eat and enjoy it. If she lived longer or shorter, time was immaterial as long as she enjoyed living, and she thoroughly enjoyed living. But she did die comparatively young in her 50s, I think. That was Jeanette Hendrickson talking about her.

Now, Harold Dickinson says a couple of other things about her. I probably have given the illusion that this is a very earthy woman, but in fact, she had a college degree, which is an interesting complexion or created a little complication into the type that I'm talking about.

But Harold says, now, Bertha was quite a cat lover. They tell a story of a time when the AAUW was having its luncheon out at her place. And one of the women opened the flower bed and screamed, Bertha, there's a mouse in here! Well, I'll fix that, said Bertha. And she quick grabbed up a cat, threw it in the flower bed, and closed it up, got everything all squared around. Now, that wasn't a ladylike thing to do, obviously.

NANCY PADDOCK: Sensible.

JOE PADDOCK: Like Big Bertha was OK. But here's another thing that Harold tells us about her. Bertha was a very smart woman and very clever. She left a note to Harold Dorks, our undertaker. One time, I went up to the furniture store to talk to Harold, get together once in a while.

And he showed me a note that he'd gotten from Bertha that she had left for him to read when she died. It was written in quite a humorous mood. I always take care of her when she was ready for burial, et cetera. But that's the kind of person that had a lot of zest and wasn't going to be intimidated by this having to be a lady.

[BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE, "I'M GONNA BE A COUNTRY GIRL AGAIN"]

(SINGING) The rain is falling lightly on the buildings and the cars

I've said goodbye to city friends, department stores, and bars

The lights of town are at my back

My heart is full of stars

And I'm gonna be a country girl again

Oh yes, I'm gonna be a country girl again

With an old, brown dog in a big front porch and rabbits in the pen

I tell you all the lights on Broadway don't amount to an acre of green

And I'm gonna be a country girl again

I've spent some time in study

Oh, I've taken my degrees

And memorize my formula, my As and Bs, and Cs

But what I know came long ago and not from such as these

And I'm gonna be a country girl again

Oh yes, I'm gonna be a country girl again

NANCY PADDOCK: It struck me that out here, as well as other places, there's a woman's culture that's separate really from the men's culture. And women getting together-- even at parties, you'll see the men at one end of the room and the women at the other, but women also getting together on their own for the old-time quilting bees that they used to have. Or they had study clogs, and they would set up a certain thing to study during that year.

And then each-- in meetings, someone would perform a lecture on this subject, or they would read books and talk about them while they were sewing. One person would read, and the others would do their mending or their sewing. And it also seemed to me that there was a-- that this was a soft kind of culture as opposed to the harshness that they must have experienced in other places.

[JOAN MORRIS AND WILLIAM BOLCOM, "THOSE WEDDING BELLS SHALL NOT RING OUT"]

(SINGING) A sexton stood one Sabbath Eve within a belfry grand

Awaiting signal from the church with bell rope in his hand

As in the house of worship stood a young and happy pair

To pledge their troth forevermore, each other's love to share

NANCY PADDOCK: The shower seemed to me to be a woman's ritual, a laying on of hands, a passing on of what it means to be a woman from one generation to the next, in which women of all ages are drawn together in order to bless this new person who's entering the sorority of wife or mother, as the case might be.

And it seemed to me that it was like an initiation ritual. And maybe they go back to the times when there were initiation rituals. I'm not sure. I have an account of showers from the Milroy area. Martha Van Dorsen was talking with another woman named Martha, and it went like this.

Well, the showers in the old days were usually in the home. And as a rule, they do this today. A few friends organize the shower. And the showers-- they had one game that was really fun. There were gifts, packages made up. And they passed a plate of dice around. And if your dice matched, well, then you would get one of the gifts. But the next time if someone else's dice matched, they would get a gift or could take it away from you if there wasn't any more there.

Then the other Martha said, our open house showers around mill right now are just like they used to be in the old days. It's just that everybody can come. It's like an open house. They usually have a musical of some type, a scripture reading, some type of devotional anyhow, and then some type of comical reading and a serious reading. And sometimes you have some kids to do some little things. And then they open the gifts, and we have lunch.

