The Quare Women's Journals: May Stone and Katherine Pettit's Summers in the Kentucky Mountains and the Founding of Hindman Settlement School ed. by Jess Stoddart (review)

truth is truth, wherever you find it. In this unlikely interweaving, wisdom is found in the voice ofa child-beater. Spiritual growth is witnessed in the words ofa bigot who has burned his neighbor's home—and his daughter's body. Amoral center is discovered in an aged healerwho cures her neighbors with faith and feathers, even after they have kicked her out of church. And, maybe most unlikely of all, restoration comes to a forty-year-old abused child who actually does what her therapist tells her to (she confronts her abuser)—but only because of the persistence of a fifteen-yearold girl naive enough to believe that magazine sales will pay her way through college. It is a peculiar cast, to be sure, but each character has value, and all are treated with respect. —William JoUiff Jess Stoddart, editor. The Quare Women's Journals: May Stone and Katherine Pettit's Summers in the Kentucky Mountains and the Founding ofHindman Settlement School. Ashland, Ky: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1997. 350 pages. $34.95. In one ofLucy Furman's books, she has a mountain character say, "Maw, there's a passel of quare women come in from furrin parts, and carrying on some ofthe outiandishest doings you ever heard of." Those women established rural settlement schools and for a long time received mosdy praise for their efforts. Then in 1983 David Whisnant took die debate to another level in his weU-researched All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. His argument that those founders were cultural imperialists who systematically intervened and manipulated the region and its mores quickly brought forth both an emotional and scholarly reaction. The debate continues. This book basically seeks to let the founders of one of those settlement schools—Hindman—speak for themselves, through three early documents. A briefreport ofthe six-week camp at Cedar Grove in 1899, a slightly longer summary ofthe 1900 Camp Industrial effort often week duration, and a lengthy diary-format account of the 1901 camp at Sassafras compose the core of the book. Stoddart, a professor ofhistory at San Diego State University, has added some briefendnotes and a perhaps too-long "Introduction." A daughter of a Hindman Settlement school graduate, she resides in the camp of those chiefly critical of the Whisnant thesis. The some 230 printed pages of these documents can be taken several ways. At one level, this could be viewed as the sincere views ofMay Stone 59 and Katherine Pettit about what they saw and felt. While it is not clear whether these materials were done primarily for public consumption (though one certainly was), it could be argued that these are more promotional pieces in which their writers emphasized what their readers wanted to see. Or, as a final option, these documents can be seen as a combination of the two, intended for public reading but also revealing perhaps more about the writers than they intended. Whatever they are, these journals are an extremely valuable resource for scholars of Appalachia. Much of what the women note fits in clearly with the literature of their times. They found poor housing, with fleas in almost every bed, poor health, poor food, lawlessness, illiterate preachers, lazy men, and women old before their time. Their Appalachia includes some that had been so isolated that they had never seen a town, or heard organ music, or held a toothbrush. At the same time, Stone and Pettit praise the hospitality , the lack ofself-consciousness, the strong native culture and crafts of those they actually encountered. Eager and bright teachers and students abound in tiieir narratives. In short, they had a mixed reaction to the land and its people. They could write of a starving family living in "filth and misery," with father, mother, and eight children sharing a 14' ? 16' log cabin that held but one bed; on the other hand, they also note the "intelligent and progressive" Mrs. Singleton and her two-story, six-room house in another locale, with "everything clean and attractive," including her bathtub and bicycle. For those who seek to find support for a view of strong preindustrial Appalachian culture, there is ample...