Abstract
Jessica Wilkerson’s To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice arbitrates critical modern topics by facilitating an in-depth, multifaceted analysis of women’s impact on the War on Poverty in the 1960s and 1970s in Appalachian America. The book’s chapters cover distinct but interconnected and lasting ordeals facing the Appalachian region, spanning several counties and communities in parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Wilkerson ably positions the narratives within the significant challenges faced by the coal counties in the states named above, specifically national events during the War on Poverty, an ongoing industrial transformation, and the underlying spark of a women’s movement. In doing so, the book approaches a critical confluence where caregiving ethics meet a democratic struggle for survival. Wilkerson elucidates how, amid a fight to keep their families alive, women engaged in a new form of activism that arose from the calamity and a yearning to survive.
In this poignant book, Wilkerson sheds light on the many ways in which the women’s gendered and class-based experiences as caregivers manifested among the backdrop of “coalfield capitalism.” Central to each chapter are the narratives of individual women whose everyday labors were dedicated to their communities in hopes of continuing life there through solutions to short-term and long-term challenges facing the region and the families within it. Wilkerson argued that as grandmothers, mothers, and wives of coal-mining men, the lives of these Appalachian women were stratified by gender and class in unique roles as they were forced to navigate the burdens of caregiving labor and citizenship rights.
The industrialization of coalfields initiated a new era of intensified caregiving for women; the men were facing debilitating illnesses, disabilities, and threats of violence, and consequently, women were left to tend to the homes, finances, farms, mechanics, and soon, politics. As long-term poverty deepened in Appalachia, capitalism in the coalfields depended upon women’s abilities to shoulder ever more diverse responsibilities. Their efforts to juggle multiple responsibilities directly impacted women’s reproductive labor and caregiving. In response, a critical mass of women began campaigning for improvements in domestic and community labor conditions. Many acted to form a grassroots feminist movement with organized fights for environmental justice, welfare, labor, health care, and ultimately, women’s rights.
The manuscript research and anti-poverty organizational records provided the author with a foundation from which to deepen readers’ understanding of the multifaceted crises and the sustaining intergenerational effects of poverty and health crises in Appalachia. Most compelling were the deeply personal accounts and the women’s narratives that delivered granular portrayals of the heartbreak and continued calamities of these troubling decades.
From hours spent at bedsides tending to wounds and illnesses caused deep in the coalmines, to efforts that would expose environmental destruction and eventually build local health care systems, Wilkerson’s research depicts rich stories from the women whose methods of caregiving extended far beyond its traditional definition; their medical caregiving, their activism, and their fight for welfare and human rights were, in themselves, heroic efforts to keep their families and future families alive. By linking the core ethic of caregiving labor with the powerful wars that women fought daily for health, welfare, and human rights, Wilkerson presents a novel account of a critical era in Appalachia through the lens of feminist activism. Although Wilkerson’s research focused primarily on the voices of working-class white women in Eastern Kentucky, her conclusions are pertinent to the many similar communities within Appalachia and, in some cases, closely parallel regional and national trends.
To Live Here, You Have to Fight embodies new research and, with it, highlights an often-forgotten consideration of the role of women’s caregiving and its relationship to activism and historical progress. Contributing a distinctive and dire form of scholarship, Wilkerson illuminates the voices and influence of women during a critical time in Appalachian and American history. Her work is a significant addition to the fields of Appalachian studies and feminism as well as to the growing bodies of knowledge on the working class, women’s activism, anti-poverty movements, coal counties, and their intersections throughout history.
