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Kim Williams: Professionalizing Domesticity In Montana And Abroad, 1923-1986, Emmett Ball

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Kim Williams was a renowned writer and naturalist living and working in Missoula, Montana in the 1970s and 80s. She gained national recognition for her regular guest appearances on National Public Radio’s program “All Things Considered,” where she offered home-spun lessons on frugality, naturalism, and happiness through simplicity. Williams’s professionalization of domesticity was the culmination of a lifelong battle in an attempt to reconcile her own personal conception of femininity against her conflicting aspirations for a professional career and a familial, domestic life. There is little scholarship analyzing Williams’s personal life, and no known scholarship has attempted to condense her …