(SINGING) The bride has not a

NANCY PADDOCK: Now, I've never seen showers like that, where there's something real going on. All the showers that I have ever gone to-- they just mainly open the gifts, and eat, and talk. But the idea of having a program and having it be a real ritual is a fascinating thing to me.

(SINGING) Knelt to entreat

The sexton swung the chimes aloft

The bells rang clear and sweet

But scarce their music had begun

When forth there came a shout

Stand back! I say they shall not ring

Those bells shall not ring out

Those wedding bells shall not ring out

I swear it on my life

For we were wedded years ago

And she is still my wife

She shall not break her vows to me

She's mine through all eternity

She's mine till death shall set her free

Those bells shall not ring out

JOE PADDOCK: I'll read this poem. It's called "The Meeting," and it's about two women who were among the first farm settlers in Southwestern Minnesota. I wrote the poem. It came out of a story that a farmer by the name of Lawrence Skanter from Olivia told me about two women who, in the midst of their hard-work lives and in the isolation, living out on the prairies, were able to meet each other about once a week.

And they were the only two women in that region at all, and they didn't speak the same language. So they met on this hilltop between their two farms. And this is my surmising what it must have been like. It's called "The Meeting."

Two women, past the noon of their lonely lives,

Before the turn of our century,

Met weekly under a circling hawk on a hilltop between their farm homes on the bleak Minnesota prairie.

There was no other woman for miles.

One spoke Norwegian, the other Bohemian,

A black and white dog lay between them,

Sometimes whimpering as they tried,

Across those prairies of difference,

With smiles and intense light from their eyes,

To exchange small particular things from their lives,

Picking cabbage worms and potato bugs,

Stripping feathers for ticks, nursing children,

Churning butter, darning socks,

Starting barrels of kraut, boiling fat for soap,

Catching a pitcher of blood from the cutthroat of a hog,

Small particulars froth from the surface of inner rivers,

Dammed through silent days,

Loosed now in the movement of hands.

And in that intense light from their eyes,

They chuckled and clucked,

But could not quite loosen their bodies to dance their lives for each other.

And the black and white dog whined,

As if something in his brain, too, knew of an immense effort toward speech.

The two women then said their different goodbyes till the next week,

A strong formal handshake,

And the hawk swept sky as they strode back through tall grass,

To their homes and their men, was luminous again.

[SANDY DENNY, "THE LADY"] The lady she had a silver tongue

For to sing, she said

And maybe that's all

Wait for the dawn

And we'll have that song

When it ends it will seem

That we hear silence fall

The lady she had a golden heart

For to love, she said

And she did not lie

Wait for the dawn

And we'll watch for the sun

As we turn, it will seem

To arise in the sky

NANCY PADDOCK: I'm going to read a poem by Wendell Berry. And he talks about a grandmother who is very much, I think, like some of these women that Joe was talking about, where her life was very much controlled by a man. And she seemed cut off from the kinds of feminine things that would make her life more full.

Better born than married, misled,

In the heavy summers of the river bottom,

And the long winters cut off by snow,

She would crave gentle, dainty things,

A pretty little cookie or a cup of tea.

But spent her days over a wood stove cooking cornbread,

Kettles of jowl and beans,

For the heavy, hungry, hardhanded men she had married and mothered.

Bent past unbending by her days of labor,

That love had led her to,

They had to break her

Before she would lie down in her coffin.

(SINGING) We heard that song

While watching the skies

Oh, the sound it rang

So clear through the cold

Then silence fell

And the sun did arise

On a beautiful morning of silver and gold

JOE PADDOCK: One thing that crossed my mind at some point while we were both talking too was that there was a time when woman's self-denial, if you will, or at least accepting the role rather than seeking self-fulfillment through a variety of roles that men might hold, had a clearer social end. I mean, there was an absolute need for it.

And I think that nowadays it's much less easy. You say, I scrubbed the kitchen floors, and cook, and clean up, and pick up the clothes after my family. And for what? Well, you wouldn't have said, and for what on a farm 50 years ago because it would have been very obvious.

[JUDY COLLINS, "PIRATE SHIPS"] Far away, far away, child

Turn your eyes far away, child

Mama will sleep right down beside you tonight

Mama will sleep tonight

JOE PADDOCK: I wrote a very short little poem, which I call "The Grandmothers," which I think shows these lives in this dream.

