Special Collections Research Center

The history of Appalachia is deeply rooted in an agrarian society whose survival depended largely on subsistence farming. Women played a crucial role in the survival of rural communities through their contributions to family life although there is frequently little mentioned in the history books on Appalachia. Women’s work in rural communities consisted of hard labor through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women cared for their children, manufactured the family’s clothes, kept large gardens and stored food for the winter. Often they milked the cows and tended to the other livestock. Women were enterprising as they supplemented family income by selling or trading surplus from their gardens and livestock. Women sold butter, eggs, canned goods, medicinal plants and berries in their communities. Women’s contributions to farming are largely understated throughout many of the historical works on Appalachia. Carolyn E. Sachs is a current writer about agricultural issues facing women and her works are useful in studying women in rural agriculture, regionally and globally. Excellent frameworks for setting women in agriculture in history are included in the 1935 Economic And Social Problems And Conditions Of The Southern Appalachians and chronology of women’s organizations provided in The Entrepreneurial Characteristics of Farm Women. Often, the subject of Women in Agriculture in Appalachia requires finding a few sentences dedicated to women’s work, or rural family life in larger works that encompass all interdisciplinary subjects in Appalachia – though a few works specifically about Women in Agriculture (or farming) in Appalachia do appear both historically and in present times.