OHQ vol. 113, no. 1 provided a robust source of income for rural counties and schools. In short,all of Oregon has a rooting interest in Portland’s economic success.And improving the rural economy would help spread out the burden of paying for public services. In addition ,if the old linkages between city and county are starting to break down, others are being developed.New research,for example,increasingly shows that many smaller communities benefit by their proximity to metropolitan areas. Think of how the growing popularity of farmers’ markets in urban Portland injects income into nearby agricultural areas. The difficulty of working together as one state has become more complicated by the nation’s partisan realignment, which led to a much sharper ideological divide between the Democratic and Republican parties. The days are long gone when many Republican senators — such as Oregon’s Bob Packwood and Mark O. Hatfield — were more liberal than several of their Democratic colleagues. In Oregon, political scientists Richard A. Clucas, Mark Henkels, and Brent S. Steel point out, the realignment ran heavily along urban-rural lines. Portland (as well as the college cities of Eugene, Corvallis, and Ashland) became heavily Democratic, the rural areas heavily Republican, and the suburbs were somewhere in the middle.Bridging those gaps, they acknowledge, will be difficult, although they see “glimmers of hope” (p. 134). Glimmers of hope might not be a bad alternative subtitle for Toward One Oregon. Right now, the regional differences have been submerged somewhat by the bad national economy. But even as the economy recovers, Oregon will continue to be faced with its own regional divide,and the contributors to Toward One Oregon have performed a useful service by giving us a solid grounding in the economic and social complications of modern Oregon. Jeff Mapes Oregonian Working the Land: The Stories of Ranch and Farm Women in the Modern American West by Sandra K. Schackel University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2011. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 200 pages. $24.95 cloth. In the mid 1990s, Sandy Schackel began interviewing ranch and farm women across the American West in order to explore the ways rural women’s lives had changed during the second half of the twentieth century.She heard tales of woe,resilience,and political activism in the face of formidable threats to family farms. In 2010, as she was completing Working the Land, she called many of her narrators to get an update. Some had died; some had moved off the land, their farms bought by developers or large agribusinesses; some remained; and some had found new outlets to honor their agricultural heritage through writing, historic reenactment, and public speaking. The heart of the book is these women’s stories. This slim volume is an intimate portrait of westernwomen,fromwestTexastoeasternOregon ,who found satisfying work,a place to forge strong family ties, a love of land and animals, and imposing social and financial challenges in the routines of modern agriculture.Despite the success of much of the feminist agenda during the late twentieth century, the world of American agriculture remains deeply patriarchal. Women act with determination and work with endurance,but the field of their actions is often the result of male decision-making. Schackel notes in the preface that she is not writing a history of agricultural policy, but agricultural policy, especially the 1980s farm crisis — with its eerie overtones of the contemporary housing crisis — runs inextricably through the book. Schackel uses agricultural census data to chart the shifting profile of twentieth-century agriculture — the rise in the size of farms and decline in the number of farmers — that forms the background of her narrators’lives.Interest- Reviews ingly, the most recent census data from 2007 showed an increase of nearly 300,000 farms since the previous count. They are small, have more diverse production,and are run by young men and women. No doubt a part of the contemporaryfoodmovement —withitsconcerns aboutfoodsafety,localandorganicproduction, andcreatingasmallercarbonfootprintthrough shorter shipping distances — how successful this new reincarnation of family farming will be is still up in the air.And whether it will make inroads in deeply inscribed patriarchal patterns is also undetermined. One of the most striking patterns that...