ABSTRACT
Appalachian women are women who were born, or whose parents were born, in the Appalachian Region (a federally defined area including West Virginia and portions of thirteen other states situated along the Appalachian Mountain range). They include the original Indian women of the region (Cherokee, Appalachee, Shawnee, Choctaw); Anglo-Saxon and Celtic women settlers and refugees; black women settlers who were free and runaway or freed slaves; and European and other immigrant women who came later to the coalfields or farms, or to work in stores. Appalachian women's work has been influenced by their harsh physical environment in isolated, mountain "hollers"; by values shaped for survival in this environment, such as familism, attachment to the land, individualism, and self-reliance; and by a patriarchal family structure. Subsistence and small cash-crop farming, coal mining, railroads, and lumbering were the traditional industries. "Boom and bust" economies forced many to leave their rural homes during the Great Migration of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s to seek work opportunities in defense factories in the cities of the North and East.
