Rural women's health

Abstract

RURAL WOMEN'S HEALTH Beverly Leipert, Belinda Leach, and Wilfreda Thurston, Eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012 Beverly Leipert knows of what she writes. Born and raised a Saskatchewan farm girl, Leipert always knew that place mattered when it came to health and quality of life. With great interest, I've watched Leipert's career and scholarship emerge over years, and culmination of her ground-breaking work exploring rurality and health can be found at least in part in her new edited text Rural Women's Health. Together with colleagues Belinda Leach and Wilfreda Thurston, Dr. Leipert creates scholarly space for discourse surrounding, well, space. Geography, broadly defined, that is. Leipert worked as a rural public health nurse in Saskatchewan for over a decade, and shared a similar awakening as did I. From that privileged perch afforded to Canada's public health nurses, we both came to understand health and quality of life as being affected by things far beyond mere biology or so-called healthy choices. Her focus and thus focus of edited text is appropriately fixed on social determinants of health. For as Canada's leading proponent of a social determinants of health lens, Dennis Raphael argues, the primary factors that shape health of Canadians are not medical treatments or lifestyle choices but rather living conditions they experience. (www.thecanadianfacts.org) According to Raphael (2011) issues like education, income distribution, (un) employment/job security/working conditions, housing, social exclusion, social safety networks, health service access, aboriginal status, gender, race, and disability greatly impact health and quality of life. And assembled scholars in Rural Women's Health have ensured discourse considers all of these issues and then some. And ok, I'll admit it. I just love that this is a primarily Canadian text, with discourse and debate representing many different regions and living circumstances that make up rural Canada. Whether it be an exploration into relationship of breast cancer and farm work in Ontario; exploring how assumptions affect Older Mennonite Women's health in Ontario; weaving together three generations of women in Newfoundland and Labrador; giving voice to quality of life of elder Ukraninan women in Saskatchewan; re-framing pregnancy and health issues in North West Territories; re-naming PTSD with women living in remote Aboriginal communities; or legitimizing Nova Scotian African Canadian women's definitions of health, this edited volume is as ruggedly honest as is Canada's terrain. Established and budding scholars alike will find twenty-two chapters thorough and enlightening, to say least. Who, except Leipert and emerging group of rural women's health scholars she's assembled, would think about food provisioning practices or food sustainability as impacting rural women's health? …