Like the contributors whose stories of language prejudice appear in part II of this volume, the nontraditional students from eastern Kentucky who took my composition classes in the early 1990s experienced discrimination on the basis of their gender and their dialect, and this figured strongly in their identities. These women were the subject of my doctoral study, for which I interviewed eight graduates of Preston College in Preston County, Kentucky (the names of both the college and the county are pseudonyms), to discover the effects of acquiring academic literacy and current literacy practices. From the eight, I chose three women for follow-up interviews and participant observation. These women taught me how coming to college helped them rise above cultural constraints to complete their degrees and take positions of responsibility in their communities. Ultimately, they disproved the adage that “whistlin’ women and crowin’ hens, always come to no good ends.”
When I wrote my dissertation—the basis for my book Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices since College1—I argued that lightly editing the female participants’ speech would retain their dignity and enable readers to more easily understand what the women were saying. If I were writing the book today, I would make some changes. While watching “Hidden America: Children of the Mountains” on ABC’s 20/20 in February 2009, I was horrified to see that the producers used subtitles, as if the subjects’ eastern Kentucky dialect was a foreign language. I realized that I had, in effect, done the same by editing out dialect features of the women’s speech. How could I claim to honor their language and continue to challenge language attitudes and prejudices if I edited the very language that defines them?
Since my study in 1999, I have interviewed the children of these women to see what effect their mothers’ education has had, since one of the primary hopes the women expressed in their interviews was that their children would not, like they did, wait too long to attend college. Pharmacists, auto mechanics, construction workers, teachers, and telecommunications workers, their sons and daughters are all contributing to their communities and were terrifically proud of what their mothers did. The following statement by Victor Villanueva applies to these women: “All [academic authors] have written about . . . the need to reclaim a memory, memory of an identity in formation and constant reformation, the need to reclaim a memory of an identity as formed through the generations.”2
As I heard the stories of these Preston County women, I observed them move from silence in the academic classroom to revised identities and more confident voices in their communities. Reflecting on their stories, I began to see the parallels to my own search for voice, the need to “reclaim a memory of an identity.” Slowly I began to acknowledge that the “reasons we engage in academic endeavor are often connected . . . implicitly to our own experiences and desires . . . our own history and interests.”3
Looking back through a generation, I remembered my first voice, nurtured fifty-some years ago in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I grew up as the oldest of eight, the daughter of Leo and Teresa Kelleher. My voice emerged among numerous silences: my mother’s silence in a family of thirteen, which strengthened her resolve to raise eight children to know the value of work, education, and equality; my silence in a northern college, which strengthened my resolve to show that southern women are not idiots; my later silence as a long-term part-time college instructor, which strengthened my resolve to return to school for my PhD; my silence in the doctoral classroom born of fear of failure; and other silences in between. In fact, I observed how our mutual coming to voice fit the three different meanings reflected in Elisabeth Hayes’s essay “Voice.”4
George Ella Lyon (see part II) speaks eloquently about the importance of reclaiming one’s “first voice”—one’s regional dialect—which has been the object of ridicule and creates a clear class distinction based on social and cultural identity. In what follows, I reflect on the connection of voice and language, using Hayes’s definition of voice as talk, which can “signify women’s actual speech or speaking style . . . focus[ing] on how women use spoken language in learning situations and how their learning preferences may be reflected in their use of talk.”5 This section concentrates on the first part of the definition—the actual speaking style or dialect of the women and me.
Unlike the women of Preston County and Appalachians in general, I did not grow up with missionaries or government workers telling me I was culturally deprived, but I got the message from insiders as well as outsiders that my first voice was not “proper.” All the teachers in our Catholic schools were nuns from Maryland and Philadelphia who had come south to “mission” territory. Mother herself corrected our grammar constantly, so we understood that if we didn’t speak “well” and become educated, we would not do well.
The summer before I went off to St. Joseph’s College in western Maryland, Mother sent me to Mrs. Ainsworth’s two-week charm school to learn social etiquette. This included diction lessons, so that I would not embarrass my mother while I was away at school. My speech teacher, with a broadcasting degree from the University of Maryland, spent hours with me outside the classroom, trying to cleanse my speech of its regional quality. People would ask me to talk for them and then break into peals of laughter. Well-meaning people said, “You’re pretty smart for a southerner.” My first voice was shadowed by many others saying it wasn’t good enough; therefore, I changed my dialect and accumulated college degrees to define myself as better, as smarter. I mastered standard English, and people stopped to listen without laughing.
When I came to eastern Kentucky I had a hard time understanding the dialect, especially when I traveled into Preston County. When I began teaching, students thought I was from Boston, not North Carolina. Before my doctoral work, I thought their speaking reflected poor grammar; since then, I have learned that the dialects of Appalachian English are among the “highly stigmatized variet[ies] of American English.”6 Though Appalachians do not limit themselves to speaking one way and frequently intermingle standard and nonstandard language, and though “no dialect can be seen as inferior or superior to another,”7 the social judgment about Appalachian dialects and other vernacular varieties results in the perception that people in the region are less respectable and economically and culturally unequal, illustrating that “racial discrimination and internalized racism are often inseparable from intolerant attitudes toward different languages and dialect.”8
Numerous studies illustrate the prejudices of school-educated people toward nonstandard speakers, the most pertinent of which was a matched guise study, “a technique [that] involves asking interviewees to evaluate the personal qualities of speakers whose voices are recorded on tape, whereby the same speaker uses different linguistic varieties.”9 In Reid Luhman’s study of eastern Kentucky speakers at a Kentucky state university, speakers of Appalachian English varieties were judged to be lacking ambition, intelligence, and education, though their grades proved otherwise. He also found that speakers of standard English were more respected than loved, that respondents felt more solidarity with speakers of lower status and less solidarity with speakers of higher status, and that book learning canceled common sense.10
Since language marks economic class, and “since it is not so easily shed as a suit of clothes or a rusted and aging automobile, . . . [language] symbolizes our social experience in an intimate way and locates us within significant social groups from which we draw our identities.”11 Kimberly Donehower observes that participants in her study of an Appalachian community in western North Carolina recognized and spoke standard English, but they wanted “those around them to acknowledge . . . that [standard English is] not the only way to talk and write.” She goes on to say:
Informants generally knew that their dialect was one of the primary markers of their identity as Southern Appalachians, and this man [a school principal] was quick to defend their right to speak it: “our dialect, the mountain dialect, is just a—an area dialect, and that’s just the way the, the speech you know a lot of, a lot of the mountaineers still use ‘holped’ for ‘helped.’ And, and you’ll hear this, but it’s what, you know, it’s just something that’s instilled in them, it’s not—it’s correct English for them. And our English and our dialect is just as correct for us around here as any in Chicago, or New York, or you go to Canada, you’ll have a little blend of the French, in it.”12
In my experience of living and teaching in the region, I have found that students can complete four years of college and still sound as if they came from “the head of the holler,” a phrase used by local people to designate those who are isolated, don’t get out much, and hence speak with a heavy accent. The students in my classroom worry about losing their family connections if they “get above their raisings” by talking in what they call a “citified” way. They also, like the school principal above, want respect for their native tongue.
Sensitivity about dialect occurs when outsiders’ attitudes are internalized by insiders trying to “better” themselves. As stated earlier, I sought to deflect attention from my study participants’ exact language patterns and settled on a lightly edited version of their speech in my dissertation. It was therefore surprising that when I asked the participants to review their interview transcripts, Jean edited her interview even further, saying that she did not want to sound like a “hillbilly” to anyone reading the transcript.
Although there was no specific question about dialect, I did ask the participants if their teachers had ever attempted to correct their speech. Lucy said that the teachers sounded like her and that any discrimination had been based on her being poor and obese. Jean stated that the teachers had not motivated her as a practical learner, so she lost interest, but she reported no pressure to speak differently. Similarly, Donehower’s school principal responded that none of his teachers had asked him to change his dialect.
