coal still employees a large number of working-class people in southern West Virginia, either directly through mining jobs or through other businesses that support mining.18 The rest of this wage-earning population is largely employed in service-oriented occupations, many lacking health-care benefits and living wages.19
While the state is rich in natural resources such as coal and timber, its citizens are some of the most impoverished in the country. Currently, West Virginia ranks as the fifth-most-impoverished state in the US, behind Kentucky, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Mississippi.20 The highest rates of poverty are in the rural southern areas of the state, including two counties located in the southern coalfields, McDowell and Mingo, with poverty rates at 33 percent and 25.4 percent, respectively.21 Many scholars and most anti-MTR activists connect the consistently high levels of poverty in West Virginia to the extraction of natural resources, the very basis of the state’s mono-economy. Journalist Jeff Goodell claims:
Nearly 150 years and some 13 billion tons of coal later, it’s strikingly obvious that the great wealth of natural resources in West Virginia has been anything but a blessing. Rather than bringing riches, it has brought poverty, sickness, environmental devastation, and despair. By virtually every indicator of a state’s economic and social well-being—educational achievement, employment rate, income level—West Virginia remains at or near the bottom of the list. Nowhere is the decline clearer than in the southern part of the state, where the promise of riches was once brightest.22
The adverse socioeconomic conditions Goodell notes impact many West Virginia citizens but are, perhaps, most keenly felt by working-class women in the state. Over the past decade, many studies have assessed the socioeconomic conditions of West Virginia. Some analyses focus explicitly on conditions of women, while others isolate the category of gender among other discrete variables. Surprisingly, the most influential assessment of the region, the Appalachian Regional Commission report, insufficiently addresses gender in its assessment of living conditions in Appalachia.
In 2003, the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal program established in 1965 to assess and ameliorate persistent poverty in the region, released its annual report, Appalachia at the Millennium: An Overview of Results from Census 2000, based on 1990s socioeconomic data.23 Curiously, the report has a section that segments race and ethnicity in changing socioeconomic patterns but provides no gender differential category, and provides data on gender disparities only in workforce participation rates. This oversight is consistent with the frequent omission of data on women in a good portion of social science policy research. The end result presupposes that women and men experience similar socioeconomic realities, an all-too-frequent and wholly false assumption argued against by many feminist researchers. Feminist economists Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner draw our attention to gender biases in socioeconomic analyses, as well as the importance of making distinctions based on race, gender, class, and so forth:
Isn’t a price just a price? A market just a market? Don’t men and women feel the ups and downs of economic activity equally, whether they are black or white, straight or gay? Won’t a change in interest rates affect everyone the same way, regardless of gender? To all these questions feminist economists answer, “no.” Gender, like race, ethnicity, class, nation, and other markers of social location, is central to our understanding of economics and economic systems. The categories of economic analysis do not express timeless truths. Economic categories and concepts, like the categories and concepts of every knowledge project, are embedded in social contexts and connected to processes of social differentiation.24
Indeed, concentrating on who is excluded in policy assessments can reveal just as much about hegemonic interests in certain locations and historical contexts as concentrating on who is included in these analyses. When socioeconomic studies fail to account for fundamental differences in a population, it is crucial that feminist researchers highlight gender bias, exposing the blind spots in the original study. This first step in underscoring omissions can lead to social analysis that is more thorough, informative, and inclusive.
While the ARC report fails to isolate the category of gender adequately, it does provide some useful general information on Appalachian lives. Defining Appalachia and delineating its boundaries have been the subjects of a complex, long-standing debate among those who study the region, but most current scholarship follows the ARC demarcations. In this latest ARC report, Appalachia covers 410 counties in 13 states, including all of West Virginia and portions of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.25 The commission also divides Appalachia into three subregions: northern Appalachia, which includes parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and 46 of West Virginia’s 55 counties; central Appalachia, which includes 9 counties in southern West Virginia’s coalfields, and portions of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee; and southern Appalachia, which includes sections of Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.26 This study makes important distinctions between areas within the 410-county Appalachian region, which in the popular point of view is a monolithic region with uniform social and economic conditions. The commission results, detailed by Kelvin M. Pollard, also distinguish between “transitional,” “competitive,” “attainment,” and “distressed” counties in the region.27 Pollard discloses that most of the “transitional” counties, those on par with national averages in some categories but lagging behind in others, are found in northern and southern Appalachia. The “competitive” counties, those closely resembling the rest of the country in social and economic indexes, are primarily in southern Appalachia. The “attainment” counties, predominantly urban areas in the region, are also on par with national averages. The “distressed” counties, located in central Appalachia, are below national averages, but also fall behind Appalachian norms in all categories.28
The “distressed” area of the region includes all of West Virginia’s coalfield counties, which are characterized as “experiencing the greatest economic hardships.”29 Counties in the “distressed” category have per capita incomes no greater than 67 percent of the national average, and rates of poverty and unemployment that are at least 150 percent of the respective rates for the country as a whole.30 Most households in this region experience socioeconomic hardships, and workforce participation rates are lower than national averages. Pollard reveals that in 2000, West Virginia workforce participation rates were 45 percent for women and 58 percent for men, behind the 2000 national averages of 58 percent for women and 71 percent for men.31 These gender disparities can be attributed to the manufacturing-based economy of the state, which relies primarily on male labor. Areas reliant on heavy manufacturing typically contain stark occupational segregation based on gender. Some feminist scholars suggest that disparities based on occupational segregation and earnings speak to the value placed on women’s labor in the US economy. Deborah M. Figart claims:
Six out of ten women still work in female-dominated occupations, particularly in a growing service sector. Most women are clerical and professional specialty workers, especially African-American women who left domestic service to replace white women in offices. About eight of ten men are employed in male-dominated occupations, especially craft and managerial or administrative work. Relatively few occupations are truly integrated, as evidenced by visits to individual workplaces. The wage gap is narrower in female-dominated occupations where overall average pay is lower, although men still earn more than women in jobs such as secretary, cashier, social worker and nurse. This not only suggests that men’s earnings exceed women’s, but that traditionally women’s work is devalued in the economy.32
In short, the devaluation of female labor consigns many women, particularly in areas with a large manufacturing base, to low-paying work that typically lacks health benefits and opportunities for advancement. In West Virginia, some scholars have argued this pattern was established long ago and still informs labor practices in the region today. For example, Frances S. Hensley argues that historically, industrial development in West Virginia provided jobs in “coal mines, coke plants,
