Oviedo, España
A lo largo de los últimos veinte años el medio rural español ha visto modificar significativamente la vida de sus pobladores. Las mujeres, en particular las jóvenes, han tomado orientaciones personales y laborales propias para situarse socialmente en un mundo rural en proceso de cambio.
Las estrategias de inserción adoptadas al final del siglo veinte por las mujeres más jóvenes han diferido de las de sus coetáneos varones primando aquellas la marcha del territorio a través de los estudios como alternativa a un medio rural con escasas oportunidades para ellas. En esta época les asemeja, sin embargo, un mismo origen agroganadero y la adopción de estrategias más familiares que individuales. En el nuevo siglo las mujeres también actúan de modo diferente a los varones:
unas continúan prefiriendo el éxodo como vía de inserción social y laboral, otras se aferran al territorio en busca de una nueva identidad simbólica de la ruralidad. Con estas estrategias cambiantes nos están mostrando las diferentes formas de afrontar el cambio en el medio rural por parte de un colectivo particularmente desfavorecido en este complejo proceso de cambio social.
In the last few years the rural environment in Spain has seen many important changes in the lives of its inhabitants. Women, especially young women, have made their own personal and professional decisions in order to get their own social status in a rural wold which is undergoing continuous change. The insertion strategies followed by younger women in the last decades of the 20th century differred from the ones followed by their contemporary men.
Young women gave priority to education, even though that meant having to leave their rural areas, which have never had many oportunities for them. However, nowadays they are similar to previous generations in that most of them come from families of farmers and cattle breeders, and in that they are making decisions based on family reasons rather than individual ones. In this new century women also behave differently from men: some of them prefer the exodus from their environment as a way of social and laboring insertion, while others hang on to their territory in search of some new symbolic identity of rurality. Through these changing strategies this particularly underpriviliged group is presenting a different way of facing this complex process of social change in the rural world.