Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South

Wilma A. Dunaway was born into an interracial family in east Tennessee in 1944. For more than two decades, she worked in civil rights and public services organizations in the Appalachian region. At present, she is an Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dunaway is a specialist in international slavery studies, Native American studies, Appalachian studies, and world-system analysis. Her dissertation about the incorporation of Southern Appalachia into the capitalist world economy was awarded a Wilson Fellowship and the Distinguished Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. She has won several awards for her previous three works on Appalachia and slavery, including two Weatherford Awards. Her interdisciplinary work has appeared in numerous history and social science journals.

The nature of female labor in the antebellum Appalachian South was shaped by race, ethnicity, and/or class positions.

Introduction; Part I. Racial, Ethnic, and Class Disjunctures among Appalachian Women: 1. No gendered sisterhood: ethnic and religious conflict among Euro-American women; 2. Not a shared patriarchal space: imperialism, racism, and cultural persistence of indigenous Appalachian women; 3. Not a shared sisterhood of subordination: racism, slavery, and resistance by black Appalachian females; 4. Not even sisters among their own kind: the centrality of class divisions among Appalachian women; Part II. Structural and Social Contradictions between Women's Productive and Reproductive Labors: 5. The myth of male farming and women's agricultural labor; 6. The myth of separate spheres and women's non-agricultural labor; 7. Family as privilege: public regulation of non-patriarchal households; 8. Motherhood as privilege: patriarchal intervention into women's reproductive labors.