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The Madison Women
Gender, Higher Education, and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia
Amanda E. Hayes
West Virginia University Press, 2024
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. 
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front cover of The Politics of Appalachian Rhetoric
The Politics of Appalachian Rhetoric
Amanda E. Hayes
West Virginia University Press, 2018

In exploring the ways that Appalachian people speak and write, Amanda E. Hayes raises the importance of knowing and respecting communication styles within a marginalized culture. Diving deep into the region’s historical roots—especially those of the Scotch-Irish and their influence on her own Appalachian Ohio—Hayes reveals a rhetoric with its own unique logic, utility, and poetry.

Hayes also considers the headwinds against Appalachian rhetoric, notably ideologies about poverty and the biases of the school system. She connects these to challenges that Appalachian students face in the classroom and pinpoints pedagogical and structural approaches for change. 

Throughout, Hayes blends conventional scholarship with autobiography, storytelling, and language, illustrating Appalachian rhetoric’s validity as a means of creating and sharing knowledge.

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