front cover of Beyond Hill and Hollow
Beyond Hill and Hollow
Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Ohio University Press, 2004

Women’s studies unites with Appalachian studies in Beyond Hill and Hollow, the first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia’s women. Featuring the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, performance artists, literary critics, theater scholars, and others, the collection portrays the diverse cultures of Appalachian women.

The chapters in Beyond Hill and Hollow examine the hidden lives of Appalachian prostitutes, urban Appalachian women in the 1800s, rural women in company towns, and an African American Appalachian poet from the 1900s. Contributors look at Appalachian opera houses, Jewish women in the coalfields, the writings of Wilma Dykeman and Sharyn McCrumb, and activists in out-migrant communities like Cincinnati. With an introduction by editor Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Beyond Hill and Hollow firmly establishes the field of Appalachian Women’s Studies.

Appropriate both as a reference and as a classroom text, Beyond Hill and Hollow expands our understanding of Appalachian women’s lives. Readers, whether from the region or beyond, may recognize themselves or women they know in its pages.

[more]

front cover of Once I Too Had Wings
Once I Too Had Wings
The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918
Emma Bell Miles
Ohio University Press, 2014

Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919) was a gifted writer, poet, naturalist, and artist with a keen perspective on Appalachian life and culture. She and her husband Frank lived on Walden’s Ridge in southeast Tennessee, where they struggled to raise a family in the difficult mountain environment. Between 1908 and 1918, Miles kept a series of journals in which she recorded in beautiful and haunting prose the natural wonders and local customs of Walden’s Ridge. Jobs were scarce, however, and as the family’s financial situation deteriorated, Miles began to sell literary works and paintings to make ends meet. Her short stories appeared in national magazines such as Harper’s Monthly and Lippincott’s, and in 1905 she published Spirit of the Mountains, a nonfiction book about southern Appalachia. After the death of her three-year-old son from scarlet fever in 1913, the journals took a more somber turn as Miles documented the difficulties of mountain life, the plight of women in rural communities, the effect of disparities of class and wealth, and her own struggle with tuberculosis.

Previously examined only by a handful of scholars, the journals contain both poignant and incisive accounts of nature and a woman’s perspective on love and marriage, death customs, child raising, medical care, and subsistence on the land in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century. With a foreword by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, this edited selection of Emma Bell Miles’s journals is illustrated with examples of her painting.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Ohio University Press, 2003

Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women's rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry. Grace MacGowan Cooke participated in avant-garde writers' colonies with the era's literary lights and applied their progressive ideals to her fiction about the Appalachia of her youth. Emma Bell Miles, witness to poverty, industrialization, and violence against women, wrote poignant and insightful critiques of her Appalachian home.

In The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature Elizabeth Engelhardt finds in all four women's writings the origins of what we recognize today as ecological feminism—a wide-reaching philosophy that values the connections between humans and nonhumans and works for social and environmental justice.

People and the land in Appalachia were also the subject of women authors with radically different approaches to mountains and their residents. Authors with progressive ideas about women's rights did not always respect the Appalachian places they were writing about or apply their ideas to all of the women in those places—but they did create hundreds of short stories, novels, letters, diaries, photographs, sketches, and poems about the mountains.

While The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature ascribes much that is noble to the beginnings of the ecological feminism movement as it developed in Appalachia, it is also unyielding in its assessment of the literatures of the voyeur, tourist, and social crusader who supported status quo systems of oppression in Appalachia.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter