The Madison Women

Gender, Higher Education, and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia

Amanda E Hayes

West Virginia University Press

9781959000259

$27.99

Paperback

2024-09-01

By uncovering how higher education and gender roles evolved in Appalachia over time, this book delivers a history that contradicts the stereotype of the region as hostile to education—including mini biographies of women who attended Madison College in the 19th century.

By uncovering how higher education and gender roles evolved in Appalachia over time, The Madison Women delivers a history that contradicts the stereotype of the region as hostile to education, highlighting colleges that proliferated the area in the 19th century. Indeed, many of these colleges were either coeducational or even specifically for women, ultimately contradicting another stereotype–that Appalachia is a region particularly hostile toward women.

Incorporating captivating mini-biographies of women who attended Madison College and who went on to change their communities in ways large and small, this book reveals how the lives of its students impart lessons about history, regional culture, and how we can shape the Appalachia’s future.

6.000in x 9.000in x 0.600in

Weight data not found for this book.

“This book stands beside Samantha NeCamp’s in the work it does to rehabilitate the false stereotype of early Appalachia as anti-education and is a true recovery project, letting us hear lives and voices otherwise silenced.”
–Kim Donehower, coeditor of Rereading Appalachia: Literacy, Place, and Cultural Resistance

“A mastery of weaving personal and archival research to resurrect a critical time in education in Appalachia. The research . . . lends itself to creating more avenues for study in women’s literacy, learning, and lives in Appalachia.”
–Travis A. Rountree, author of Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out

204 Pages

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