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Women and Gender Studies
Women’s experience as settlers, mothers, miners and miners’ wives, elderly, teachers, missionaries; family role and LGBTQ studies; Mother Jones and other leaders; artists and entrepreneurs
Ackley, H. Adam. 2015. “In the Footsteps of Mother Jones, Mothers of the Miners: Florence Reece, Molly Jackson, and Sarah Ogun Gunning.” Chap. 11 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 327-349. Athens: Ohio University Press. “...analyzes the maternal model of Appalachian community organizing based on the lives of some of Appalachia’s best-known and best-loved women activists....[who] brought national attention to the poor working conditions found in the timber and coal mining regions of the Mountain South.”
Antolini, Katharine Lane. 2014. Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day. West Virginia and Appalachia Series, no 15. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 288 pp. “Anna Jarvis organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908, and then spent decades promoting the holiday and defending it from commercialization.”
Antolini, Lane. 2015. “Mothers’ Day v. Mother’s Day: The Jarvis Women and the Meaning of Motherhood.” Chap. 2 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 45-73. Athens: Ohio University Press. The 1858 legacy of 1908-founded Mother’s Day (Taylor County, W. Va.).
Baker, Nancy E. 2015. “Integrating Women into Modern Kentucky History: The Equal Rights Amendment Debate (1972–1978) as a Case Study.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 113, no. 2-3 (Spring-Summer): 477-507.
Balay, Anne. 2016. “Surprised by Activism: The Effects of One Oral History on Its Queer Steel-Working Narrators.” Oral History Review 43, no. 1 (Winter-Spring): 69-80. http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/1/69.full.
Barnett, Bob, and Steven Cooper. 2013. “Holding Court: West Virginia’s First Girls’ High School Basketball Tournament” [1919-1924; Spencer, Roane Co.]. Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, no. 1 (Spring): 24-31.
Barry, Joyce M. 2015. “‘Remembering the Past, Working for the Future’: West Virginia Women Fight for Environmental Heritage and Economic Justice in the Age of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining.” Chap. 15 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 418-442. Athens: Ohio University Press. “...women have created their own path in the fight against mountaintop removal...[operating] outside the coal industry and against the interests of male labor in an effort to protect their families, their communities, and the environment.”
Bell, Shannon Elizabeth, ed. 2013. Our Roots Run Deep As Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 210 pp. Interviews with twelve activist women fighting mountaintop removal. Contents: Introduction -- 1. “How can they expect me as a mother to look over that?”: Maria Gunnoe’s fight for her children’s health and safety -- 2. “We became two determined women”: Pauline Canterberry and Mary Miller become the Sylvester dustbusters -- 3. “Let us live in our mountains”: Joan Linville’s fight for her homeland -- 4. “You gotta go and do everything you can -- fight for your kids”: Donetta Blankenship speaks out against underground slurry injections -- 5. “It’s just a part of who I am”: Maria Lambert and the movement for clean water in Prenter -- 6. “I’m not an activist against coal, I’m an activist forthe preservation of my state”: Teri Blanton and the fight for justice in Kentucky -- 7. “I’m not going to be run out, I’m not going to be run over, I’m not going out without a fight”: Patty Sebok’s battle against monster coal trucks -- 8. “Our roots run so deep, you can’t distinguish us from the earth we live on”: Debbie Jarrell and the campaign to move Marsh Fork elementary school -- 9. “It’s not just what I choose to do, it’s also, I think, what I have to do”: Lorelei Scarboro’s drive to save Coal River Mountain -- 10. “Money cannot recreate what nature gives you”: Donna Branham’s struggle against mountaintop removal -- 11. “I want my great-great-grandchildren to be able to live on this earth!”: the legacy of the courageous Julia “Judy” Bonds -- Conclusion.
Bennett, Keisa, JaNelle M. Ricks, and Britteny M. Howell. 2014. “‘It’s just a way of fitting in’: Tobacco Use and the Lived Experience of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Appalachians.” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 25, no. 4 (November): 1646-1666.