Some still work in gardens,

Nurturing green life and the slow, warm flames of the hyacinth and the rose,

While their thoughts flow,

Out along those flesh dreams of children and children's children.

And they feel multiplied by so much life,

As their holes open the rich body of Earth.

(SINGING) Tonight

In the stars, in the stars, child

See the people in the stars, child

NANCY PADDOCK: There's a nurturing role that I see so often, especially in these older women out here. And they are really the center of the family and the grandmother, for example, who would make the quilts for the children.

And there was one woman who talked about how she'd made so many quilts that you could stick a needle in the top of that thumb, and you wouldn't get blood. And then she talked about how she had all of her children covered by quilts in the sense that there was a sort of a gift of warmth that really did cover them in many different senses, psychological as well as physical.

(SINGING) Mama will sleep right down beside you tonight

Mama will sleep tonight far away

JOE PADDOCK: I have heard studies done by feminists who suggested that maybe there was a lot of insanity and suicide among early prairie women, especially those that were more isolated, that it was a bad life for them. I suppose if they didn't have a large family, a reason for living, a healthy marriage, a town that was within reasonable distance, that it was a pretty horrible life.

The prairies were probably much more satisfying to tribal groups that lived on them as groups than it was to live alone in a farmhouse and have 160 acres of land around you and then moving on to another.

VICKIE STURGEON: Apparently, women are still having difficulty adapting to life on the farm. Some people claim that drug and alcohol addiction among rural housewives is one of the major yet hidden problems of the countryside. Bonnie Fredrickson is the senior public health nurse at the Great Plains Nursing Service, which serves Nobles and Rock counties in Minnesota. She sees a surprising number of women who are finding it hard to adjust to life on the farm.

BONNIE FREDRICKSON: Particularly, what we see is a lot of older women who their lifestyle has been determined. For instance, as a young family, the woman was a prime person as far as the homemaking, the child-rearing. And in terms of the extended family when the children leave home, she really continues the same way that she did when the children were still there in the fact that many women continue with the big gardens and the canning.

They don't know how to change things that have been really fixed in their younger years. And a lot of times they just-- they can't keep up with it, yet they feel they have to. It's the only interest areas they have. A very few older women have developed other interests in homemaking, and that cannot really carry them through.

VICKIE STURGEON: Dorothy Sietsema, home care coordinator at the Great Plains Nursing Service, says that the younger farm women are having trouble as well.

DOROTHY SIETSEMA: I know a young farm wife who has three children. One's a teenager-- two are teenagers and one smaller child that she didn't expect to have. And because of the farm, she has to help her husband with the farm work, continue a big garden, work nights so there's enough money for all of them. And she's the one that's taking all the children to the meetings at school and to the different things that they belong to. And she continues to have rather a high blood pressure and tends to eat too much.

And when we see people like that, they tend to talk and talk and talk with us and tell us all these things. Sometimes I think the fathers or husbands do not assist them with many of these things. They're doing all of the housework, and child-rearing, and helping with the farm, and working besides. And it's really too much for a person to do all these things.

[COUNTRY MUSIC] I noticed that her hand

There's soil from the land in her brow

Well, I noticed she was sweating

Flipping back her head to see where she was at

Well, I asked her now, what are we getting

She said, I'm your sister of the sun

Blue lands of the moon

Beat her too on a country mile

I want to be your lover

One lover in the style

See me through

You know that I know that we know it will all fall too

NANCY PADDOCK: I have an interesting interview that I picked up down in the Milroy area with a woman named Martha Van Dorsen, who, of course, lived this life of this very nurturing role as a wife and mother. And I'm going to read something from her talking about what it was like when the threshing crews would come through.

"When Leo had the threshing crews, we had as many as 15 to 20 men to cook for. And maybe your neighbor lady would come and help you with part of that. And the neighbors helped each other with the threshing, the men. When they came in from the bundle wagons, the crews, they really ate. We baked pancakes, just stacks and stacks and stacks of pancakes besides all the other things that went with it, old sausage, probably, and eggs and bacon.

Then came your lunch. And you'd fill your large dish pans with-- well, first, it would be a white towel. Fill it with sandwiches and cover it up with your towel. And the sandwiches were always gone by the time you came back. Besides pans full of cakes and cookies and coffee, their lunch-- they would have in the field.

