Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South (review)

Wilma Dunaway’s Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South offers a much-needed analysis of Appalachian women before the Civil War. Adopting a feminist perspective, she succeeds in both providing a revisionist exploration of the lives of non-elite women in the mountain South and takes the field of women’s history in new and important directions. Although much work has been undertaken to dispel many of the myths and stereotypes about Appalachia, scholars of gender in the region have been negligent in allowing many of the stereotypes about women to remain. Appalachian women have continually been portrayed by scholars as operating completely within the household and its economy, and have rarely granted women the agency afforded to other groups of historical figures. Most scholarship presents a monolithic picture of women of the mountain South that simply does not hold up under Dunaway’s careful research. Dunaway rejects the conception of separate spheres and the cult of domesticity which have so often been applied to the study of southern women. Instead she postulates a new pattern of analysis that demands the exploration of racial, ethnic, and class differences among women.

As she did in The First American Frontier, Dunaway undertook a massive amount of archival research to allow for a full analysis of Euro-American, African American, and Native American women within the Appalachian region. Beginning with sample populations of thousands of women and households from the manuscript census, she added oral histories, diaries, letters, and published primary documents to allow for the most complete exploration possible. Since Dunaway found the notion of separate spheres and the cult of domesticity inadequate paradigms for understanding women and their work experiences, she created the conception of a labor portfolio to categorize three types of paid and three types of unpaid labor in which women were likely to engage. The types of paid labor were wage work, business operations, and income earning work in the informal sector, such as the sale of homemade goods or garden produce. Unpaid labor included labor to sustain the household, labor associated with reproduction and child rearing, and unpaid community work. Using this model as the basis for analysis, Dunaway is able to discern differences associated with unique cultural experiences for various groups of mountain women.

Dunaway devotes eight chapters to her exploration of non-elite women of the mountain South. Her text is peppered with maps, tables, and images that serve to strengthen her argument. The importance of the work lies in the new images of Appalachian women that emerge from the research. Dunaway convincingly demonstrates that these southern women had very little in common. Not only were they often at conflict with the patriarchal structures that controlled southern society, such as the courts and established religion, but they were often in conflict with each other. The women of southern Appalachia were likely to be poor and white, African American, or even Cherokee, and the fundamental differences of the culture in which they lived precludes a single understanding of their lives. Although they may have shared responsibilities for household reproduction and acted as mothers and workers, their individual experiences were shaped by (and made unique by) class, race, and ethnicity. The important message of Dunaway’s book is likely to reverberate among gender scholars and lead to much rethinking about women in the mountain South. Hopefully, it will stimulate additional work that takes a critical look at the way historians and others have considered women in Appalachia.