Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes

Coalfield Women Making History

Coalfield Women Making History Sally Ward Maggard We made history! I mean,youknow,whatwould Pikevillebewithoutus strikers? Mae Fields, Pike County, Kentucky On the night ofJune 10, 1972, over two hundred people walked offtheir jobs at the end of the evening shift at a large eastern Kentucky hospital. Almost all of them were women. The rest of the night they milled around in a huge crowd gathered at the mouth ofHarold's Branch where it runs into the Levisa Fork of the Kentucky River in Pike County. Across the parking lot behind them, administrators and members ofthe boardofdirectors were gathered in the lobbyofa shiny new concrete-and-g1ass, eight-storyhospital. The face-offthatbegan that night was overworking conditions and union representation, and it lastedeleven years. Eventually, after a bitter strike and years ofcourt battles, these women and their allies outdistanced some ofeastern Kentucky's most powerful economic, political, and social elites. While the strikers failed to win union representation , the back pay settlement they eventually won remains one ofthe largest in the history of strikes in this country. Most important, their strike changed the nation's labor relations laws. Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act that resulted from the strike extendedcoverage to employees ofnonprofit health care institutions and greatly expanded the possibility of organizing unions among service workers in the health care industry. About a year into the hospital strike in Pike County, another strike broke out in neighboring Harlan County, Kentucky. Again, women were heavily involved in this organizing drive, which brought more national attention to Appalachia. The United Mine Workers ofAmerica (UMWA) was trying to organize a coal mine owned by Duke Power Company at Brookside, Kentucky. In the fall of 1973, court action limited the number ofstrikers on picket lines and threatened to cripple the strike. Women from the Brookside coal camp got together, went to the mine, and shut it down. As word of their confrontation with strikebreakers got out, other women from Harlan County and nearby coal counties joined in the strike effort. Theyformed the now famous Brookside Women's Club featured in the academy award-winning documentary Harlan Coalfield Women Making History ~ 229 County, U.S.A., and remained at the forefront ofthe strike until it was resolved in August 1974. These women crossed an unofficial line in the sand that had historicallyrelegatedwomen to auxiliaryroles in the mine workers' union. Their participation is widely recognized as pivotal in the resolution of the thirteenmonth strike and successful negotiation of a union contract. Stereotypes of Appalachian women would never lead anyone to predict women's participation and leadership in such events. According to popular images ofAppalachia, these women simply could not exist. Two distinct kinds of stereotypes, one romantic and the other degrading, dominate common notions of Appalachian women. Romantic images portray mountain women as enigmaticbut talented people who make beautiful quilts, spin wool into thread, weave it into coverlets, and play dulcimers in their spare time. Good at handicrafts , gardening, and cooking such delicacies as corn bread, spoon bread, and apple stack cake, Appalachian women are characterized as the quiet caretakers of an idealized rural mountain way oflife. In contrast, degrading stereotypes ofAppalachian women are tied up with four popular caricatures in cartoons, television, and film: Daisy Mae, the star ofthe"Li'lAbner" cartoon strip; her latter-day Daisy counterpart in the television seriesDukes oJHazzard; and Ellie Mae and GrannyClampett ofThe Beverly Hillbillies television series and its recent film adaptation. The two Daisys and Ellie Mae are voluptuous, vacuous, barefoot, and likely to be, if not already, pregnant. They tempt, confuse, and distract their menfolk, but they do not lead, instruct, or direct the events that shape their lives. Granny is wizened, wiry, and wrinkled, an older Appalachian woman with enough rural smarts to outwit city slicker bankers. But she tends to her goats and pigs in her urban Beverly Hills mansion, uninterested in achieving some upper-middle-class lifestyle her newfound riches would support. In both kinds of images mountain women seem to be standing outside of or apart from the rest ofAmerica. They are counterpoints to the modern world, representing either a simpler rural life or a ridiculous fringe population ofdeficient , mysterious characters.l Neither set ofimages would suggest thatAppalachian women are capable ofthe concerted, organized, public action that could defeat Duke Power Company and challenge Pike County's powerful political and economic leaders. Yet, here were these women in the mid-1970s in eastern Kentucky taking prominent roles in two nationally significant...