This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.

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Women's community organizing for change has the potential to improve many aspects of women's lives, the lives of their families, and community members at large. Yet the role of women's organized action in shaping the social environment is not well understood and is rarely supported by the mainstream institutions of planning. In rural areas, women's contributions to community planning may be even less apparent given the voluntary nature of their work and the lack of sensitivity paid to women's particular needs. The purpose of this study is to contribute to contemporary planning thought by providing some insight in to why, to what extent, and how women successfully organize to meet their social needs in rural communities. Two themes are examined: (1) the motivating factors that led to the development of a women's planning rganization, the Nicola Valley Women in Action, (NVWIA) in Merritt, B.C., and; (2) the dynamic forces in this community that support and/or limit women's abilities to engage in gender-informed community planning. A literature review outlines the need for gender-sensitive approaches to planning and the potential of women's community organizing for change (feminist activism) to serve as a catalyst for gendersensitive planning praxis. To explore the experiences of a particular group of women engaged in community organizing from a feminist perspective, a case study of the NVWIA is described through a review of organizational material and interviews with members. The principal findings are: (1) there was a definite need for gender-sensitive planning to meet the social needs of women in Merritt; (2) factors such as the lack of gender-sensitivity in institutional planning, the existence of barriers to women's involvement, and the dearth of opportunities for women in Merritt to influence decision-making motivated the development of the NVWIA; (3) opportunities, including government incentive, municipal support, inter-agency co-operation, organizing skills and member initiative, enabled the NVWIA to successfully respond to women's needs; and (4) constraints, including the absence of funding, philosophical differences, anti-feminist sentiment, and limits to voluntary time, hinder the ability of the NVWIA to continue its efforts. The study highlights the value of supporting women's community organizing as a means of encouraging planning approaches in rural areas that are gender-sensitive. It concludes by identifying the implications for self-help and professional planners wishing to support women's organized action.

The thesis is an exploration of the current role of the small business forest sector in hinterland forest communities, and the extent to which their economic and social positions correspond to the role envisioned for them by two prevailing visions of the future of the forest industry. One, advocated by Canadian political economists, predicts a continuation, indeed an intensification of corporate concentration, with attendant downsizing and job losses. Corporate restructuring is seen in part to induce small business development, through subcontracting arrangements and local entrepreneurialism, as a response to losses of core forest industry jobs. The second interpretation, advocated by the alternative forestry school, views the current crisis in the forest industry as an opportunity to return to decentralised approaches to ecologically-based forest management which encourage 'democracy in the forests', leading to community and environmental sustainability. Local entrepreneurs are an important part of this new 'value-based' forest economy. Interviews with small forest operators reveal a diversity of economic and social identities that do not conform well to either of the positions ascribed to small business by the Canadian political economy or alternative forestry literatures. The representations of small business found in these two literatures homogenize and suppress this diversity, making it difficult to 'see' small forest operators as anything other than contractors to the conventional system of corporate forestry, or alternative operators in an ecosystem- and community-based forest economy. In the place of these singular, marginalizing representations, I argue, using poststructural and feminist approaches to economic geography, for a 'third way' of exploring small forest operator subjectivities through overdetermined multiple class processes. Exploring small forest operator identity through multiple class processes avoids the essentialism found in fixed representations. It recognizes the transformative potential of small business in the forest economy, without denying the potential for exploitation that exists both within small business and corporate forestry. Class processes rendered invisible in the Canadian political economy and alternative forestry narratives, such as unpaid labour performed by family members and volunteer work in local planning processes, as well as work performed for wages and profit, are considered in this multiple class processes approach.