Bhatraju, Kiran. 2013. Mud Creek Medicine: The Life of Eula Hall and the Fight for Appalachia. Louisville, Ky.: Butler Books. 304 pp. Mud Creek Clinic, Floyd County, Ky., founded 1973. “...takes the reader through Eula’s experiences with moonshining, labor strikes, and fighting against severe domestic abuse, to eventually building and managing her [community-based health care] clinic.” “Place defines her struggle to give power back to the people from the hands of powerful political elites .... It is place that defines her steely feminism and resolve to continue to ‘raise holy hell’ at the first sign of injustice.”
Billips, Martha. 2015. “Harriette Simpson Arnow (1908-1986): A Writer’s Life.” In Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. M. McEuen, and T. Appleton, 312-336. Athens: University of Georgia Press. “While her formative years in and around Burnside in Pulaski County ‘contributed indelibly’ to Arnow’s development as a writer, she had to leave that world in order to write about it.”
Blackwell, Deborah L. 2015. “Female Stereotypes and the Creation of Appalachia, 1870-1940.” Chap. 3 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 74-94. Athens: Ohio University Press. “While mountain women sometimes used the images as a means of social, economic, or political agency, benevolent workers [outsiders] used them to obtain charitable aid and industry used them to excuse their exploitation of the land and its people.”
Burch-Brown, Carol. 2015. “Helen Louise Gibson Compton: Founder and Proprietor of the Shamrock” [Bluefield, Mercer Co., W. Va.]. Interview with Helen Compton (1924-2001), in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 459-465. Athens: Ohio University Press. The Shamrock was a restaurant by day and a gay bar at night that Compton managed for 37 years as “an underground haven for Appalachian queers from the Virginias to Kentucky and North Carolina.”
Caldemeyer, Dana M. 2015. “Yoked to Tradition: Kentucky Women and Their Histories, 1900–1945.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 113, no. 2-3 (Spring-Summer): 453-475.
Case, Sarah. 2015. “Katherine Pettit (1868-1936) and May Stone (1867-1946): The Cultural Politics of Mountain Reform.” In Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. M. McEuen, and T. Appleton, 168-195. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Pettit and Stone founded Hindman Settlement School (Knott Co., Ky.), and Pettit went on to co-found Pine Mountain Settlement School (Harlan Co., Ky.).
Churilla, Lauren M. 2014. “Women & the Civic Club of Allegheny County [Pittsburgh]. Western Pennsylvania History 97, no. 2 (Summer): 48-60. “Members...were faced with problems such as industrial pollution, inadequate housing, and terrible living conditions .... Women played critical roles...[and] effectively supported the social transformation of an entire city.”
Clapp, Elizabeth J. 2015. “‘Where I First Learned the Nature of Care’: Women and Violence on the Late Eighteenth-Century Frontier.” American Nineteenth Century History 16, no. 1 (March): 59-81. “...considers the tensions which exist in the portrayal of these women in the sources – between the one-dimensional victims of contemporary newspaper accounts and the larger-than-life frontier heroines of later memoirs and oral histories .... It contends that far from being passive victims in encounters with Indians, white women were frequently fully prepared and willing to fight back.”
Clark, Amy D. 2013. “Letters from Home: The Literate Lives of Central Appalachian Women.” Appalachian Journal 41, no. 1-2 (Fall 2013-Winter 2014): 54-76. Through generations, for the past 100 years.
DeKeseredy, Walter S. 2015. “New Directions in Feminist Understandings of Rural Crime.” Journal of Rural Studies 39 (June): 180-187.
Dorgan, Kelly A., Kathryn L. Duvall, Sadie P. Hutson, and Amber E. Kinser. 2013. “Mothered, Mothering, and Motherizing in Illness Narratives: What Women Cancer Survivors in Southern Central Appalachia Reveal about Mothering-Disruption.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 19, no. 1-2 (Spring-Fall): 59-81. “...stories of twenty-nine women cancer survivors from northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia.”
