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 E P I L O G U E Remembering In  I drove my red Mazda subcompact with its New Mexico license plates into the yard of my uncle’s Wisconsin farm.I had lost contact with my mother’s family after she died in . I was in graduate school then, and the loss seemed purely private. There was my dissertation to finish at UCLA, teaching in San Diego, a separation from my first husband, then the antiwar movement. By  a back-to-the-land craze had swept me onto a small communal farm in southern Colorado. That brief but intense experience changed the way I looked at history. We had struggled on the farm to establish a small island where men and women shared work and decision making equally. I returned to teaching after two years, but I brought with me a commitment to continue that quest for equality through my work as a historian. I had met many resourceful and competent women on other farms while living in that southern Colorado community. Other historians were already writing about women’s experiences, but mainly about urban women. As I re-entered academic life I hoped to bring some of the joy and strength I experienced as a farm woman to my study of the past. I dedicated my first book on rural women to my mother and her escape from a Wisconsin farm at sixteen. I crossed the country several times to do research on Pennsylvania farm women. Then one day, on a whim, I turned off Interstate  and drove north through Wisconsin. Remembering only the place name“Medford,”I decided to look for my mother’s home. My mother had always given Medford as her birthplace because it was the largest town near her family’s farm. It looked like every other small midwestern town I had seen: streets lined with tidy two-story clapboard houses, each with its carefully manicured yard. Too urban, I finally realized—my mother’s family would have been outside of town on a farm. My mother’s maiden name was Schopp, but there were no Schopps in the phone book. My grandmother had talked about living “by Dorchester.” South from Medford on Highway  I saw a sign to Dorchester and turned off. The town “felt” somehow closer to home. The streets were short; many ended in cornfields. Men with tractor caps were entering and leaving the village stores; women were in their gardens. There was a Frank Schopper in the phone book, but no Schopp. I gave up and drove west toward the interstate that would take me home to New Mexico. From there I called my brother to see if he knew. No, but he did have an aunt’s phone number. Frank Schopper, she confirmed, was my mother’s half-brother, and, yes, he still lived on the old home farm, a few miles outside Dorchester. The next summer I turned north off the interstate again. This time I drove directly to the post office in Dorchester. I explained to the postal clerk that my uncle Frank Schopper lived somewhere nearby and asked for directions to his farm. Two miles east on Highway A, then north one mile, then another halfmile east would bring me to the Schopper place. Highway A cut through high cornfields. Occasionally farmhouse yards, barns, and high blue enameled steel silos marked a crossroad. The Schopper place was on a dirt road; the small two-story frame house sat beside a gravel driveway lined with linden and poplar trees. I turned in and drove toward the house, then around it as the driveway led me into the back yard. I pulled to a stop near a slightly bent man who was chopping wood. I got out and introduced myself. “I’m Theresa’s daughter, Joan,” I said.“Oh,” he replied,“We were wondering what happened to you.” I suddenly understood what it meant to “claim kin.” And how it felt. I was home. The original log house in which my mother had been born and grew up was still there. Uncle Frank had covered it with clapboards, and it now served as his blacksmith shop. My uncle was thrifty and never threw anything away. In the loft of the old house I discovered schoolbooks, some with my mother’s name in them.We talked about what life was like, growing up in that small log house: how the eight children all crowded into the loft, shivering in...

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