New Wave at the Div School

Mary Lee Daugherty, one of the five visiting scholars in the women's studies program at the Divinity School, spent her first semester at Harvard in the libraries, researching the women of West Virginia, and this semester will teach a course on that subject. Such work is not unusual for professors in the burgeoning field of women's studies, but Daugherty's special perspective on her subject is. Her knowledge of the "Heart of Appalachia" comes not just from books, but from the 21 years she lived there, in circumstances not usually conducive to an academic career.

Daugherty spent her early childhood in a small West Virginia town where her parents worked in the coal mining and glass industries, as their parents had. During the Great Depression of the '30s, the family moved to Charleston, West Virginia, for factory jobs. The move to the city opened up "very unusual opportunities" for Daugherty; the higher quality of schooling in the city led to scholarships and a Biblical Studies degree at Morris Harvey College in Charleston. After that, Daugherty went on to graduate school in Richmond, Virginia, and to three years of Presbyterian Church missionary work in Brazil. In the early '60s Daugherty directed religious education programs in suburban churches around Washington, D.C., while her husband earned a Ph.D. in political science.

These experiences working with others outside her Appalachian home caused Daugherty to examine her own life more closely. "In Brazil, I was looking at my own past from the perspective of another country, in another rural setting," she remembers.

Her involvement in the Washington civil rights movement sparked her interest in feminism. "As I worked for open housing and equal rights for blacks, I realized that I myself did not have equal rights and opportunities," she says.

After her stint in Washington, Daugherty returned to Morris Harvey College to teach religion and women's studies, which she continued to do until coming to the Div School's program this year. The unique culture and lifestyle of rural West Virginia creates a special problem for Daugherty in her work, for Appalachian women do not fit easily into the mainstream of the American feminist movement. "The average rural woman doesn't even know the movement exists, and if she does it's usually greeted with suspicion and hostility," Daugherty says. She found few suitable teaching materials for her women's studies course at Morris Harvey. In Appalachia, "it's very hard even for college women to identify with materials from large urban center," she says.

Daugherty says poverty and lack of education are the two main problems West Virginia women must overcome, unlike many of their more affluent sisters in other regions. More than half of the Appalachian women live in rural areas; most of the 29 per cent who work outside the home have only a tenth grade education and hold low-playing jobs. Three years ago, however, the United Mine Workers opened coal mining jobs to women, and these jobs pay more than most available to rural people. In Daugherty's view, the economic advantages of mining jobs for women outweigh their drawbacks. "It is dangerous, but many women will do it out of sheer economic necessity. They're not free to go elsewhere for jobs, and mining affords them $12,000 to $15,000 a year as a starting salary," she points out.

The lack of literature for her course prompted Daugherty and 40 other people to compile information for a Yellow Pages for West Virginia Women. Like the Boston and New England versions of these "yellow pages," the book, to be published in May, focuses on women's concerns in employment, health, education, law, etc., but addresses itself specifically to West Virginia women. One section, for example, explores opportunities for women in coal mining. Another part describes emerging small industries run by women, such as quilting cooperatives; only recently have these women begun to market and sell the region's traditional crafts and handwork. The book's food and nutrition section contains information on gardening and canning, familiar chores for most Appalachian women.

The Yellow Pages gears itself to its audience in style and price as well as content. "We wrote it at a tenth to 12th grade reading level, which for many women is still too high," Daugherty says. Because Ms. Magazine and the Cabot Foundation underwrote the book, it may cost only 25 cents in places where welfare offices subsidize it further. Its readers' poverty dramatizes the need for such a book, Daugherty points out.

Along with social conditions, the impact of religion on West Virginia women interests Daugherty. "Religion is what's glued many people together in the very dark times of depression and of mining accidents," she says, and adds that "the church still has a very powerful influence, especially in Appalachia; for many people, the school and church are still the only real places of socializing." In her course this spring, she will show her own films of women's participation in Pentecostal groups, which are part of Appalachia's fundamentalist religious revivals, and in the mountain "serpent-handling" cults. She will also screen "Harlan Country USA," Barbara Kopple's movie on the Kentucky coal strike in which the miners' wives played a large role.

Daugherty sees her year at Harvard as a chance "to get away from the narrow tunnel vision we're all susceptible to, whatever we do," but intends to return next year to her native state. "I want to spend the rest of my life working with women in Appalachia... I've been changed through living in other parts of the world and going through doctoral education, but I feel in my gut I still know what life is there."