To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice by Jessica Wilkerson (review)

This first, award-winning, monograph by Jessica Wilkerson details how working-class women formed the backbone of Appalachia's progressive movements from the 1960s to the 1980s. In foregrounding women's agency, Wilkerson dispels commonly held myths about the region's working class and convincingly shows how the prevalent narrative of Appalachia as a conservative "white enclave"—captured in the masculine coal miner or racist hillbilly stereotypes—influenced their achievements (p. 34). By illuminating local and national interconnections, the significance of Wilkerson's work belies her narrow topic.

Wilkerson's central argument revolves around the ways in which these women's gendered and class experiences as caregivers caught in the system of "coalfield capitalism"—as mothers and wives of men marked by their coalmining jobs and as working women who were themselves in the industry—informed a grassroots feminist tradition that fused caregiving labor with citizenship rights (p. 5). Seeing their fights for health care, environmental justice, and labor, welfare, and women's rights as interrelated, women like Eula Hall and Edith Easterling utilized the federal War on Poverty programs to connect local and outside progressive groups, to build an interracial community health movement, to secure unionized workplaces during the 1974 Brookside strike, and to reshape meanings of democracy.

Although the book's primary actors are white, race is omnipresent. Wilkerson underscores the legacy of civil rights organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who trained incoming white activists, while simultaneously disclosing how "gendered white privilege often served as a cornerstone" to local women's lives (p. 6). Race-based notions of the so-called deserving and undeserving poor shaped the federal resources around which Appalachian women built their movements. Yet the race-infused strength of conservative and anticommunist organizations, combined with internal strife between grassroots women and white middle-class policy makers, spurred activist organizations' decline; among the most memorable passages is Easterling's defiant testimony before the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee in 1968.

The result is a complex portrait of southern womanhood that adds nuance to existing literature on Appalachia and aligns with growing scholarly and public interest in working-class studies. While recent scholarship on civil rights unionism and working-class feminism already underscores working-class heterogeneity, Wilkerson expands the focus beyond the workplace. Her emphasis on bottom-up leadership, (dis)continuities in activism, and the importance of networks and federal intervention for social change also fits community organizing debates in black studies and analyses of structural inequality under its Black Power studies paradigm; black female-led urban welfare movements, for instance, similarly employed the "ethic of care" to demand citizenship rights (p. 3). More engagement with such works and the parallels of other southern antipoverty movements will sharpen her arguments.

Wilkerson's superb oral history usage, inserted to offset working-class women's absence in institutional records, furthers scholars' understanding of intergenerational influences on activism and how women imbued everyday activities, like learning to drive, with political meaning. The personal anecdotes also form the book's most animated prose. Although Wilkerson's overall matter-of-fact narration is laudable, it occasionally leaves the reader desiring more detail. For instance, black activists' voices are limited. While this serves her argument that whites' dominance resulted from structural racism, it inhibits assessments of the inner workings of these alliances. Moreover, Wilkerson concedes, but does not develop, that white activists' departure from civil rights movements in the Deep South due to black nationalism affected these activists' approach to interracial organizing. Black Power itself is only discussed in relation to the backlash against white progressive activism, which inadvertently plays into earlier views of Black Power as a supposedly tragic epilogue to the movement's perceived glory days...