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In rural gender studies, the dominant forms of agrarian femininity are associated with the traditional role of being the farmer's spouse. According to Brandth (2002), “the discourse of family farming” has represented the hegemonic interpretation of how a typical farm woman lives and works on a farm owned and controlled by her husband, or by members of her husband's extended family. In this context, family farming has been characterised as patriarchal, and the position of farm women subordinated. Whereas the head of the farm is a man, who supervises activities and makes decisions, a woman is responsible for household tasks and routine agricultural activities. Hence, agrarian femininity is conditioned by this gendered division of labour. A farm woman's feminine identity is “tied to her marital contract assuming the identity of a farmer's wife” (Brandth, 2002, p. 184), she has no independent status, thus her occupational identity is weak and hardly recognised. Homemaking also defines farm women “as mothers, tying the definitions of social roles to their biological functions” (Brandth, 2002, p. 184). Thus, a “good farm woman” can be defined as a caring woman in this discourse of family farming.

Marshall (1950, p. 10) saw civil citizenship rights as concerning individual liberties, such as freedom of speech, property ownership rights, personal liberties and rights to justice. Women obtained many of these rights only after the acknowledgement of their political citizenship (Walby, 1997, p. 175) and much later than men did. Civil citizenship includes a whole range of issues which cannot be covered in this book. This book focuses on the gender aspects of ownership and land succession. Land succession is interrelated with a series of other civil citizenship rights issues such as access to training and education. While succession is also interrelated with issues of social (social security eligibility), economic (division of labour in the families) and political (political participation and representation) citizenship issues, these relations are to be discussed later.

Seema Arora-Jonsson is assistant professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Her interests are in development theories and practice, natural resource management and feminist participatory methodologies. She is currently engaged in writing a chapter for a book, Doing Science Together: The Politics and Practices of Participatory Research (with Louise Fortmann as editor) in which she as the academic researcher as well as the women in the village that she worked with, reflect on the research process and its contribution to science and the local community. In a project called At Home and Abroad: Gender and Participation in Swedish Environmental Policy Making, she is studying policy making and practice on gender and participation in environmental projects. She has recently started work on a project called Gender and Power in the Swedish Countryside: Women's Agency in Development Projects.

This volume looks at the construction of gendered citizenship in different rural contexts: under different welfare and gender regimes, and different rural and agricultural conditions. Through applying the concepts of the welfare state and gender regimes within rural research, this book contributes to the further development of a comparative theoretical framework for rural gender studies. The importance of integrating rural gender studies into both the mainstreams of rural and feminist research has been emphasized in previous volumes, as has that of developing comparative analytical frameworks (Whatmore, Marsden, & Lowe, 1994, p. 2; Brandth, 2002; Shortall, 2006). The conceptual framework adopted in this volume sets out to meet this challenge by approaching rural gender relations as the meeting point of two core research areas: feminist research into gender regime studies and research on rural transformative processes. Research into gender regimes offers a promising analytical framework for comparing gender relations in diverse rural settings. By formulating gender relations in terms of citizenship rights, this approach elevates the concerns of rural gender relations to broader discourses located at the nation state level (Werbner & Yuval-Davis, 1999; Asztalos Morell, 1999a). The evolution of citizenship rights at the nation state level has created hegemonic frameworks that are able to influence and transform rural gender relations. At the same time, by addressing rural concerns, deriving from the specificity of rural transition processes and gender regimes, the approach also contributes to an elucidation of the complexity of citizenship. In accordance to current debates emphasizing the embedded nature of gender relations with other social forces of differentiation, such as age, class and ethnicity (Walby, 1997; Hobson & Lister, 2002) we aimed to elucidate how gendered citizenship is constituted in the rural context.