To Live Here, You Have To Fight How Women led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice.

Jessica Wilkerson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

           During the early stages of industrialization in the 20^th century, improvements in machinery contributed to the mass production and sale of goods. Safe work conditions and compensation in these businesses seemed nonexistent to working-class or poor Appalachian people. In To Live Here, You Have To Fight: How Women led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice, Jessica Wilkerson analyzes the roles that Appalachian working-class women played in movements that sought social justice in the coal industry in the 1960s and 1970s. She argues that, through their activism, Appalachian women expanded the complexity of womanhood. Wilkerson’s purpose is to position working-class women in the Appalachian South as caregivers of the region who fought against the poverty in the coalfields.

           Wilkerson focuses on white working-class women to illustrate poverty’s impact on miners and their families. According to Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, in her crucial article, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” “employing a female angle f vision to reveal aspects of the conflict that have been overlooked or misunderstood . . . is a close look at women’s distinctive forms of collective action, using language and gesture as points of entry to a culture.”[i] Wilkerson’s and Hall’s perspectives emphasize women’s thoughts and words in history to describe how they fought against the capitalist business powers in the coal industry. It is from these illuminated women’s perspectives that Wilkerson develops her book.

           In To Live Here, You Have to Fight, Wilkerson emphasizes the national political situation in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period, Wilkerson centers women’s work “of implementing and improving federal legislation in their communities, and they also mounted an array of democratic campaigns addressing the complex ways that class and gender disparity played out in the region.”[ii] Wilkerson develops the book around women’s motives, lives, and decisions in coal mining communities.

           Wilkerson argues that working-class white women pushed for social justice in the 1960s and the 1970s. She demonstrates these women’s views by incorporating case studies in Appalachian coal communities. Wilkerson writes of a woman named Florence Reece, whose Great Depression-era song “Which Side Are You On” remained popular among Appalachian activists during the War on Poverty.[iii]  The song expressed the struggles Appalachian people faced during the Great Depression and centered the importance of labor unions as tools to better people’s lives in the coal industry. Appalachian women emphasized the importance of reducing poverty caused by low wages and poor working conditions in the coal industry, and they argued that poverty disproportionately impacted Appalachian women and children.

           Wilkerson emphasizes the dangerous working conditions present in Appalachian coal mines to explain why working-class women especially focused on expanding access to medical care. For instance, Wilkerson incorporates the case of Eula Hall, who was a social worker, to describe the lung diseases, especially Black Lung Disease, that miners faced.[iv] Hall stated, “You hear somebody coughing, and there’ll be a man sitting on the porch trying to breathe.”[v] Hall saw these people around her suffer, and she knew that they could not access decent medical care. Wilkerson utilizes the fight for better medical care to depict the power difference between industries and their employees. Under the federal anti-poverty programs supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson, working-class Appalachian women demanded investments in their communities to promote better living standards, improve working conditions in the coal mines, and preserve the environment in the face of increasingly invasive mining techniques.

           To Live Here, You Have to Fight incorporates a variety of sources, including manuscripts, newspapers, journals, oral histories, and digital collections. The text incorporates Appalachian women’s thoughts and emphasizes the roles they played in attempts to alleviate economic hardship, gain equal employment opportunities, and reduce poverty in the coalfields. Armed with these sources, Wilkerson analyzes white working-class women’s understandings of the working and living conditions in Appalachia, as well as the ways in which they understood womanhood, motherhood, and caregiving in the context of communities centered around extractive industry.

           Wilkerson analyzes the roles that women played in Appalachian movements for social justice, and she also demonstrates that Appalachian women were able to expand the complexity of womanhood and formulate new understandings of their identities through their activism. By demonstrating the persistence of working-class Appalachian women’s activism for equal pay, social justice, and access to healthcare, Wilkerson argues that women impacted political planning and control by pushing for equitable medical policies, promoting environmental justice, and emphasizing fairness in the workplace.

Nicholas Brothers

Western Carolina University

[i] Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South” The Journal of American History, Vol. 73, No. 2 (September., 1986), 375.

[ii] Jessica Wilkerson, To Live Here, You Have To Fight How Women led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.), 4.

[iii] Wilkerson, To Live Here, 18.

[iv] Ibid., 135.

[v] Ibid., 135.