Dorgan, Kelly, Kathryn L. Duvall, and Sadie P. Hutson. 2015. “At the Intersection of Cancer Survivorship, Gender, Family, and Place in Southern Central Appalachia: A Case Study.” In Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 466-470. Athens: Ohio University Press. Excerpts from a 2008 interview with a breast and ovarian cancer survivor.
Dunaway, Wilma A. 2015. “Challenging the Myth of Separate Spheres: Women’s Work in the Antebellum Mountain South.” Chap. 6 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 173-194. Athens: Ohio University Press. “...gender lines blurred, with mountain women performing tasks that outside the mountains were seen as ‘unsuitable’ for women .... women’s work came in many forms and was shaped by race, class, and gender, all of which had economic value regardless of being paid or unpaid work.”
Fariello, M. Anna. 2015. “Olive Dame Campbell: Among the Folk: Education, Experimentation, and Rural Life.” In North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 2, ed. M. Gillespie and S. McMillen, 32-51. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Ferrari, Mary C. 2015. “Mary Draper Ingles: A Survivor in Her Time and a Legend Ever Since.” In Virginia Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. C. Kierner and S. Treadway, 138-159. Athens: University of Georgia Press. After her 1755 capture by the Shawnee on the Virginia frontier and removal to the Ohio Territory, Ingles escaped and made a legendary trek hundreds of miles back home.
Fink, Joey. 2014. “In Good Faith: Working-Class Women, Feminism, and Religious Support in the Struggle to Organize J. P. Stevens Textile Workers in the Southern Piedmont, 1974–1980.” Southern Spaces, 15 July. 8,252 words. Sections: Introduction | The Stevens Campaign and the Southern Textile Industry | Sick for Justice | Religious Support for Stevens Workers after the 1974 Election Victory | Labor | Feminism | The Norma Raes Win a Contract and Create a Legacy | Recommended resources. http://southernspaces.org/2014/good-faith-working-class-women-feminism-and-religious-support-struggle-organize-j-p-stevens.
Friend, Craig Thompson. 2015. “Nonhelema Hokolesqua (1718-1786), Jemima Boone Callaway (1762-1829), and Matilda Lewis Threlkeld (1799--c. 1885): Searching for Kentucky’s Female Frontier.” In Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. M. McEuen, and T. Appleton, 8-32. Athens: University of Georgia Press. “Nonhelema Hokolesqua, a female Shawnee chief who experienced the frontier of the 1760s; Jemima Boone Callaway, a daughter of Rebecca and Daniel Boone who lived on the frontier in the late 1770s and 1780s; and Matilda Lewis Threlkeld, a young slave brought to western Kentucky in the early 1800s.”
Garringer, Rachel. 2014. “Interview with Rachel Garringer.” Still: The Journal, no. 16 (Fall). 6,049 words, plus video clip (3:52 min.). Garringer works as a youth advocate in West Virginia where she founded “Country Queers,” a multi-media oral history project “documenting the diverse experiences of rural, small town, and country LGBTQI folks.” http://www.stilljournal.net/interview-rachelgarringer.php.
Giardina, Denise. 2014. “The Mountains Haunt Me: Retired Writer-In-Residence Plots Next Step” [“Innerviews” column]. Interview by Sandy Wells. Charleston Gazette, 2 February, 5(A). 1,756 words.
Gifford, James. 2014. “Jean Thomas and the American Folk Song Festival” [1881-1982]. Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 29, no. 2 (Winter): 8-9. Thomas established the festival in 1930 and “her old-fashioned Singin’ Gatherin’ was held at various sites in and around her hometown of Ashland” (Ky.) the second Sunday of June.
Gillespie, Gabby, and Kipp Dawson. 2016. “Hearts Afire: Building Intergenerational Solidarity.” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 31, no. 2 (Winter): 28-29. Brief profiles and interviews with Gillespie, 29 (Va., anti-MTR and community activist), and Dawson,70 (Pa., former coal miner and UMWA activist) .