And then they would come in at noon. But they wouldn't all come in at the same time. And so you were feeding men from 11:00 until 1:00 usually because the ones that were way out in the field-- they took a long time to get in with their loads. So sometimes you had to set the table twice if you didn't have enough room for all of them once.

You usually set a wash pan with a pail of water and some soap and towels outside. And that's where the men washed. Then they came in to eat, and when they were done, why, their place was taken by someone that came later. See?

And the food was-- my goodness, I don't know how we ever cooked that much. If I dressed chicken, we couldn't go and take it out of the freezer. We had to dress it the night before, but we did. Pies-- oh, my goodness, the pies we used to make, ole apple, lemon, coconut, chocolate. And if you had them a long time, you almost ran out of ideas of what to bake so you could have something different. So it was really-- we really, really worked.

He sometimes had to do the dishes so the next fella could eat if you didn't have enough dishes to go around. But here again was the friendliness of neighbors. Many times the neighbor lady came over. If you got extra cups, bring them along. Or if there was some kettle or pan that they had that you didn't have, they'd bring it along, and use theirs.

[JUDY COLLINS, "COOK WITH HONEY"]

(SINGING) Well, our door is always open

And there's surely room for more

Cooking where there's good love is never any chore

So come and get to know us

There'll be a place set just for you

Sweet wine before dinner

That is surely bound to soothe

I always cook with honey to sweeten up the night

We always cook with honey

Tell me how's your appetite for some sweet love

I always cook with honey to sweeten up

JOE PADDOCK: One of the things that I'm impressed by, though, too, is that the women that did these things don't really regret having given their lives in that way in most cases. Now and then, you feel some find someone who says, well, maybe this wasn't the life for me. But so often, there's a zest about it. They remember it with pride.

Those were the-- those were the peak experience times of their lives when they really put that in-- put themselves out to feed and nurture and make a household work and go in that way. But I think, too, that we probably don't want to get the idea that it was only during threshing that they worked this hard.

I had a real rare privilege of interviewing a woman in Hector, Minnesota, named Mary Clancy. She was, I think, 82 or 83 when this interview was done. A woman-- probably not quite 5 feet tall and just as full of zest in life then-- with sparkling eyes and enthusiasm and wit, but described a life of work that I think that very few of us can really-- can hardly grasp or comprehend the way she worked.

I can give you-- she didn't just work at home caring for a family. And she had four children, I believe it was. She worked elsewhere. She was a seamstress, and she worked as a waitress. And here's her describing what a week of hers might be like. At this time, she was working in Olivia.

I suppose I worked 9 or 10 hours a day in the hotel, whatever the work was. I used to have to go early in the morning. I used to usually be a waitress. Once in a while, I cooked. The other thing is, I could do all of these things. She'd be a waitress, but if the cook wasn't there, she would become the cook because she knew how to cook for large groups of people.

Well, sure, I used to be sewing at that time, too. I'd just go so long, and then I'd tell them I couldn't come back. I had to do my sewing. Sure, I had a family too then, three, two boys and a girl. My boys are both dead. Sure, it was hard to take care of the children and work too. Well, I don't know. Their dad used to be home some. And then I used to get-- what was her name-- Irene Paulson to take care of them.

If you have to, you can do a lot of things. Laughs. We cooked with an old wood stove or coal stove, whatever you wanted to call it. And I don't know. We had to carry the water in. There was no water in the houses. And we had lamps, not electric, kerosene lamps. No, I never had a problem sewing with kerosene lamps for light. No, I never did have it, but I'm having it now with electric. But to do fancy work and stuff, it was hard. But I just loved to do that to embroidery.

Nowadays, if they do a little something, they're so tired and laughs. Monday, I only washed and ironed. I refused to do other work unless it was something really important. Happened that somebody wanted something, then I would accommodate him. But otherwise, I didn't. Well, the washing and ironing was done in a wash tub on a washboard, heated the water in a boiler on our cook stove. You'd boil the clothes.

Oh yes, we had to cook three meals. We had to eat. They had larger meals at that time really than they do nowadays. My husband used to like his bacon and some fried potatoes for breakfast. A lot of people did. Now, I have a hard time to make my toast in the morning. Laughs.

