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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S The seventeen-year project upon which this book was based was made possible by the time, talents, and various kinds of support given to me by numerous individuals and institutions. At Morehead State University, I wish to thank my department for a one semester sabbatical and the Research and Creative Productions Committee for the two grants that supported my postdoctoral research. But what I cherish and remember best have been the kind inquiries about my work on this project made by students in my Appalachian sociology seminars over the years. I also want to acknowledge the support and inspiration of friend and colleague Chris Hensley and to thank Mary Koscheski for her careful editing and sympathetic reading of an important draft of the book. Likewise, I will never forget the women miners at Coal Employment Project conferences, namely, Bernice Dombrowski, Marat Moore, and Cosby Totten, whose interest in my research helped fuel my own determination . At Penn State University, where the project started, my ideas and endeavors were heavily nurtured by mentors and friends Carolyn Sachs and Rosalind Harris. Numerous other women scholars in the Rural Sociological Society have responded with enthusiasm and encouragement to my work on women miners over the years: Cornelia Flora, JoAnn Jaffee, Sally Maggard , Cynthia Struthers, and Julie Zimmerman. This is also a perfect opportunity to remember the lives of two giants in rural sociology, Kenneth Wilkinson and Janet Fitchen, for their dedication to rural people and rural places. Thanks go to Rural Studies Series Editors Leif Jensen and Claire Hinrichs and to former Penn State Press editor-in-chief Peter J. Potter, as xii acknowledgments well as Press staff members who brought this work to fruition. I am equally grateful to the West Virginia Humanities Council for its financial backing of the book. And because I recognize this research as a special part of my own lived experiences, I have often drawn upon my mother’s nontraditional experiences in service to her country as a wac officer during WWII. Her wisdom and insights lead me to the threshold of this work. Finally, I will be forever indebted to those women miners who dug coal for a living and who took the time and effort to share their stories with me. ...

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