Gleaves, Sam, and Ethan Hamblin. 2014. “Heritage, Sexuality and Country Music As an Axis for Life: A Down Home Diva Cosmology” [creative nonfiction]. Still: The Journal, no. 14 (Winter). 2,336 words. “Our work began as a humor article [Downhome Divas] in the Berea College student newspaper...but it has since grown to encompass an ideology, a calling, a ministry, a daily battle to be ourselves in an opposing world and help others do the same .... Let us underscore the importance of grandparents in our lives....We know that they know that we are gay. We know that their love for us will never shift.” http://www.stilljournal.net/downhomedivas-cnf.php.
Gleaves, Sam. 2016. “Reconciling Ground: Music and LGBTQ Activism.” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine31, no. 2 (Winter): 8-10, with sidebar, “A Mother’s Journey,” by Deanna Bradberry. Berea College graduate and folk singer Sam Gleaves released his first collection of original songs, Ain’t We Brothers, in November 2015.
Goan, Melanie Beals. 2015. “Mary Breckinridge (1881-1965): Kind Ambition and the Creation of the Frontier Nursing Service.” In Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. M. McEuen, and T. Appleton, 294-311. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Goh, Debbie. 2013. “WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE WANT: A Feminist Standpoint Approach to Defining Effective ICT Use for West Virginian Women.” Information, Communication & Society 16, no 7 (September): 1019-1041. “...Third World feminist epistemology as theory and method in gender digital divide research to establish the consciousness of Appalachian women left behind in the information society.”
Greer, Jane. 2015. “Expanding Working-Class Rhetorical Traditions: The Moonlight Schools and Alternative Solidarities among Appalachian Women, 1911 to 1920” [Ky.; adult education]. College English 77, no. 3: 216-235.
Griffin, Connie, ed. 2015. Crooked Letter I: Coming Out in the South [LGBTQ]. Montgomery, Ala.: NewSouth Books. 207 pp. Essays by eighteen writers, including Dorothy Allison and Jeff Mann.
Haberland, Michelle. 2015. Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930-2000. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 228 pp.
Hayden, Erica. 2013. “‘She Keeps the Place in Continual Excitement’: Female Inmates’ Reactions to Incarceration in Antebellum Pennsylvania’s Prisons.” Pennsylvania History 80, no. 1 (Winter): 51-84. Western State Penitentiary, Allegheny Co.; women’s experience, 1826-1862.
Henry, Murphy Hicks. 2013. Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass. Music in American Life series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 469 pp. Sources, bibliography, index. Profiles of more than 70 women, organized by decade, 1940s to present.
Hill, Sarah H. 2014. “Arizona Nick Swaney Blankenship” [d. 1934]. In North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. M. Gillespie and S. McMillen, 359-382. Athens: University of Georgia Press. “Granddaughter of a Cherokee-black marriage and daughter of a Cherokee-white union, she grew up on the Cherokee reservation in western North Carolina, attended a predominantly black school in Virginia, worked for elite white families in New England, taught impoverished black children in South Carolina, and returned to the reservation to marry a white man several years her junior.”
hooks, bell. 2016. “bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness.” Interview by George Yancy. New York Times, 10 December. 4,445 words. http://nyti.ms/1XYG4hq.
Horton, Kristina. 2015. Martyr of Loray Mill: Ella May and the 1929 Textile Workers’ Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. 224 pp. Examines the history of the strike and the murder of union organizer and feminist pioneer Ella May (1920-1929); written by her great-granddaughter.
Howard, Jason. 2014. “Gay and Underground in West Virginia” [creative nonfiction]. Still: The Journal, no. 14 (Winter). 1,687 words. “In late 2010, Jason interviewed Sam Hall, a coal miner [who]...had just filed suit for workplace harassment and discrimination due to his sexual orientation. Today, Hall continues to fight for fairness legislation in West Virginia.” http://www.stilljournal.net/jason-howard-cnf.php.
