The Quare Women's Journals: May Stone & Katherine Pettit's Summers in the Kentucky Mountains and the Founding of the Hindman Settlement School, and: Courageous Paths: Stories of Nine Appalachian Women (review)

The Quare Women’s Journals and Courageous Paths cross cut a century of women and education in Southern Appalachia. The Quare Women’s Journals tells the story of how Katherine Pettit and May Stone first came into Eastern Kentucky in 1899. The two women were in the vanguard of those who came to establish rural settlement and mission schools in the mountains. The journals are an extremely valuable resource for scholars of Appalachia and women’s history.

Katherine Pettit and May Stone were dubbed the “Quare Women” by those they hoped to serve. In the journals these founders speak for themselves through three early documents that form the core of the book: a brief report of the six-week camp at Cedar Grove in 1899, a slightly longer summary of the 1900 Camp Industrial effort of ten weeks, and a lengthy diary-format account of the 1901 camp at Sassafras. Editor Stoddart, a daughter of a Hindman Settlement school graduate and a professor of history at San Diego State University, has added an introduction and brief endnotes.

Much of what Stone and Pettit write in their letters and diaries is consistant with the depiction of Appalachia in the literature of the times. They found poor housing, with flea infested beds, poor health, poor food, lawlessness, illiterate preachers, lazy men, and women old before their time. Their Appalachia includes some individuals who had been so isolated that they had never seen a town, heard organ music, or held a toothbrush. At the same time, they praise the hospitality, the lack of self-consciousness, and the strong native culture and crafts of those they encountered. Bright students and teachers abound in their narratives. This book provides glimpses of the people as seen and described by women whose backgrounds and education were vastly different.

Pettit and Stone, in The Quare Women’s Journals, had mixed reactions to Appalachia and its people. They write of a starving family living in “filth and misery,” with father, mother, and eight children sharing a 14-foot by 16-foot log cabin that held but one bed; on the other hand, they 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 most of the century Katherine Pettit and May Stone and their successors received mostly praise for their efforts at education and uplift, and their personal sacrifices. In 1983 David Whisnant set off a continuing debate with publication of his well-researched All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, arguing that the settlement school founders were cultural imperialists who systematically intervened and manipulated the region and its mores. Editor Stoddart joins in the camp of those chiefly critical of the Whisnant thesis.

The 230 printed pages of the “quare” women’s letters and diaries can lend themselves to several interpretations. On one hand, they may be seen as the sincere views of May Stone and Katherine Pettit about what they saw and felt. On the other hand, they may have been primarily written for public consumption as promotional pieces on behalf of the settlement school fund-raising in which the writers emphasized what their readers wanted to see and hear about the mountains. Still another possibility is that these documents represent a combination of the two—writings intended for public reading, but also revealing much about the writers.

The students at settlement and mission schools in the mountains were taught by women from outside the mountains who, like other observers...