Women of the Mountain South ― Identity, Work, and Activism

Scholars of southern Appalachia have tended to focus their research on men, particularly white men. While there have been a few important studies of Appalachian women, no one book has offered a broad overview across time and place. With this collection, editors Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco redress this imbalance, telling the stories of these women and calling attention to the varied demographics of those who call the mountains home.

The essays that make up Women of the Mountain South contradict and debunk entrenched stereotypes of Appalachian women as poor and white, and they bring to life women too often neglected in the history of the region. Each focuses on a particular individual or a particular group, but taken as a whole, they illustrate the diversity of women who live in the region and the richness of their life experiences. 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 worked, played, and loved in the place called the Mountain South and added to the fullness of its history and culture.

The collection is supplemented with key documents that make the volume ideal for the classroom.

Contributors: H. Adam Ackley, Katherine Lane Antolini, Joyce M. Barry, Deborah L. Blackwell, Carletta A. Bush, Wilma A. Dunaway, Barbara J. Howe, John C. Inscoe, Lois Lucas, Penny Messinger, Louis C. Martin, Evelyn Ashley Sorrell, Connie Park Rice, Marie Tedesco, Karen W. Tice, and Jan Voogd.

Connie Park Rice is a professor in the Department of History at West Virginia University and the author ofOur Monongalia: A History of African Americans in Monongalia County, West Virginia.

Marie Tedesco is the director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at East Tennessee State University and coeditor of the Ohio University Press Series in Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Appalachia.