Howe, Barbara J. 2015. “Cyprians and Courtesans, Murder and Mayhem: Prostitution in Wheeling during the Civil War.” Chap. 7 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 195-216. Athens: Ohio University Press. “...reveals a hierarchal profession based on class, race, and ethnicity .... Lacking both power and agency, many of these women entered prostitution as a consequence of economic distress, alcoholism, abuse, or homelessness.”
Inscoe, John C. 2014. “Mary Martin Sloop: Mountain Miracle Worker.” In North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. M. Gillespie and S. McMillen, 313-336. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Sloop (1873-1962) moved with her husband to Avery County, N.C., in 1908 where they became medical providers and where she helped found the Crossnore School and its weaving program. See also her memoir, Miracle in the Hills(McGraw-Hill, 1953).
Inscoe, John C. 2015. “Women on a Mission: Southern Appalachia’s ‘Benevolent Workers’ on Film. Chap 4 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 96-116. Athens: Ohio University Press. “...analyzes the media’s portrayal of female benevolent workers in the films I’d Climb the Highest Mountain [1951], Christy [1994], and Songcatcher [2000].”
Johnson, Colin R. 2013. Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. Sexuality Studies series. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 247 pp.
Johnson, Lee A. 2013. “Women and Glossolalia in Pauline Communities: The Relationship between Pneumatic Gifts and Authority” [Pentecostalism]. Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 21, no. 2: 196-214. “...examines the extent of the role of the Corinthian women vis-à-vis Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s study of glossolalic women in late twentieth-century Appalachian churches.”
Johnston, Carolyn, ed. 2013. Voices of Cherokee Women. Real Voices, Real History series. Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair. 295 pp. First-person accounts; over fifty primary documents, 16th-century to present.
Jones, Sarah. 2016. “The Strange Story of Sewanee, the KKK, and a Franklin County Gay/Straight Alliance” [Tenn.]. Scalawag Magazine, 19 May. 2,873 words. http://www.scalawagmagazine.org/articles/strange-story-sewanee.
Judson, Sarah. 2014. “‘I Am a Nasty Branch Kid’: Women’s Memories of Place in the Era of Asheville’s Urban Renewal.” North Carolina Historical Review 91, no. 3 (July): 323-350. “...discusses women’s memories of Asheville, North Carolina’s urban renewal from the 1950s through the 1970s.”
Kasworm, Carol E. 2015. “OLIVE DAME CAMPBELL: An Appalachian Social Activist and Adult Educator.” Chap. 7 in No Small Lives: Handbook of North American Early Women Adult Educators, 1925-1950, ed. S. Imel and G. Bersch, 73-79. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishing.
Kiernan, Denise. 2013. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II [1943 Oak Ridge, Tenn.; interviews]. New York: Simon & Schuster. 373 pp. “They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb ‘Little Boy’ was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out.”
Kreiser, Christine M. 2015. “Call the MIDWIFE.” American History 50, no. 2 (June): 62-71. Biography of Frontier Nursing Service (Ky.; horseback) founder and nurse-midwife, Mary Breckenridge (1881-1965).
LeFlouria, Talitha L. 2015. Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 257. Including leased labor; mines and mills.
Martin, Louis C. 2015. “Flopping Tin and Punching Metal: A Survey of Women Steelworkers in West Virginia, 1890-1970.” Chap. 10 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 270-294. Athens: Ohio University Press. “... sex typing of jobs and sexism among union workers in the steel industry....did not improve until legal challenges against discrimination occurred in the 1970s.”
Massek, Sue. 2015. “Herstory of Appalachia: Three Centuries of Oppression and Resistance.” Appalachian Journal 42, no. 3-4 (Spring-Summer): 284-295. This article is interspersed with song lyrics by and about women, including: Nancy Ward, Hedy West, Emma Bell Miles, Mother Jones, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Aunt Molly Jackson, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Florence Reece, Mary Lou Layne Chandler, Coal Employment Project, Cosby Totten, Helen Lewis, Lily May Ledford and the Coon Creek Girls, Blanche Coldiron, Lois Short, Jean Ritchie, Hazel Dickens, Eula Hall, Edna Gulley, Widow Combs, Becky Simpson, Evelyn Williams, Holly Near, Judy Bonds, Janice Nease, Denise Giardina, Marilou Awiakta, George Ella Lyon, Anne Shelby, Nikky Finney, Jo Carson, Nikki Giovanni, Kate Long, Candie Carawan, and more. The author, Sue Massek, is a founding member of the Real World String Band.
