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Dissertation Information for Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche Engelhardt

NAME:
- Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche Engelhardt

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1999)

ADVISORS:
- Frances Smith Foster

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Beverly Guy-Sheftall
- Barbara Ladd

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Southern Appalachian Ecological Literature and Feminism: Women Authors Address the Land, 1890-1910

Abstract: n the decades around 1900 in the southern Appalachian mountains, logging, lynching, and the fashion for hat plumage peaked while diverse women organized to found parks, fight mass bird killings, and gain the vote. This project examines how nature and gender were constructed and intersect in writings by women about Appalachia from 1890 to 1910.

Initially, I extend and particularize a history projected in abstract by ecocritical and ecological feminist literary scholars. I show how literary constructions of nature and gender led to oppression of women and destruction of the earth in short stories, novels, letters, and diaries by Rebecca Harding Davis, Katherine Pettit, Olive Campbell, and lesser-known authors. While occasional constructions might help preserve the mountain environment, the view presents nature as fundamentally "environmental," not "ecological"--always separate from humans who can choose to value it as picturesque, treat it as safely feminized, or categorize and dissect it with Science and Progress. I find certain middle-class, white women complicit in this oppression and destruction and argue that these constructions also stereotype local men and erase Appalachia's racial and class diversity.

Finally, I argue that ecological feminism has roots in turn-of-the-century Appalachia. Analyzing texts by Emma Bell Miles, Grace MacGowan Cooke, and even Mary Murfree, I find sophisticated attempts to write nature into agency and connect humans to nature without erasing difference. I uncover evidence of ecological activism by women of color. These Appalachian modifications of mainstream feminism made feminism more local, which, in effect, made it more ecological. Water, air, soil quality and the effects of ecological destruction on human and nonhuman residents become women's issues in these texts. That these authors are less well-known than the ones in the first half of this study (or, as with most women writers of color, largely erased) suggests the ascendancy of the mainstream, environmental feminist view. That we still struggle with issues of development, logging, water, and (feminized) poverty in Appalachia and the United States speaks to the necessity of recovering this literary history.

MPACT Scores for Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche Engelhardt

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-02 21:44:08

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