However, when the women came to Preston College, they experienced some disjuncture related to faculty attitudes toward Appalachian dialects. They got the message that their dialect was not acceptable in academic writing, in speech classes, or in future job interviews. A colleague in a nearby college observed that faculty worked with students on their voice and diction to little avail, because once the students became classroom teachers, they returned to their old ways. Linguist Michael Montgomery’s work on Appalachian English varieties points out the diversity of the dialects, and he would concur with sociologist Paula Moore’s opinion that trying to make language more homogeneous is like taking the color out of a painting.13 Linda Scott DeRosier states that the dialects are “colorful, earthy, profane, and . . . a very important part of our identity as hill folk, and . . . not something we should give up without a fight.”14 By maintaining their first voice, the Preston County women have learned the power of the language they use in their communities in positive ways. Kentucky-born DeRosier states that she is at home in both communities (in her academic position as a professor at the University of Montana and as the daughter of a Kentucky coal miner) because she makes an effort to watch her language in both settings, taking care not to offend her relatives. She says: “My sense of who I am comes from my identity as a hillbilly woman, and I do not see that ever changing. . . . To maintain a sense of wholeness and of loyalty to the community that I was brought up in, I have held on to an accent that is too often mistakenly seen as an indication of lower intelligence than many other accents in the US.”15
Language is closely tied to the way women define themselves and create community, and changing that language is a method of erasing culture.
One of my participants, Mary, stated: “If I hadn’t come to college, I wouldn’t be the person I am now. I wouldn’t trade that growth or the knowledge I’ve gained. Yeah, I’m glad I did that, I’m glad I did that. It made me a better person.” Even though she had not been employed in the teaching field since college and was underemployed in her present job, Mary reflected positively on college’s contribution to her identity during our interview. Her response echoes my own awareness when I finished the course work for my doctorate. Like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, who seeks a brain but finds out from the Wizard that he’s had one all along, my doctoral work reinforced my intellect in a way that no other experience could have. This common experience of being smart but not knowing it is reflected in other literacy studies about women, most notably those of Jennifer Horsman and Wendy Luttrell.16
Generally, the Preston County women were not voiceless in the context of their families; they had strong identities as mothers, wives, and daughters but felt “inarticulate when [they] enter[ed] a college classroom.”17 Voice in this sense “focuses on how women’s identity is reflected in what they say, in the ideas they express, and in the confidence they express in their own thoughts and opinions.”18 I would add that this confidence emanates into all aspects of their lives, far beyond the personal to include families, spouses, and children, as well as community acquaintances.
Going to college helped each of these women become somebody and to make her voice heard. Like them, I turned the silence of fifteen years as an adjunct faculty member into action by enrolling at age fifty in a doctoral program—a step toward identity and recognition as a professional by colleagues and students. My identity as a nontraditional student in that setting prompted me to gain a new respect for the nontraditional female students in my classroom and to see the possibilities of educating others about our stories. For these women, one of the tools provided by academic literacy that helped them achieve comfort in the academic setting was their writing. They reported doing some personal writing before college but spoke unkindly about school-sponsored literacy. Mary’s remarks reflected a common theme in the interviews—students’ struggles with college writing: “At first I thought it [writing] would be difficult, but once I started learning some patterns about writing, how to get across what I wanted to, because you can’t just write something down on paper, [it was not so hard]. There are certain steps you’ve got to take. And I was never taught those steps.”
These reflections surprised me, since the women’s writing was generally more lucid and creative than that of some of the traditional students. Their maturity and life experience made content easy to retrieve, and once they grasped the form, they illustrated working-class women’s potential to give words to their stories, which in turn affirmed their power and worthiness. They wrote about homemaking (e.g., the process of making chocolate gravy or an eleven-layer apple stack cake) and other issues of importance to women (e.g., the horrors of child and spouse abuse and date rape)—issues that cut across class boundaries. I believe that literacy, both reading and writing, offered these women “the greatest force for empowering, validating, and affirming [themselves] and [their] self-worth.”19 In fact, many of their essays ended up in the English Department’s publication of teacher-nominated student essays, Voices from the Hill.