Menius, Art. 2015. “Precious Memories: Bringing Sarah Ogan Gunning to Life on Stage.” Old-Time Herald 14, no. 2. Si Kahn’s new one-woman play, Precious Memories, starring Sue Massek. http://www.oldtimeherald.org/archive/back_issues/volume-14/14-2/index.html.
Messenger, Penny. 2015. “Professionalizing ‘Mountain Work’ in Appalachia: Women in the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers. Chap. 8 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 217-243. Athens: Ohio University Press. “...examines the central role of middleclass white women from outside the region .... The female leadership of the CSMW carried out a rural and feminized Progressive agenda in the mountains that contributed to the development of social work as a profession.”
Mulloy, Clement A. 2014. “Vada Webb Sheid and the Transformation of North Central Arkansas” [Baxter Co.]. Arkansas Historical Quarterly 73, no. 2 (Summer): 192-215.
Newhouse, Walter J. 2016. “The Founding of the Spirit of Motherhood.” Journal of the Alleghenies 52: 33-43. Mother’s Day was founded by Anna Jarvis (b. 1864) in Grafton, W. Va.
Pendarvis, Edwina. 2014. “Sweet Georgia Brown: The Tangled Roots of a Popular Tune.” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 29, no. 2 (Winter): 45-47. From 1897 Bluefield, W. Va. (birthplace of composer Maceo Pinkard), to 1920s New York City, to various interpretations of the song, to celebrity and brothel connections, to theme song of the Harlem Globetrotters.
Pickett, Suzanne. 2013. The Path Was Steep: A Memoir of Appalachian Coal Camps During the Great Depression[W. Va., Ala.]. Foreword by Norman McMillan. Montgomery, Ala.: NewSouth Books. 210 pp. The author is both daughter and wife of coal miners, and wrote for the Welch (West Virginia) Daily News.
Rice, Connie Park, and Marie Tedesco, ed. 2015. Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism. Series in Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press. 506 pp. Fifteen essays plus 15 primary documents written by mountain women; discussion questions; authors’ roundtable. “The essays...contradict and debunk entrenched stereotypes of Appalachian women as poor and white .... Each focuses on a particular individual or a particular group .... The Mountain South has been home to Cherokee, African American, Latina, and white women, both rich and poor. Civil rights and gay rights advocates, environmental and labor activists, prostitutes, and coal miners—all have lived in the place called the Mountain South and enriched its history and culture.” Contents: INTRODUCTION: A Tapestry of Voices: Women’s History in the Mountain South / Connie Park Rice -- PART ONE: IDENTITY AND WOMEN OF THE MOUNTAIN SOUTH. 1. Women in Cherokee Society: Status, Race, and Power from the Colonial Period to Removal / Marie Tedesco -- 2. Mothers’ Day v. Mother’s Day: The Jarvis Women and the Meaning of Motherhood / Katharine Lane Antolini -- 3. Female Stereotypes and the Creation of Appalachia, 1870-1940 / Deborah L. Blackwell -- 4. Women on a Mission: Southern Appalachia’s “Benevolent Workers” on Film / John C. Inscoe -- 5. Embodying Appalachia: Progress, Pride, and Beauty Pageantry, 1930s to the Present / Karen W. Tice -- DOCUMENTS. Moravian Lebenslauf (Memoir or Life’s Journey) -- Petition for Divorce – Women of the Mountains / Rev. Edgar Tufts -- Rebel in the Mosque: Going Where I know I Belong / Asra Q. Nomani -- An Undocumented Mexican mother of a High School Dropout in East Tennessee / Maria Alejandra Lopez -- Questions for Discussion -- PART TWO: WOMEN AND WORK IN APPALACHIA. 