Resumen de References to a Rural Idyll in the Attitudes and Self-Perceptions of Women in Rural West Germany
Drawing on research from three villages in West Germany, this paper investigates women’s daily lives and the significance of the conception of a rural idyll in this context. The rural idyll is considered to be the socially constructed and commonly shared idealised image, or stereotype, of life in villages, often depicted as a place where the world is still all right and unaffected by global changes (R. Short 1991, Bunce 2003, Bell 2006, B. Short 2006). As a construction of a simple and morally valuable lifestyle it is strongly connected to a model of heterosexual family life and motherhood. Notably, it can also be a place where the world is again all right, where childrearing and subsistence gardening is a lifestyle decision of the critics of consumerism. Although nature and community are important elements of the rural idyll, women’s roles and concepts of childhood and motherhood are analysed in detail because of the formative power idealised social concepts can have on the behaviour of the individual, or as Bunce (2003: 25) puts it, ‘even if we accept that there are many versions of the rural idyll they all converge around a normative nostalgic ideal which is embedded in social and economic structures’.