Although they had not written expository essays before, the women reported writing poems, journals, and letters, forms of expression that Anita Puckett confirms are considered acceptable for mountain women. In her literacy study in eastern Kentucky, she notes that “literate practices are God-given attributes of women’s ‘nature’ . . . provid[ing] contexts in which a woman can negotiate her social, religious, and cultural identity.”20 Women can acquire literacy, but they are bound by cultural roles not to get above their raisings. Puckett observes that these women “walk a literate tightrope, called upon to assert an identity that affirms ‘good’ reading and writing skills but constrained by cultural norms and social practices in the directions and forms their writing can successfully assume to maintain social propriety and their family name.”21
The Preston County women managed to walk that tightrope. Their stories showed individual confidence in their mastery of the written code as steps toward achieving an identity within the academic community. Recognizing the power of the written word, they expressed themselves more actively, using writing to create meaning and contribute to their identity and moving from discomfort with academic literacy to fulfillment.
One of the Preston County women, Polly, said, “Whether I ever use it [her education degree] towards teaching, I will always use it in life.” With their college experience and recognition of self-worth, these women came to power, though not in Hayes’s sense, which “emphasizes women’s development of a collective identity and oppression as women, and of the means to challenge this oppression.”22 In contrast to a collective identity, the Preston County women experienced power in their personal achievements, primarily by maintaining the closeness of their families. I believe, along with Mary Field Belenky, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock, that as women are educated and are “drawn out and empowered, they are likely to draw out and uplift others, who in turn will reach out to still others. . . . Such women are more likely to be deeply invested in seeing that the community meets the needs of all children and families.”23 Their choice of work, their desire for more education, and their influence on others make powerful statements, even though they might not organize as a group. They prove that “even those environments that may not seem optimal have given women opportunities to create new knowledge, question old beliefs, and engage in personal and social change.”24 Even Lucy, who does not work outside the home and has not pursued an education beyond college, has power through her local expertise and her frequent letters to the editor.
Even previous silences can empower women, as my mother, Teresa Kelleher, illustrated by numerous activities in her life. A frustrated intellectual who felt inferior because she had completed only one year of business college, Mother spent a lifetime instilling in her children, especially her daughters, the importance of literacy and education. Steeped in Catholic teachings about having large families, she married Leo Kelleher, who inherited his dad’s scrap iron and metal business. Dad’s salary was stretched by his family of eight children, and Mother thought education could help us achieve her dreams.
Turning voice into power, I completed my doctorate, an accomplishment that, next to marrying my husband and birthing my daughter and son, was the most joyful act of my life. Mother’s influence lives on in my daughter’s work with female Appalachian folk artists and her position as a fund-raiser for Appalshop, a socially activist Appalachian film media organization. Like his grandmother, my son marches in antiwar protests and fights for environmental causes. Power begets power.
The participants in my study, once they experienced the power of literacy and learned to manage multiple tasks successfully, became invested in the concept of lifelong learning, seeking advanced degrees through correspondence and satellite programs. Completing college, they knew that they could accomplish whatever they set out to do. Like other college graduates, these women “learn much more than subject matter or skills. They learn implicit and explicit lessons about themselves as women and . . . about themselves as women of a particular race, class, and culture. These lessons in turn affect how they see themselves as learners and shape their future learning experiences.”25
Not content to remain in one position for too long, most of the employed women talked about job advancement. Mary, working in a lab at the time of my research, wanted to get a degree in English and work toward a master’s degree, “and maybe someday I’ll get to teach on the college level.” In the summer of 1999, Hope was planning to go back for her master’s, either in special education or in teaching reading on the elementary level—education that would help her move up the salary scale in the Preston County schools. When Judith finished her internship, she was planning to pursue graduate school. Jean’s plans included getting numerous nursing certifications and working toward her master’s in critical care nursing through correspondence. Sarah was aiming for a master’s in social work. Lucy worked at home, became more active in her son’s school governance, and continued to help others in various ways. All this illustrates that literacy is social practice and, according to David Barton and Mary Hamilton, “demonstrates the changing demands that people experience at different stages of their lives and offers convincing evidence of the need for lifelong learning systems which people can access at critical points when they need to respond to new demands.”26
The women in this study gained economic power by making higher salaries without moving outside the community. Jean describes the lack of economic power for women without a college education:
I think it’s a lot different for the girls than it is the boys. The boys can always get out and make a living. They can do something somewhere, somehow driving a coal truck, driving something, even though it’s not what you want them to do, they can still make the money. But for a girl it’s very hard. They can’t get out and do what they want. And who wants to house clean for $5 an hour the rest of your life? It’s fine; I’ve done it before. It’s good. But you don’t want to stay there the rest of your life.