6. Challenging the Myth of Separate Spheres: Women’s Work in the Antebellum Mountain South / Wilma A. Dunaway -- 7. Cyprians and Courtesans, Murder and Mayhem: Prostitution in Wheeling during the Civil War / Barbara J. Howe -- 8. Professionalizing “Mountain Work” in Appalachia: Women in the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers / Penny Messenger -- 9. “‘Two fer’ the Money”? African American Women in the Appalachian Coalfields / Carletta A. Bush -- 10. Flopping Tin and Punching Metal: A Survey of Women Steelworkers in West Virginia, 1890-1970 / Louis C. Martin -- DOCUMENTS. The Indenture of Mary Hollens -- The Testimony of Mrs. Maggie Waters -- A Working Woman Speaks -- The Pikeville Methodist Hospital Strike -- Poetry from the Coal Mining Women’s Support Team News -- Questions for Discussion -- PART THREE: WOMEN AND ACTIVISM IN THE MOUNTAIN SOUTH. 11. In the Footsteps of Mother Jones, Mothers of the Miners: Florence Reece, Molly Jackson, and Sarah Ogun Gunning / H. Adam Ackley -- 12. “She Now Cries Out”: Linda Neville and the Limitations of Venereal Disease Control Policies in Kentucky / Evelyn Ashley Sorrell -- 13. Garrison, Drewry, Meadows, and Bateman: Race, Class, and Activism in the Mountain State / Lois Lucas -- 14. Ethel New v. Atlantic Greyhound: Fighting for Social Justice in Appalachia / Jan Voogd -- 15. “Remembering the Past, Working for the Future”: West Virginia Women Fight for Environmental Heritage and Economic Justice in the Age of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining / Joyce M. Barry -- DOCUMENTS: The Petition of Margaret Lee -- The Fight for Suffrage -- Abortion in the Mountain South -- Helen Louise Gibson Compton: Founder and Proprietor of The Shamrock / Carol Burch-Brown -- At the Intersection of Cancer Survivorship, Gender, Family, and Place in Southern Central Appalachia: A Case Study / Kelly A. Dorgan, Kathryn L. Duvall, and Sadie P. Hutson -- EPILOGUE: Reflections on the Concept of Place in the Study of Women in the Mountain South: A Roundtable Discussion with the Authors.
Rice, Connie Park. 2015. “A Tapestry of Voices: Women’s History in the Mountain South.” Introduction to Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 1-20. Athens: Ohio University Press. Overview of the historiography of the role women have played in Appalachia from pioneer times to the present, pointing to key authors and studies, followed by descriptions of the fifteen papers in this edited volume.
Rolston, Jessica Smith. 2014. Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West [Wyoming]. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 236 pp. Contents: Part I: Orientation | Putting Kinship to Work | Labor Relations and Corporate Social Responsibility -- Part II: Putting in Time | Shiftwork as Kinwork | Interweaving Love and Labor -- Part III: Undoing Gender at Work | Tomboys and Softies | Hard Work, Humor, and Harassment | Conclusion.
Schoenberg, Nancy E., Christina R. Studts, Jenna Hatcher-Keller, Eliza Buelt, and Elwanda Adams. 2013. “Patterns and Determinants of Breast and Cervical Cancer Non-Screening among Appalachian Women.” Women & Health 53, no. 6 (August): 552-571. From interviews with 222 from six Appalachian counties.
Sheffield, Caroline C. 2014. “Heroines on Horseback: The Frontier Nursing Service of Appalachia.” Social Studies & The Young Learner 26, no. 3 (January-February): 5-9. Discusses the career of founder Mary Breckinridge (1881-1965).
Sickels, Carter. 2014. “Johnson City” [creative nonfiction]. Appalachian Heritage 42, no. 2 (Spring): 34-52. In this essay the author tells of his emergence as transgender.
