What inspired you to write about women in higher education in Appalachia?

Really, it was just the surprise of discovering how many of them there were. We
don’t really hear about women in college in Appalachia as far back as the 1800s. When I found out that we had a local college at one time, especially one that early, it didn’t even occur to me that women were attending. I want to see them more widely understood and celebrated. And because I couldn’t stop talking about them, my colleague Dr. Nicole Willey said, “I’ve got bad news for you: I think you need to write a book.” Even then, I didn’t realize I would have enough material for one. Turns out, I had more than I could fit in one.

What do you believe fuels the stereotype of Appalachia being a region hostile to education?

I think it ultimately comes back to the ways that corporate interests have tried to control the story of what it means to be Appalachian. When the industrial revolution turned us from an agricultural region to a mining/logging/manufacturing one, industry leaders wanted us to be workers, not readers. Physical labor became valued over intellectual labor (and these became treated as very different things). If anyone is interested in learning more about how this dynamic came about, I recommend Todd Snyder’s The Rhetoric of Appalachian Identity.

Today, we’re also facing the realities of college costs and lack of access that make higher education tougher for Appalachian students to manage, but on the surface the fact that fewer of us attend college perpetuates the stereotype in wider society.

The book incorporates mini-biographies of women who attended Madison College. Can you talk a bit about the experience of collecting these biographies?

They really came together in bits and pieces as I looked over census data, newspaper articles, obituaries, cemeteries, and family recollections. Very often, the written record wasn’t about the women in question—it was about the people who came after them, including daughters, granddaughters, and nieces. I used what I learned about these descendants to make educated guesses about the women who attended Madison and what their influence was like. The hardest to glean any information about were the women who didn’t marry or have children. There are still some of them for whom I found no records at all, beyond the 1854 class list that names them as students at Madison College. It’s frustrating because I know that they were writing; they would have written school papers if nothing else. But so little seems to have survived, especially not in their own voices. I wanted to do the best I could with what I had to let them tell us about themselves.

Why did you decide to incorporate the mini-biographies of the Madison women? How do they enhance your larger argument?

This is part of my desire for them to be able to speak for themselves as much as possible. But I also wanted their stories to tell us something about women’s lives in Appalachia at that time; specifically, that they defy the “barefoot and pregnant” stereotype of Appalachian women as beaten down and living lives of drudgery. I wanted to acknowledge the narrative tradition in Appalachia, which values familial stories and experiences. Some of these women didn’t have families to continue telling their stories, so I did the best I could.

Back in 2020, Ohio Valley History called your other book The Politics of Appalachian Rhetoric “a gently delivered, but no less demanding, critique of academia’s anti-Appalachian prejudice.” Do you believe that The Madison Women makes a similar critique?

I hope so, but part of what I’m critiquing in this book is myself. Why was I surprised to learn that so many colleges existed here at one time? Why didn’t I think the women in my region would have been interested in higher education? I think a lot of that has to do with how the stereotypes have influenced the perception that Appalachia isn’t a land of scholars and writers, which I hadn’t realized I’d also imbibed, but it also has to do with the very real inequalities that we now face in terms of school funding and educational resources. The students of Madison College not only had access to an affordable school, they had the desire to learn and belief that college was worthwhile, even though most wouldn’t see any economic benefit from going. Learning for its own sake isn’t something we’re encouraged to pursue today, but my mistake was in assuming that if something is the case now, it must have been even more so in the past. Turns out, the past still has a lot to teach me.

What does it mean to have a network and lineage of college educated women from the Appalachian region?

For me, it means reclaiming something that I never knew we had at one point: a sense of our region as a place for intellectuals. I’ve always known that college wasn’t required for intelligence, curiosity, or ability, but I did feel like I was strange for the fact that I loved college so much. People used to roll their eyes at me for being a “career student” (which, trust me, if that was an actual career, I’d take it), and that surely so much school would destroy my common sense. Now I know that this wasn’t always the prevailing attitude. Knowing that I’m actually part of a longer tradition of women who chose college has forced me to reconsider what I thought I knew about my own history as part of a multigenerational Appalachian family. Turns out, I’m not quite the first-generation college student I thought I was!

What other literature inspired and informed The Madison Women? 

One book that deeply inspired me was Gretchen Gerzina’s 2008 book Mr. And Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend. While the subject matter is different, Gerzina made her research process part of the story. We get to see her excitement as she visits archives and talks with sources; I hope I conveyed some of my own excitement and joy in learning about the students of Madison College.

I also love any works that reclaim lost voices. One of my favorite discoveries during my own research process was Circumstances Are Destiny: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere by Tina Stewart Brakebill. Her book introduced me to an Ohio woman writer living around the same time as the Madison women, who would have experienced—and pushed against—many similar social strictures as they did.

What is currently on your nightstand? 

I usually have several books on the go at any one time depending on my mood. Right now, I’m finishing Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Campus History edited by Rhondda Robinson Thomas. As you can tell, I’m fascinated by the histories of colleges and schools, and this book looks at how the racial histories get remembered (and misremembered) in ways that at the least don’t benefit everyone equally, and at the worst perpetuate racism. I’m also reading the novel The Bookbinder by Pip Williams.

I love reading about people who love books and learning like I do, and learning about the historical production of books is especially fun for me.