Women, Youth, and Coalition Work
Between 1965 and 1968, Eula Hall, Edith Easterling, and many other women in
Appalachia learned about and joined antipoverty programs. Some, like Easterling, became “fieldmen” for the Appalachian Volunteers (AV), an antipoverty organization supported in part by the Office of Economic Opportunity; others, like Hall, were community volunteers before
they became paid workers. Local women were never the majority of staff people in local or
regional antipoverty organizations. Nonetheless, a handful became organizational leaders and the
platform of the War on Poverty empowered them to lead grassroots movements in the 1970s.
This chapter examines the early years of the War on Poverty in Appalachia, focusing on how
women used the programs and the gender and class dynamics that they encountered.
Women approached antipoverty programs geared for the uplift of men and their
dependents and reshaped them to address a broad range of struggles in poor communities. The
primary model of the War on Poverty jobs programs—the family-wage model—did little to
acknowledge the realities facing many Appalachian women. Those realities included disabled
and unemployed husbands, a lack of opportunity for young or single women, environmental
problems that made unpaid caregiving duties especially difficult, abusive partners, and a punitive
welfare system. Antipoverty initiatives at the local level often excluded or limited the
involvement of low-income people in decision-making, and sexism further limited women’s
ability to gain a foot-hold in government-based programs. As women joined grassroots
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programs by mobilizing their own resources to redress the barriers and prejudices they
encountered in their daily lives. One of the first steps in that process was to create community
spaces and organizations where a diverse coalition of people—women and men, old and young,
local and outsider—could gather and work together to create change.
The success of community mobilization relied in part on cross-class and inter-
generational alliances. Some of the strongest supporters and allies of community organizations
were the young activists who moved to the mountains in the mid-60s, many of whom joined the
OEO-funded Appalachian Volunteers and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). The
alliances between young antipoverty workers and community members of all ages proved crucial
in communities where local governments were resistant to ceding control of organizations or to
routing public funds to poor people. The volunteer organizations, with their outside grants and
federal funding, provided arenas where debate and creative ideas could flourish. Together the
local and outsider activists drew inspiration from one another and brought a range of goals to the
War on Poverty. By the end of the 1960s, state and local politicians saw the growing movement
as a threat to their political power and sought to defund antipoverty organizations. Despite the
political attacks, the work of the coalition invigorated an Appalachian Movement that was
developed by the end of the decade and continued into the 1970s.69
69
The Appalachian Movement refers to the grassroots activism that sprouted up across Appalachia, primarily in Eastern Kentucky, Southwest Virginia, and West Virginia, from 1968 through the mid-1970s. Several articles in the regional magazine, Mountain Life and Work, which was also the clearinghouse for many campaigns and
organizations, refer to the Appalachian Movement. Some activists in the mountains drew parallels between an Appalachian Movement and civil rights organizing, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. For an examples, see Si Kahn, “The Appalachian Movement—CSM, New Directions for the ’70s” and Mike Clark, “Education and Exploitation,” Mountain Life and Work, July-August, 1971. For further analysis of the Appalachian Movement and the development of regional consciousness, see Eller, Uneven Ground; Glen, “The War on Poverty
in Appalachia: Oral History from the Top down and the Bottom up”: 67-93; Kiffmeyer, “Looking Back to the City in the Hills.”
60 Women in the War on Poverty
In the early 1960s a series of news reports and books exposed the entrenched poverty of Appalachia, including Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: Biography of a
Depressed Region (1962) and Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), which included a section on Appalachian poverty. Both books were widely read and caught the attention of
President Kennedy, whose 1960 campaign trip to West Virginia had opened his eyes to poverty
in the coal fields. In the fall of 1963, after reading a New York Times article that described a
crisis of unemployment in the Cumberland Plateau, Kennedy instructed his administration to
send emergency funds to the families of unemployed miners and to draft a blueprint for national antipoverty measures. Kennedy also oversaw the formation of the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission, a joint federal-state committee appointed to draft economic development
plans for the region. After the assassination of Kennedy, the Johnson administration continued the work, with Johnson declaring a “war on poverty” in his State of the Union address in January 1964. Following the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act and the Appalachian Regional
Development Act, resources and people soon flooded into the region.70
Edith Easterling and Eula Hall took advantage of those resources during the early
implementation of the programs. Their experiences point to three overarching motivations that
led women to participate: a desire to work for the betterment of the community, a personal
longing to speak and act on a public stage, and the chance for meaningful employment. Poor and
working-class women in the Appalachian coal fields did not have much freedom to pursue job or
educational opportunities; those routes required financial stability, good schools, and a
70 Douglass Cater, who was an editor of The Reporter before becoming a White House aide in 1964, provided
context for the Johnson’s declaration of a “war on poverty” in his article “The Politics of Poverty,” The Reporter, February 13, 1964. See also Eller, Uneven Ground in Appalachia, 66-77. In his article, Cater discusses some of the major influences on the War on Poverty, including Kennedy’s interest in the arguments made by Harry Caudill and Michael Harrington.
