Southern women of different races and classes live in complex relationship to one another. Young white women in Mississippi who fashion themselves as Southern belles unknowingly rest their delicacy on the contrasting cultural representations of their African American peers. Working-class women in eastern Kentucky, once dependent on the wages of their coal miner husbands, now support their families by charging twenty-five dollars a day to take care of others’ children, thus making it feasible for middle-class mothers to pursue their careers. Women who are midlevel bankers and stockbrokers in Atlanta, frustrated by the acts of sexism and the glass ceiling...

In the early nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans in Appalachia took extreme measures, both legal and extralegal, to disenfranchise or otherwise disempower people who were classified as “nonwhite.” The non-white category included Native Americans, former Africans, and people of mixed ancestry designated “FPCs,” or free persons of color. Many residents with multiethnic ancestry in the mountainous sections of Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas either self-identified or were redesignated by census-takers as “Melungeons”; others called them “mountain niggers.”¹

In this chapter, we explore the “hidden transcripts” by which Appalachians have claimed links, primarily through kinship to Native American or mixed-ancestry “grandmothers,” to...

Priscilla Jacobs, chief of the state-recognized Waccamaw Sioux of North Carolina, represents a new generation of Indian women leaders in the South. Like Wilma Mankiller, former chief of the Oklahoma Cherokee, jacobs symbolizes the accomplishments of Indian women from her region. The public details of her people’s story reveal how the relations of gender and race, both within the Waccamaw and between the Waccamaw and other groups, have shifted over time. In recent years, facilitated in part by the complex implications of the modern civil rights movement for Southern Indians, jacobs and other contemporary Waccamaw have defined a new era...

Domestic household service typically brings together women of contrasting social positions for work that is distinctive in its site and tasks. Elite women, most commonly white and middle or upper class, employ less privileged women, often of a subordinated racial and/or ethnic group, to carry out the gendered household duties for which all women in the United States tend to be responsible.¹ In short, some women pay other, less privileged women to do stigmatized “women’s work.” Whether cleaning toilets, cooking dinner, ironing shirts, or pushing a baby carriage, domestic workers take care of many basic personal needs of members of...

In the early twentieth century, the Southern textile industry’s labor force, recruited from impoverished farms, was overwhelmingly white and unskilled.¹ Many white women worked in the textile mills, and, like their male counterparts, labored for low wages and long hours in these hot, noisy workplaces. Mill villages, while often a step up from the hardships of farming, were dominated by paternalistic mill owners who attempted to control their workers by integrating work and community life into a single system of deferential social relations.² Mills were typically located in rural areas where the company constructed and owned the surrounding town, thus...

Throughout the coalfields of central Appalachia, working-class people are engaging in alternative means of economic survival. For many, the region’s endemic poverty is now worsening as tremendous job losses in coal mining diminish the historic source of employment for working-class men. In order to secure the necessities of life for themselves and their families, working-class women are not only entering the paid labor force but also turning to unregulated forms of income generation that lie outside the formal, wage-earning economy.

This chapter examines the involvement of rural, working-class women in central Appalachia in home-based work and other informal sector activities...

Although it is not known for the diversity of its population, the South is now home to a variety of ethnicities and races. In this chapter I shall focus in on one of the fastest growing of these groups: Latinas, or women who trace their origins to countries colonized by Spain. As new arrivals in historically biracial locations throughout the region, Latinas must intentionally create an ethnic identity and community for themselves.

Although Hispanic women share a history of Spanish colonization and communicate primarily in the language imposed by the Spanish conquerors, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Mexican women come from...

Mississippi’s Yazoo Delta has long been a two-class society comprised primarily of well-to-do whites and poor blacks. The region was settled in the 1830s by wealthy, ambitious planters from other areas in the South who had the resources to clear the swampy, snake-infested land and buy slaves to cultivate cotton in the fertile soil. Their ability to maintain a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption and meet the economic requirements of growing cotton in this harsh environment “was wholly dependent on their success in retaining and controlling a large supply of black labor.”¹ Following emancipation and the Civil War, Delta planters retained...

The exodus of rural African Americans from the South to Northern cities had all but ceased by the 1970s. Since then, in a little-noted but highly consequential turn of events, the process has reversed: black Americans have been leaving an urban Northern economy that failed them and returning South. The South has regained from the cities of the North the half-million black citizens it lost to northward migration during the 1960s. For many, the destinations are rural communities that by all statistical measures can only be assessed as some of the least promising places in the United States—places the...

There is more than oneIin these words. I write in the first person, singular and plural.Iam Monica Kelly Appleby, a member of FOCIS, the Federation of Communities in Service.Weare FOCIS. FOCIS is a nonprofit, community-building organization in Appalachia; it was created in 1967 by forty-four women who organized as a group to leave the Home Mission Sisters of America (Glenmary Sisters) of the Roman Catholic Church. For some thirty years, FOCIS members have lived in local communities throughout the mountains of Appalachia, seeking to create relationships and social change from the bottom up.

This...

In Appalachia, class oppression has long been the primary focus of activism and scholarship directed toward social justice. Male coal miners have been viewed as the vanguard of working-class resistance, their legendary labor conflicts the premier examples of class struggle. Yet social inequality in Appalachia, as elsewhere, has had multiple dimensions. Not only have gender and race been the subjects of other, less studied conflicts, but they have also influenced the character and outcome of struggles focused on class.

This chapter, a case study of a strike at a hospital in Pike County, Kentucky in the early 1970s, demonstrates how...

Women throughout the South, in big cities and tiny towns, work in factories. Many companies originally came to this region for a climate of minimal unionization, right-to-work laws, lower wages, and weak environmental regulation. However, increasing globalization has recently triggered waves of capital flight from this area to developing countries. Companies have encouraged workers in the Southern U.S. to blame workers of the Southern Hemisphere for “stealing their jobs.” At the same time, several Southeastern states like Tennessee and Kentucky have for the first time begun seeing significant numbers of Mexican and Central American workers arrive in their communities as...

I was a virgin until I was twenty-one, the night a guy from Dartmouth came down to Montgomery, Alabama, with his rowing team and got me drunk as a skunk, and I stripped naked with him behind the country club and we fucked, me alternately exclaiming, “I am the Earth Mother!” and “I am not an easy lay!” I retrieved my grass-stained dress, the only thing I had to wear to church the next morning in Tuskegee as I repented as best I could through a headache that started at my shoulder blades and scrambled the syntax of the Doxology...