Without an education, residents in rural regions like Appalachia are harder hit by the dwindling economy, so job opportunities are limited for both men and women. Some may ask whether women entering traditional occupations doesn’t just reinforce traditional low-paying work by keeping women in their place. But the study participants chose traditional professions because there was no alternative. They moved from minimum-wage jobs in retail and housekeeping—the only choices Jean describes for women—to salaried positions as teachers, nurses, and social workers.
The power of literacy relates to the sense of accomplishment in finishing a college degree, something the women valued whether they found jobs in their fields of study or not. Their power rested in their ability to be role models for their children, for the chance to be “somebody”27 and to move “from a passive to an active role . . . to see themselves as . . . instruments of knowledge and influence.”28 The women of Preston County are like the African American women in rural Georgia that Sue Hammons-Bryner studied: “women who grow up in rural poverty [and] are poorly educated in classrooms where they suffer from denigrating remarks about their success potential, yet who dream, do more than wish, become change agents, and fulfill goals.”29
Those who could not find jobs in their majors were frustrated with the job market, with perceived age discrimination, and with the inability to use the talents they had discovered during their four years at college; they blamed family pressures, the economy, and employers as opposed to blaming the college. We tend to hope that education will enlarge women’s vistas and encourage them to consider nontraditional occupations, but these Appalachian women did not have many choices. Still, they achieved personal and social change, which they surely would not have been able to do otherwise. In other words, “Education does offer women opportunities, and the credentialist tie between education and work is as strong for women as it is for men.”30 The key difference between their poor precollege experiences and their postcollege ones appeared to be that the women had become “instrumental in shaping . . . their destiny.”31
One of the most powerful statements these women made was deciding to remain in their communities: their acquisition of academic literacy did not destroy family or community. Many were not opposed to moving away or becoming more upwardly mobile, but they knew how disruptive such a move would be for their families. So they overcame family members’ objections to their returning to school and the constraints of gender roles; they advanced beyond minimum-wage jobs to get college educations. They voiced their concerns by using literacy for their own purposes in their jobs, churches, children’s schools, and homes, maintaining community values. These mountain women appear to be similar to Donehower’s informants, who “use literacy within this system in the ways that they can, or to choose to opt out of this system as it operates in mainstream society by staying in their own communities, and enjoying a different kind of relationship with literacy as a result.”32
This finding challenges previous literature about other nonmainstream groups who are alienated from their cultural moorings because of acquired academic literacy.33 Essays of working-class academics illustrate that the academy “has destroyed something even while it has been recreating [us] in its own image.”34 For many immigrant groups, education creates “the clash and dislocation in our communities.”35 Most notably, Richard Rodriguez describes his estrangement from his home and native tongue (Spanish) as a result of his education.36 Although language change was an issue for these Appalachian women, it was not nearly as dramatic as it is for nonnative speakers of English, as exemplified in case studies of Appalachian and Californian nonliterates. Juliet Merrifield and her colleagues found that there was less concern “about the impact of literacy language, and education on family relationships for the Appalachian group than for the California immigrants, some of whom fear the loss of their culture in following generations.”37 Although educated Appalachians may leave the region to find work, they usually come home often for visits, so there is less risk of a change in cultures. Likewise, many academics manage to bridge the gap and not feel alienated.
