Standing by Their Men
SPARKS, PHILIP
Standing by Their Men Hillbilly Women By Kathy Kahn Doubleday. 230 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Philip Sparks Appalachia stretches from West Virginia to Georgia. Coal mines and textile mills dot its...
...When a slag dam broke in 1972, some 125 persons were killed...
...slag accumulations have altered the course of streams polluted by the mills and the mines...
...Bearing the brunt of Appalachia's poverty are the hillbilly women, for they are the ones who have to run a household on skimpy paychecks...
...The book does not pretend to be a sociopolitical study of the area...
...To depict the plight of these women-and of Appalachia's population in general-Kathy Kahn has interviewed more than a dozen of them...
...Many of the region's spontaneous fights against poverty have been led by women...
...Ranging from a disabled miner's wife to the maternal head of a hillbilly family forced to migrate to a Cincinnati slum, they describe their efforts to gain both human and female rights, telling their stories in a manner that is as straightforward as it is compelling...
...One woman explains how she and her wheelchair-bound husband managed to stop a coal train from breaking a union picket line...
...In the '30s, hillbillies were the miners who staged bloody union-organizing campaigns to attain economic and social parity with the rest of the country...
...Coal mines and textile mills dot its mountain landscape, symbols not of prosperity but of ugliness and exploitation...
...The stereotype of the region is the hillbilly, a figure most people associate with illiteracy and bootleg whiskey...
...To Appalachia's inhabitants, though, the word is no more pejorative than "black" was to Martin Luther King, or than "Chi-cano" is to Cesar Chavez...
...It simply puts the reader on the front porch or in the living room of a small number of individuals, and lets him draw his own conclusions...
...During a recent UMW strike, it was the wives of the strikers who kept the picket line going when the confrontation reached a critical stage...
...Hillbilly Women is a well-ordered attempt to set forth what living in the Southern mountains of the United States is really like...
...Female organizers helped walk the picket lines during the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal miners' strike in the '30s...
...Women have written some of the most famous textile-worker and coal-miner protest songs...
...Sometimes, a miner disabled by "black lung" has a millhand wife who has been felled by the disease's cotton cousin, "brown lung...
...Another recounts her battle to hold her family together after two sons fled to Canada at the height of the Vietnam war to escape the draft...
...Strip mines have torn the land away, leaving it gouged and eroded...
...In many cases, while their men are in the mines, they work in the textile mills, tied to the same low wage structure and dangerous conditions as their husbands...
...Today they struggle for the same goal in less violent ways through the Miners for Democracy and the revitalized United Mine Workers (UMW) under Arnold Miller...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 12
