Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism ed. by Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco (review)

In a 1999 article, Barbara Ellen Smith, a trailblazer in Appalachian studies, declared that “the monolithic constructs of Appalachia” obscured women’s experiences and prevented an understanding of how gender operated in the region (“Beyond the Mountains: The Paradox of Women’s Place in Appalachian History,” NWSA Journal, 11 [Autumn 1999], 2). Since then scholars in history, Appalachian studies, women’s studies, and other fields have chipped away at the monolith, but the edited volume Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism topples it.

The volume contains fifteen essays and three sets of primary documents, organized into the title’s themes: identity, work, and activism. It opens with a long-overdue historiographical essay on Appalachian women’s history by coeditor Connie Park Rice. Collectively, the essays and documents span the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries and cover a wide range of topics. Some will be very familiar to scholars of the mountain South; histories of women’s reform movements, the activism of coal miners’ wives, and explorations of Appalachian stereotypes have been common themes since the development of Appalachian studies. Yet the authors deepen analysis of these topics. For instance, in her essay on women reformers in the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers from the 1920s to the 1940s, Penny Messinger salvages a history of women who were once dismissed by historians “as ineffectual home missionaries” (p. 233). She places the outsider women reformers—who lived and worked in the mountains as educators, nurses, and community workers—in the broader national and international context of social work, a field that women greatly influenced in the early twentieth century. Along with developing the direction of social work in the region, Messinger argues, women reformers helped cultivate images of mountain culture, embodied in the industrious female handicrafter.

In another essay that tackles familiar themes in innovative ways, Karen W. Tice approaches the topic of Appalachian stereotypes through the study of beauty pageants in the mountains. Much of the work on Appalachian stereotypes is focused on countering stereotypes rather than explaining them, but Tice shows that there is much analytical work to be done in explaining them through the lenses of race and gender. She argues that “beauty pageants are rich cultural sites” to study a variety of identities and relationships (p. 118). In the mountain South, beauty pageants have served as much to “perpetuat[e] restrictive and exclusionary patterns of culture, heritage, memory, belonging, and gendered normativity” as they have to overturn stock images of Appalachia (p. 136).

Along with new studies on well-known themes, the collection offers fresh, exciting research that reflects prominent themes in women’s and gender history, intersectionality, and the history of sexuality. Two essays examine sexuality in the region: one on prostitution in Civil War Wheeling, West Virginia, and the other on venereal disease policies in Kentucky. A handful of essays demonstrate intersectionality in the mountains, undermining the strong association between rural white people and the mountain South. The collection provides histories of women from various class backgrounds and racial and ethnic groups. For instance, Wilma A. Dunaway compares the lives and labor of white women, enslaved black women, and indigenous women in the antebellum mountain South. Other essays explore the histories of black women’s social justice activism, including their political battles for recognition, civil rights activism against segregation, and struggles for equality in the workplace. Taken together, these essays show, as coeditor Connie Park Rice states, that there is no “universal female identity in the region” (p. 6); perhaps more important, though, these essays demonstrate that identities of gender, race, and region are complex, that they change over time, and that they are configured of mutually reinforcing categories.

The primary sources, with brief introductions to each, will...