The women in the Preston County study might have had more economic power if they moved away, as some Appalachians do. However, Candy Knudson, a colleague who formerly lived in Preston with her professor-husband and was a nontraditional student in the Preston College English program, shared with me the evolution of her thinking about people who prefer to remain in the region: “The magnificent, awe-inspiring beauty of Kentucky’s hills and ‘hollers’ and the sense of familial commitment made me see ‘wealth’ and ‘resources’ differently. Having been pingponged as academic gypsies, back-and-forth these past many years and realizing too late the negative impact that has on family, I know that ‘poverty’ of soul and poverty of social ties are much worse than poverty of ‘stuff.’” Though I do not mean to valorize poverty, Knudson points out the advantages of remaining in the mountains. In fact, a study of the alumni of twenty-three of the thirty-three colleges that make up the Appalachian College Association revealed that many graduates of all ages remain in the area, supporting my findings.38
By taking their academic literacy and fitting it to their own purposes, these women maintained their common sense and cultural integrity, which they (and other working-class students) feared they might lose by going to college. One of the participants, Mary, said of her eighty-six-year-old grandmother, “I would give anything for her wisdom.” Common sense is defined as “the commonly held conceptions of the world held by various cultures, a culture’s way of seeing and believing . . . carried and transmitted by discourse.”39 Resisting the loss of common sense, and not wanting to be alienated from their families, many students drop out of college. In fact, common sense equates to personal empathy and experience, which, for Horsman’s adult education students, counted for more than an educated person’s knowledge;40 in other words, book learning does not equal “real” knowledge. Luttrell’s adult students in North Carolina and Philadelphia “were drawn to common sense and intuition because these forms of knowledge rest in women themselves (not in higher authorities) and are experienced directly in the world (not through abstractions).”41 Common sense, in reality, is a literacy with its own language and rules,42 and although it generally stands in contrast to education, the dichotomy may not be as absolute as the women feared.
The most important achievement of these nontraditional women, an outgrowth of the “personal is political” argument, seems to be “the sense of self-respect and worth gained from taking that first step into college and sticking it out until they finish[ed].”43 Not getting work in their fields did not seem to matter as much as having something they did not have before. These women’s narratives illustrate that “some people use literacy to make their lives more meaningful, no matter what their economic and political circumstances are.”44
Mary recently called to see if I could help her find a publisher for her poems. In the middle of the conversation, she described the hours she had spent constructing her Web page and went on to say, “After the interview with you [in the winter of 1999], I realized how much I missed writing, so I began writing poetry again.” In addition to the poems, she had written several articles for a local newspaper, summarizing her interviews with local bluegrass artists performing in the region. She informed me that she had quit her position as an environmental lab assistant to return to substitute teaching because the laboratory job was just not satisfying. Continually frustrated that she could not get a teaching job, Mary told me that the school principals she subbed for were pleased with her work, but “when a job opens, somebody’s cousin gets the job!” She has since moved to Pennsylvania, where she is teaching four-year-olds.
Because Preston is so small, I run into the other women occasionally or talk to them on the phone. At least quarterly I see Lucy’s letters to the editor about school conditions and related topics; she was recently elected to the Site Based Council at her children’s school. Lucy also had two works of art—a pencil drawing entitled God, Naked in Our Sins and a piece in acrylics called Memories—in an alumni art exhibit at Preston College. Sarah has taken a new job doing social work in a nearby county after quitting her job as director of a private social work agency. Hope finally found a teaching position closer to home than her previous two-hour round-trip commute. These and other conversations have confirmed for me the continuing importance of language and literacy in these women’s lives.
1. Katherine Kelleher Sohn, Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices since College (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).
2. Victor Villanueva, “Cuentos de mi Historia: An Art of Memory,” in Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing, ed. Deborah Holdstein and David Bleich (Provo: Utah University Press, 2001), 269.
3. Theresa M. Lillis, Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire (London: Routledge, 2001), 2.
4. Elisabeth Hayes, “Voice,” in Women as Learners: The Significance of Gender in Adult Learning, ed. Elisabeth Hayes and Daniele D. Flannery (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 79–110.
5. Ibid., 80.
6. Anita Puckett, Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xiii.
7. See William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 72; Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society (London: Penguin Press, 1995), 95; James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation (London: Routledge, 1991), 91.
