Desiging Women in Appalachia: Linking the Past to the Future

A number of Appalachian scholars have considered the central role women played in movements to “uplift” the region, particularly during the Progressive Era. Most, however, have focused on the “fotched-on” women who entered “mountain work” by carving out new areas of expertise that had gone unclaimed by men—education, social work, nursing, recreation, and cultural work, for example (Whisnant 1983, Forderhase 1985 and 1987, England 1990, Tice 1998, Barney 2000, Goan 2000, Stoddart 2002). In this paper I will analyze the “mountain work” of women, both “fotched-on” and native, who dared to challenge the status quo by directly competing in the traditional male profession of architecture, a field that Despina Stratigakos argues still has not successfully integrated women (Stratigakos 2016). Using written records, including diaries and letters, oral history, original architectural drawings, historic photographs, and the buildings themselves, I will present the architectural work of four groups of women, who worked in the Mountain South between the late-nineteenth-century and the 1990s. With one exception, the women were untrained in architecture, and the one who had professionally training was denied official admittance to the profession. Despite having no professional recognition, I will demonstrate how all of the women harnessed the built environment to gain personal power, while at the same time shaping public discourse. While this diverse group of women may seem to have had little in common, I will argue that they all employed a collaborative design, an observation that Stratigakos has associated with other designing women. Finally, I will conclude this paper by suggesting lessons these historical players have to offer social justice activists working in the region today