An examination of the class and gender conditions of working-class women in the coal mining fields reveals how they struggled for development and change and how the struggle sometimes lead to empowerment.

Challenging the traditional treatment of human rights cast in purely legal frameworks, the authors argue that, in order to promote the notion of human rights, its geographies and spatialities must be investigated and be made explicit. A wealth of case studies examine the significance of these components in various countries with multi-cultured societies, and identify ways to integrate human rights issues in planning, development and policy making. The book uses case studies from UK, Israel, Canada, Singapore, USA, Peru, European Union, Australia and the Czech Republic.

This collection demonstrates the diversity of women's struggles against problems such as racism, violence, homophobia, focusing on the complex ways that gender, culture, race-ethnicity and class shape women's political consciousness in the US.

After the 2016 presidential election, popular media branded Appalachia as "Trump Country," decrying its inhabitants as ignorant fearmongers voting against their own interests. And since the 1880s, there have been many, including travel writers and absentee landowners, who have framed mountain people as uneducated and hostile. These stereotypes ultimately ward off potential investments in the region's educational system and skew how students understand themselves and the place they call home. Attacking these misrepresentations head on, Literacy in the Mountains: Community, Newspapers, and Writing in Appalachia reclaims the long history of literacy in the Appalachian region. Focusing on five Kentucky newspapers printed between 1885 and 1920, Samantha NeCamp explores the complex ways readers in the mountains negotiated their local and national circumstances through editorials, advertisements, and correspondence. In local newspapers, community action groups announced meeting times and philanthropists raised funds for a network of hitherto unknown private schools. Preserved in print, these stories and others reveal an engaged citizenry specifically concerned with education. Combining literacy and journalism studies, NeCamp demonstrates that Appalachians are not—and never have been—an illiterate, isolated people.

Documents the economic, educational, and existential struggles that single mothers in poverty confront in the current welfare climate.

Publisher Description

Scholars of southern Appalachia have largely focused their research on men, particularly white men. While there have been a few important studies of Appalachian women, no one book has offered a broad overview across time and place. With this collection, editors Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco redress this imbalance, telling the stories of these women and calling attention to the varied backgrounds of those who call the mountains home. The essays of Women of the Mountain South debunk the entrenched stereotype of Appalachian women as poor and white, and shine a long-overdue spotlight on women too often neglected in the history of the region. Each author focuses on a particular individual or group, but together they illustrate the diversity of women who live in the region and the depth of their life experiences. The Mountain South has been home to Native American, African American, Latina, and white women, both rich and poor. Civil rights and gay rights advocates, environmental and labor activists, prostitutes, and coal miners—all have lived in the place called the Mountain South and enriched its history and culture.

Leach and Pini bring together empirical and theoretical studies that consider the intersections of class, gender and rurality. Each chapter engages with current debates on these concepts to explore them in the context of contemporary social and economic transformations. This book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of gender, rurality, identity, and class studies.

A regional studies review.