[MARIA MULDAUR, "THE WORK SONG"]

(SINGING) Whoa, backs broke bending, digging holes to plant the seeds

The owners ate the cane and the workers ate the weeds

Putting wood in the stove and water in the cup

You worked so hard that you died standing up

Backs broke bending, digging holes to plant the seeds

The owners ate the cane and the workers ate the weeds

Putting wood in the stove and water in the cup

You worked so hard that you died standing up

HELEN HINTON: I had to make a living. I wanted to make it where I could decide the things that women did, either teaching school or bringing up children. And by the time-- in the old days, when they had brought up children, there wasn't anything they could do excepting what I used to call lady work, crocheting, or tatting, or cooking as long as they lived.

I wanted to be able to do something with my life. I couldn't see anything in the so-called women's work that was nursing, or teaching, or living on your family. And I couldn't see that I wouldn't always be primarily living at the beck and call of someone else. I wasn't about to, and I never have.

VICKIE STURGEON: That was Helen Hinton from Olivia, the first woman lawyer in Central Minnesota. She began her practice in 1925. Upon her marriage five years later, she left the formal practice of law. Since then, she has spent her time as a writer and researcher, painter and collector, and the manager of a considerable amount of farmland. Hinton is just one of many women who emerged to shatter the notion that most rural women are either farm wives or schoolteacher types.

Another such woman is Mary Page, now the mayor of Olivia. While Hinton moved from the practice of law to more secluded private pursuits, Page emerged from the traditional women's world of volunteerism and service groups to enter the political mainstream of her community. I spoke with both women recently about their respective careers.

HELEN HINTON: I started in Franklin. Right after I got out of law school, I walked the streets of Minneapolis. I tried at every law firm that was big enough to possibly want another person in the firm. And the thing that they would ask is, can you type? And I would say no because I had not spent seven years of college to be a typist in a law office.

MARY PAGE: Maybe the first step back is that I was asked to be on the planning commission. And at some point, they decided now we need to have input from women, therefore we need to look for some. And I'm not sure how my name came to that point. But I really enjoyed the experience.

And after a year, I was elected chair of the planning commission and served in that capacity for two years. At the end of which time I was not reappointed, and I considered it having been fired, and it made me so mad that I ran for office.

HELEN HINTON: At that time, I had an enormous waiting room and never very many people in there waiting a very small private office for conferences. The only other people on the second floor were the telephone-- was the telephone operator. There weren't-- there was just one at a time.

At the other end of the upstairs hall, I heated with an airtight stove, and that was fed with wood, which was kept in a closet off the waiting room-- I paid $7 a month rent-- and heated it myself. In the morning, I'd make the fire. It sounds like-- it sounds primitive. It was. I'd make the fire. And by about 10:00 or 11:00 in the wintertime, the snow would be melted enough so that I could see out the window in the big waiting room.

But little by little, I got a few collections. And I got a little work, a lawsuit or two. And people have said that Franklin would never accept a woman lawyer. It didn't seem to matter to the farmers who are normally, I know I work with them now. Farmers are usually very conservative people, but if they needed legal work done, they figured I could do it as well as anyone else.

MARY PAGE: There was a deliberate, I would call it a campaign to label me. And they used a lot of the typical things about women like, well, it isn't-- at first, it was that I was just a meddlesome person and a troublemaker. Then it was like, it isn't that she isn't smart. It's just like a lot of women who get into these kinds of roles and responsibility. They take it so seriously that all they do is get bogged down with details. And I felt that was unfair, but I was not in a position to fight it because I hadn't earned enough credibility.

The mayor had shook his fist in my face and said, I believe woman's place is in the home. Well, that pretty much tells you then that he was not going to listen to anything I had to say. And it really became an emotional battleground. Like he would come in, and he'd take over the planning commission meetings and tell me I was to do certain things. I mean, you must deal with this and this piece of business right now because I order you to do so. And that--

VICKIE STURGEON: He really did that?

MARY PAGE: Yes. And actually, his veins stuck out quite a ways in his neck, too, because he was very angry. But the neat part of that story is that by a year later, we were trying to run a woman for a council position or at least present a woman's name for an appointment. And at that time, I heard via the grapevine that there were some elderly ladies in the community who were saying, and do you know what that mayor said? A woman's place is in the kitchen.

And because of that, I mean, you know then that it had to have been gossip that got it so that it wasn't just in the home, it was now in the kitchen, so that for my inaugural, I chose a seal that said-- I think it said mayor of Olivia on it, but in the center was an old wood cookstove.

VICKIE STURGEON: When did you marry? What year?

HELEN HINTON: In 1930.

VICKIE STURGEON: How did that change your professional life?

HELEN HINTON: I left the practice of law. And I wish I had a nickel for every person who has said all that good education wasted,

MARY PAGE: That I was a woman was an issue in a way in that those people who would never vote for a woman made it an issue, and those people who would vote only for a woman made it an issue. But I think that balanced out. I knew that it was an appropriate time to run.

It was like, this is the best chance we would ever have because it was the first time that city elections were held at the same time as national elections, which meant that the way in which city officials had been elected before was being changed right then.

HELEN HINTON: Until about 10 years ago, the things that women did were just little make work things excepting for-- now, don't get me wrong on this. I'm all for women who have children, being in the home. I think that this is something I feel strongly about. The women who contribute to their children and their upbringing-- they have one of the most important jobs there is. But I had no children.

MARY PAGE: When I first came to town, there were a lot of coffee parties, and there were-- that's where the women got together. Now, the first ones I was exposed to-- there wasn't a lot of-- there was a tremendous acceptance of their own roles, I mean, the roles that had been assigned them. And my recollection was that they talked an awful lot about what was best to soak the diapers in.

And I sought out a different kind of group because I really felt that my mind was atrophying. And I had to-- I had to stop it quickly. OK, but it still took a long time to get other women who did not want to talk about what to soak diapers in, to start talking about influencing decisions about their community. And I think a lot of those-- I see a lot of those women operating at different levels. Mine happens to be an interest in city government.

HELEN HINTON: I looked around when I was about 12. And I couldn't see that there was anything that was interesting for women to do if that all the interesting things were being done by men. And I couldn't see why women couldn't do something that was interesting too.

It happens that I've lived primarily in a man's world. But for me, that hasn't been a man's world or a woman's world. Maybe I'm one of the earliest or one of the early women's libbers in that it never seemed to me that that was a man's world or a woman's world. It's a world. And that's all it is now.

VICKIE STURGEON: Helen Hinton, who began her practice as the first woman lawyer in Central Minnesota in 1925. Before that, Mary Page, who is now the mayor of Olivia.

[COUNTRY MUSIC]

Throughout our program, we've heard about the strength and sacrifice of the farm woman, as well as the determination of those women who struggled, sometimes alone, to gather something for themselves. With the richness of character and the diversity of the women who populate the countryside, there can be no single image that fits them all.

To end our program, though, we're going to turn away from some of the public concerns of the rural woman to those more personal. With the help of poet Nancy Paddock, we'll end with a tribute to the complexity of the country woman, those from the past and those who will follow.

[LINDA RONSTADT, "HASTEN DOWN THE WIND"]

(SINGING) She tells him she thinks she wants to be free

He tells her he doesn't understand

She takes his hand

And tells him nothing's working out the way she planned

She's so many women

He can't find the one who was his friend

NANCY PADDOCK: Denise Levertov has a wonderful poem that talks about this split that I think many women find within themselves. It's called "In Mind."

There's in my mind a woman of innocence,

Unadorned but fair-featured and smelling of apples or grass.

She wears a utopian smock or shift.

Her hair is light brown and smooth,

And she is kind and very clean without ostentation,

But she has no imagination.

And there's a turbulent, moon-ridden girl or old woman or both,

Dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta,

Who knows strange songs,

But she is not kind.

(SINGING) She's so many women

He can't find the one who was his friend

He hanging on to half a heart

But he can't have the restless part

He tells her to hasten down the wind

He tells her to hasten down the wind

He tells her to hasten down the wind

VICKIE STURGEON: On today's program, we heard Nancy and Joe Paddock reading their own poetry, as well as the works of Denise Levertov and Wendell Berry. We also heard the Paddocks reading selections from an oral history they've collected entitled The Things We Know Best.

We heard interviews with Bonnie Fredrickson and Dorothy Sietsema of Worthington, as well as Helen Hinton and Mary Page of Olivia. Funding for The Poet's Perspective comes in part from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Those responsible for the production-- Kim and Judy Hodgson, and I'm Vickie Sturgeon.