8. Gail Okawa, “Resurfacing Roots: Developing a Pedagogy of Language Awareness from Two Views,” in Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice, ed. Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 111.
9. Marina S. Obiols, “The Matched Guise Technique: A Classic Test for Formal Measurement of Language Attitudes,” http://www6.gencat.net/lengcat/noves/hm02estiu/metodologia/asolis15.htm.
10. Reid Luhman, “Appalachian English Stereotypes: Language Attitudes in Kentucky,” Language in Society 19, no. 3 (1990): 331–48.
11. Ibid., 332.
12. Kimberly Donehower, “Beliefs about Literacy in a Southern Appalachian Community” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1997), 98–99.
13. Kelli Caudill and Charity Quillen, Searching for an Appalachian Accent (Whitesburg, KY: Appalshop, 2002).
14. Linda Scott DeRosier, Creeker: A Woman’s Journey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 58.
15. Ibid., 66–67.
16. Jennifer Horsman, Something in My Mind besides the Everyday: Women and Literacy (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1990), 90; Wendy Luttrell, Schoolsmart and Motherwise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling (New York: Routledge, 1997), 97.
17. Hayes, “Voice,” 94.
18. Ibid., 80.
19. Myrna Harrienger, “Writing a Life: The Composing of Grace,” in Feminine Principles and Women’s Experiences in American Composition and Rhetoric, ed. Louise W. Phelps and Janet W. Emig (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 151.
20. Anita Puckett, “Let the Girls Do the Spelling and Dan Will Do the Shooting: Literacy, the Division of Labor, and Identity in a Rural Appalachian Community,” Anthropological Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1992): 137.
21. Ibid., 143.
22. Hayes, “Voice,” 80.
23. Mary Field Belenky, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock, A Tradition that Has No Name: Nurturing the Development of People, Families and Communities (New York: Basic Press, 1997), 52.
24. Hayes, “Voice,” 52.
25. Ibid., 51.
26. David Barton and Mary Hamilton, Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community (London: Routledge, 1998), 282.
27. Luttrell, Schoolsmart and Motherwise, 32.
28. Lori Neilson, Literacy and Living: The Literate Lives of Three Adults (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1989), 132.
29. Sue Hammons-Bryner, “Interpersonal Relationships and African-American Women’s Educational Achievement: An Ethnographic Study,” Sage 9, no. 1 (1995): 12.
30. Gillian Pascall and Roger Cox, Women Returning to Higher Education (London: Open University Press, 1993), 141.
31. Judith Fiene, “The Social Reality of a Group of Rural, Low-Status, Appalachian Women: A Grounded Theory Study” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1988), 53.
32. Donehower, “Beliefs about Literacy in a Southern Appalachian Community,” 199.
33. Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Autobiography (Boston: Godline Press, 1982); Patricia Bizzell, Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Sherry L. Linkon, Teaching Working-Class (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
34. Caroline Law, “Introduction,” in This Fine Place so Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, ed. C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 1.
35. Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of American’s Educational Underclass (New York: Penguin, 1989), 226.
36. Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory.
37. Juliet Merrifield, Mary Beth Bingman, David Hemphill, and Kathleen P. Bennett deMarrais, Life at the Margins: Literacy, Language and Technology in Everyday Life (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), 201.
38. Ernest T. Pascarella, Gregory C. Wolniak, Christopher T. Pierson, and Patrick T. Terenzini, “Appalachian Region Alumni Outcomes Survey (Preliminary Findings),” available from acaweb.org.
39. Victor Villanueva, Bootstraps: An Academic of Color (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993), 124.
40. Horsman, Something in My Mind Besides the Everyday, 90.
41. Luttrell, Schoolsmart and Motherwise, 32.
42. Katherine Vanderbrake, personal interview, 2002.
43. John Shiber, “Nontraditional Students: The Importance of Getting There,” Innovation Abstract 32 (1999): 102.
44. Beth Daniell, “Narratives of Literacy: Connecting Composition to Culture,” College Composition and Communication 50, no. 3 (1999): 404.