Spatig, Linda, and Layne Amerikaner. 2014. Thinking Outside the Girl Box: Teaming Up with Resilient Youth in Appalachia [W. Va.]. Series in Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press. 224 pp. “Traces the life of the Lincoln County Girls’ Resiliency Program (GRP), a grassroots, community nonprofit aimed at helping girls identify strengths, become active decision makers, and advocate for social change.”
Stephenson, Jane B. 2013. Changing Lives in Appalachia: The New Opportunity School for Women [founded 1987, Berea, Ky.]. Ashland, Ky.: Jesse Stuart Foundation. 155 pp. “...twenty-seven graduates of the New Opportunity School for Women share their courage and lives, many relating intimate details of growing up in Appalachia facing physical and sexual abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, and marriage and children at a young age. Included also is a history of the school’s twenty-five years and a description of the curriculum of this innovative program that has successfully changed lives of Appalachian women in Kentucky as well as North Carolina.”
Taras, Stephanie Kadel. 2014. Mountain Girls. Ann Arbor, Mich.: TimePieces Personal Biographies. 127 pp. “Irreverent and poignant tales” featuring “the lifelong friendship of two girls from Elkins, West Virginia,” who came of age in the 1970’s and 80s’s.
Tedesco, Marie, Karen W. Tice, Penny Messenger, and others. 2015. “Reflections on the Concept of Place in the Study of Women in the Mountain South: A Roundtable Discussion with the Authors.” Epilogue in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 475-491. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Tice, Karen W. 2015. “Embodying Appalachia: Progress, Pride, and Beauty Pageantry, 1930s to the Present.” Chap. 5 in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. C. Rice and M. Tedesco, 117-140. Athens: Ohio University Press. “... examines the gendered, racialized, and class-based nature of beauty pageants and the personal and political agendas behind them.”
Todd, Roxy, and Jessica Lilly. 2015. “What’s It Like to Be Gay in Appalachia?” Telling West Virginia’s Story series. West Virginia Public Broadcasting, 4 September. Podcast, 53:59 min., with music by Sam Gleaves. Two other podcasts including a 7:39 min. interview by Trey Kay with Huntington, W. Va., Rev. Jim Lewis: “Marrying Gays When It Wasn’t Cool.” http://www.tinyurl.com/o3u4x8c.
Todd, Roxy, and Jessica Lilly. 2015. “Telling Appalachia’s Story Like a Girl & Reshaping Stereotypes Along the Way.” Telling West Virginia’s Story series. West Virginia Public Broadcasting, 13 March. Podcast, 53:11 min. Plus other podcasts and excerpts from interviews with, and stories by, Anna Sales, Elaine McMillion Sheldon, Mimi Pickering, Jean Snedegar, and Suzanne Higgins. http://www.tinyurl.com/lusv2sa.
Wilkerson, Jessica. 2016. “The Company Owns the Mine but They Don’t Own Us: Feminist Critiques of Capitalism in the Coalfields of Kentucky in the 1970s.” Gender & History 28, no. 1 (April): 199–220. “...examines women’s involvement in the Brookside Mine strike of 1974 .... During the strike, female kin of miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, started a club to support striking miners and their families and to organise picket lines; they were joined by women from across the region and country.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0424.12183/epdf.
Wilkins, Patricia. 2015. “The Women’s Land Army at Media Farm: Farmerettes in the Field” [Jefferson Co.]. Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 41, no. 2 (Summer): 34-39. “...story of Women’s Land Army recruits who worked on a farm in West Virginia during World War I.” Attached article: “World War II West Virginia Land Girls,” by Patricia Wilkins. “In June 1944, young women from 18 West Virginia counties traveled to farms in northern Ohio to harvest crops.”
Withrow, Dolly. 2013. “An Appalachian Rosie the Riveter Recalls the World War II Era.” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 29, no. 1 (Summer): 10-11. Agnes Kukuchka (b. 1924) tells ordeals suffered by her relatives in Poland, and her experience working for Koppers Company in Baltimore where she was the first woman to be licensed as a crane and truck operator.