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Hill Women
Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains
3 of 4 copies available
“Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review)
“A gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them.”—Slate
Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County, Kentucky, is one of the poorest places in the country. Buildings are crumbling as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women find creative ways to subsist in the hills.
Through the women who raised her, Cassie Chambers traces her path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Granny’s daughter, Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish college. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated from the larger world.
Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County. With her “hill women” values guiding her, she went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved home to help rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues from domestic violence to the opioid crisis, but they are also keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers breaks down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
January 7, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593148280
- File size: 216857 KB
- Duration: 07:31:47
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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September 9, 2019
Women in Kentucky’s Appalachian community come into focus in lawyer Chambers’s powerful debut memoir, which aims to put a human face on a stereotyped region. Kentucky native Chambers spent much of her youth in impoverished Owsley County, where her sharecropper grandparents maintained a tobacco farm. Chambers highlights three women who exemplify Appalachian strength: her scrappy grandmother (whose “joy hid the poverty”); her resilient aunt, who sacrificed personal ambition to help run the farm; and her trailblazing mother, who became the first person in the family to graduate from college. Chambers credits them with supporting her as she forged her own path, which included attending Yale and Harvard Law School. Upon graduation, Chambers moved back to Kentucky to provide legal assistance to the poor. She recounts her work on behalf of low-income women, including helping domestic violence victims, and touches on her role as vice-chair for the state Democratic Party. Chambers acknowledges Appalachia’s problems, such as water pollution and the drug epidemic, but these sections—sporadically interspersed throughout the book— only skim the surface of Appalachia’s issues. Still, this is a passionate memoir, one that honors Appalachia’s residents, especially its women.
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