Summary Of Women, Power And Dissent In The Hills Of Carolina

Women, Power and Dissent in the Hills of Carolina is an ethnography by Mary K. Anglin about women’s labor in the declining mica industry in Southern Appalachia, specifically the Moth Hill Mica Company. Anglin begins her research by first analyzing government documents as a contextual base for the social and economic environment of North Carolina. Then, she conducts eight months of field research in which she interacts and has daily conversations and interviews with workers in order to get first-hand accounts of the women’s experiences both inside and outside of the factory. Through this research, Anglin argues that women are essential contributors to both household and regional economies; they cannot be reduced to one or the other. She also
claims that women, despite their inability to gain union membership or be recognized as skilled laborers, are able to “boss themselves” because they utilize the “local cultural forms,” community bonds, and their own interpretations of gender relationships to challenge authority and navigate through inadequate working conditions (Anglin 2002: 3).
In Chapter 1, “Relocating Appalachia,” Anglin uses census and other government records to understand the social and economic landscape of Pike and Clark counties in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Anglin 2002: 13). By recognizing the biased and scanty nature of the official documents she analyzed, Anglin argues that the southern Appalachian region encompasses a “greater complexity of cultural identities” and relations based on class, gender, and racial differences than its given credit for (Anglin 2002: 14). Despite the non-ethnographic nature of this chapter, its content helps contruct a richer understanding of Southern Appalachia as more than a “land of poverty” but rather a region that, similarly to the rest of the United States, has significantly been affected by “economic disparities and shifting social relations,” thus providing a context base for the following ethnographic content (Anglin 2002: 13).
Chapter 2, “Questions of Authority,” focuses on how Anglin conducted fieldwork on the women of the Moth Hill Mica Company, as well as some of the complications she faced as a hopeful “engaged ethnographer” in the region. It is important to realize that she is only able to further her research in the factory after being befriended by two of the women workers; this implies early on the importance of kinship and social relationships in this community. In Chapter 3, “Carolina Mica,” Anglin provides a history of the marginalized mica industry through interviews with workers and local elites and government records. She argues that the mica industry is heavily organized around the relations of gender, class, and ethnicity and “illustrate[s] the long-standing significance of women labor.”
Chapter 4, “Working Close Home,” begins Anglin’s ethnographic accounts of the Moth Hill Mica Company community and focuses on the significance of kinship, gender and class relationships (Anglin 2002: 10). Women “derive power from their roles as kinswomen within the workplace” because it allowed them to bring their daily lives to the shop floor and display assertiveness in their interactions with managers and supervisors (Anglin 2002: 76). The presence of these kinships also emphasized distinctions between social classes, such as through physical separation during dinnertime and gossip (Anglin 2002: 71). However, the decline in the mica industry had implications for gender relationships in the factory; a once women-dominated workforce became subject to increase male authority figures who earned higher wages and faced less risk for unemployment than their female counterparts (Anglin 2002: 76). This created an interesting power dynamic for the women; though they did not have the power to fight the implications of the diminishing mica industry, they did have the ability to use their kinships to gain influence within the factory (Anglin 2002: 76).
In Chapter 5, “Life Histories and Local Cultures,” Anglin emphasizes the significance of understanding the lives of the women outside of the factory by presenting narratives of two women from different generations of the mica industry.
Through her time spent with Hazel and Zona outside of work, Anglin finds that factory life is not the most meaningful aspect of the mica women’s lives; rather, they are multifaceted people who find meaning in religion, kinship and community (Anglin 2002: 98). In Chapter 6, “Paternalism, Protest and Back Talk,” Anglin uses the research of her previous chapters to argue that the kinship based networks “took the place of formalized dissent and provided the means for women to negotiate the politics of the shop floor” (Anglin 2002: 104). Since women were not able to gain influence through authority positions such as men when the mica industry began to decline, they had to find other means of strategizing and navigating efficiently through the workplace, and they did this by bringing kinship and family life into the factory. Through this, women were able to make factory life more bearable and “contain men’s authority” to an extent (Anglin 2002: 117). However, class often limited these relationships as it had the ability to create rifts even between kin (Anglin 2002:
118).
In the assigned quote, Anglin is critiquing approaches to gender and valued work in the realms of waged labor. Women are continuously ignored as skilled workers in their communities because they are categorized to “exist primarily within the context of their families,” which are “defined as being part of privatized worlds” (Anglin 2002: 105). As a result, their work in the public sphere is undermined and regarded as “cheap labor” in comparison to the work of men, as made evident in the existence of wage gaps and inability to participate in union activism.
Thus, arguing that there is a serve lacking in the union support and recognition of women as proficient workers, Anglin believes that there is a need to address “the silence about gendered relations of protest” in Southern Appalachia (Anglin 2002: 105). Union activism is characterized primarily through masculinity, and therefore neglects the work and efforts of women in the same industries (Anglin 2002: 105). Consequently, women are unable to navigate their fields of work as efficiently as men can because they are hindered in their ability to challenge inadequate working conditions, which marginalizes their agency to lead and make change. This disparity can be witnessed first hand in this ethnography; while the male workers gain power through their positions of authority, the female workers can only find influence through association with and support of their kin, which is why Anglin places such heavy emphasis on familial dynamics. The absence of union support led women of Moth Hill Mica Company to use informal resistance through “appropriated forms of cultural authority;” they were able to defy and dissent through the strength of their community of networks. However, despite the political economy’s affect on them, women are unable to be agents within that realm until they are supported by unions and seen as skilled workers.