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willingness to leave families and homes behind. Moreover, the best paying job for working-class
people in the mountains, coal mining, was reserved for men. For Hall, Easterling, and countless
other women, the antipoverty programs offered paid work and a platform for engaging in
community, regional, and even national politics.
Edith Easterling had an abiding interest in local politics and had long found ways to
support her neighbors and improve her community. After living in a coal camp for about four years, Edith and her husband Jake moved to “the backside of town,” the community called Poor Bottom, and built a house on her father’s farm. Though Edith and her husband Jake constantly struggled to bring in an adequate income, they had more stability than many others in eastern
Kentucky: they had each other, and they had a family member with land. These slight advantages do not fully explain Edith’s early forms of community organizing, especially in a sex-segregated community where women lacked access to the majority of wage work and political positions.
Still, she found ways to be involved. She was the chairman of the Republican Party in her district
in the early 1960s, following in her father’s and grandfather’s political tradition of Lincoln
Republicanism. (She maintained her affiliation with the Republican Party even as she
increasingly supported Democratic candidates in the 1960s and 1970s.) Easterling was also an
active member of the Parent and Teacher’s Association and served a term as its president. Sue Ella Kobak, Edith’s daughter, recalls that Edith “knew everybody’s business” and “knew every property line in our part of the county.” Sue Ella also recognized that her mother was different from other women, but that she managed to find ways to adjust so that she did not appear too
different.71
Thinking back on her mother’s work in the community, Sue Ella called her mother “the unofficial social worker.” Edith often read letters to illiterate neighbors, and when neighbors and
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kin were eligible for Social Security benefits, she helped them fill out the paperwork. Even when
family members moved on to northern industrial towns to find work, she kept in touch and notified them when they were eligible for veteran’s benefits from the state of Kentucky. Easterling drove people to polling places during elections and provided them sample ballots.
When the polio vaccine became available, the health department called on her to visit families, to
assure them that the vaccine was safe, and to convince them that they should have their children
vaccinated. Edith and Sue Ella were the first in their community to receive the vaccine. 72
For Edith Easterling, the antipoverty programs were an extension of her volunteer work. As she saw it, “it was normal” to be involved. She asserted, “I was pretty active in the
community. I wasn’t doing anything that I shouldn’t have done.”73
Easterling learned about the antipoverty programs sometime in 1964 when she was
working as a cook at a school cafeteria. A man from the University of Kentucky was conducting
a survey in the county to see what people wanted and needed from federal programs, and one day
he stopped by the school; after talking to Edith he asked if he could come to her home and
discuss the antipoverty programs in more depth. The man eventually became a part of a team that
worked on bringing a water system to rural Pike County, where families relied on unsafe wells. After Edith’s encounter with the surveyor, Sue Ella, who had learned about the War on Poverty as a freshman at Morehead State University, introduced her mother to the Appalachian
Volunteers program. Edith eventually became a paid worker in the program. As an important
local activist, she was a gatekeeper, hosting antipoverty workers from around the country and
introducing them to the community. She helped to found and direct the Marrowbone Folk
72 Kobak, interview with author, May 20, 2011. 73 Easterling, interview by Kinderman.
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School, which housed a sewing co-cop for women and served as a meeting space and training
ground for activists and community people. Edith was a key figure in the Appalachian Volunteers and one of the few female “fieldmen,” or staff, that the organization hired.74
In 1965, Eula Hall and her five children were living in Floyd County, Kentucky, where
over a third of families had incomes below the poverty level and over half of the housing had
been deemed substandard.75 Eula did not have a formal job, but along with caring for the
children, gardening and canning food, she helped her husband McKinley produce moonshine for
sale, which was, sometimes their only source of cash income.76
Unlike Edith Easterling, Hall had not been involved in community organizing or local
politics before the War on Poverty, at least not in any formal way, but her story suggests a fluid
definition of community organizing. Without formal organizations, women helped one another and “organized” around pressing needs. Hall helped women she knew learn how to drive. This may seem like a politically neutral act, yet, as Hall explained, if a woman could drive, she gained
a degree of independence. She stated that before the War on Poverty, “The most I’d been
involved—I tried to teach other women how to drive. Our husbands didn’t want us to drive. They can’t control you if you can drive and get out and get on a little. You’re not going to be home 24 hours a day.” If a woman could drive, she could “go to the store, pick out what your kids needed to wear to school, you could go ride to the company store and get groceries….It was just a big benefit to be able to drive a vehicle, especially when there [was] no public transportation, no way
74 Easterling, interview by Kinderman; Easterling, interview by Kline.
75 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of the Population: General Social and
Economic Characteristics, Kentucky, vol. 1, pt. 19; Richard A. Couto, Poverty, Politics, and Health Care: An
Appalachian Experience (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), 63.
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of getting anywhere. It was a big benefit to be able to drive.”77
The War on Poverty expanded on
and gave new meaning to such informal networks, as women drew upon them to inform one
another of federal resources and to build support for antipoverty campaigns.
Hall’s first encounter with the War on Poverty came through the Highway 979
Community Action Council and the VISTA workers who were assigned to the group. In 1965
Hall hosted a VISTA from the national pool, Colleen LeBlanc of Minnesota and received a cash
payment of $12.50 per week for room and board. By concretely supporting the program Hall also
helped assure that federal funds were more likely to reach communities in Floyd County. As one
local minister reported, along with providing human services, VISTA injected the local economy
with much needed funds and made it more likely that community groups in that county would
receive federal grants.78 The volunteers helped to create opportunities for women who needed
income and were eager to change their lives and communities. The anti-poverty volunteers,
whom Hall called “good resource people,” gave her a direct line into community organizations
that could provide alternatives to her hard-scrabble life. LeBlanc, who had a car, traveled the
county and drove women to community meetings where they discussed the antipoverty programs
and the needs in their communities.
Hall soon became a member of the VISTA-staffed 979 Community Action Council, which
between 1965 and 1969 secured emergency wells and a water system for Floyd County,
informed people about welfare rights, helped them apply for food stamps, pressured Kentucky
politicians to provide better benefits to poor families, and established a community newspaper
that kept local people up-to-date about the anti-poverty programs in the region. Hall did not take
77 Eula Hall, interview with the author, September 15, 2012.
78 William G. Poole, “A Citizen’s Report on Volunteers in Service to America and Appalachian Volunteers in
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on a more official role until 1969 when she became a spokesperson for the community health
movement in Floyd County. Nonetheless, her consistent involvement in the antipoverty
programs gave her access to skills and people that would help her in the future.79
The stories of Hall and Easterling—along with the major groups and people with whom
they intersected—offer a fresh perspective of the War on Poverty in Appalachia, in which local
people and outsiders built alliances and worked together to tackle short- and long-term problems.
They adapted on-the-ground antipoverty programs whose original goals focused on job training
and relief for male breadwinners, often with a top-down approach, and implemented projects
addressing the issues that they thought most crucial for changing patterns of poverty in their
communities.80
Gender, Social Status, and the War on Poverty in Appalachia
Women in Appalachia encountered programs through the War on Poverty that in many
ways did not target or even address the problems that, as caregivers for the elderly, disabled, and
children, they faced in a crumbling economy. Nonetheless, key pieces of antipoverty legislation employed a “language of opportunity,” opening the way for poor people, and especially women, to take on roles in community organizations and direct resources in ways that they saw fit.81 In
particular, the Economic Opportunity Act (1964) outlined that community action agencies should be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of
79
Hall, interviews with author, March 2011 and September 2012.
80 On how women utilized the antipoverty resources in urban areas, see Naples, Grassroots Warriors, and Orleck,
Storming Caesar’s Palace. Orleck describes women’s involvement in antipoverty efforts as motherist politics, since
women were often driven to join community organizations that would benefit their children and themselves as mothers. The women in this study sometimes express motherist politics, but their politics are much broader as well. See Orleck, “Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up,” 19.
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residents of the areas and members of the groups served.”82
The federal government channeled resources into the Appalachian region through a
number of programs, all a part of either the Economic Opportunity Act or the regionally-specific
Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965. The Appalachian Act promised, in the words of Kentucky and West Virginia Senators, “to assist local bodies in the development of the basic resources and facilities on which economic growth depends” and to serve the national interest “by offering opportunity to those of different generations who want to work toward our national goals and continue to live in this great region.”83
Underlying this act were widely-held beliefs
that without new roads, highways, water systems, vocational schools, and overall infrastructure
development, industries would not succeed in the region and Appalachian residents would need
to move to cities or continue to face poverty and a depressed economy.
While the Appalachian Act promised to change the region’s economic infrastructure over the long haul, the Economic Opportunity Act addressed more immediate concerns, such as
education, employment, and access to healthcare and welfare benefits. It eventually created an
opening for low-income people to participate in developing and managing antipoverty programs.
In the beginning, however, local governments were often loathe to include community people
and poor people in programs except in cursory ways. In fact, President Johnson was not fond of
the idea of community action that circumvented local government, but his aides and the
administrators of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) created a path for grassroots
82
Act of August 20, 1964 (Economic Opportunity Act of 1964), Public Law 88-452, 78 STAT 508, Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789-2011, Record Group 11, National Archives,
http://research.archives.gov/description/299896.
83
Senators John Sherman Cooper and Jennings Randolph, “The Appalachian Development Act: A Statement for the 40th Anniversary of Mountain Life and Work,” Mountain Life and Work XL, no. 1 (Summer 1965).