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Activism

The Women of Glenmary and FOCIS: A Modern-Day Version of “Fotched-On” Women?
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many educated, white, middle/upper-middle-class women ventured to the Southern Mountain region, to initiate or to work at rural settlements. Benefactors of the women’s movement which saw the establishment of a number of colleges for women, especially in the Northeast, the educated women sought an outlet for their talents and interests. “Uplift” long had been part of the tradition of the mainstream Protestant religions to which most of the women subscribed, and in the latter part of the nineteenth century, uplift came to be incorporated into the social gospel movement which sought to apply Christian principles of charity to a viciously competitive, capitalist society which seemed to care little for the downtrodden. Traditional piety associated with “woman’s sphere,” legitimized her reform-minded activities which could be seen as an extension of mothering.

War Report from Black Oak Ridge to Marshall University
No Tellico Surprise is a poem about the last demonstration against the Tellico Dam, the “Halloween before they shut the gates forever.” It describes all the people who were there protesting against the dam and all the reasons they had for protesting (that is, not just snail darters!) It is about taking a dare and failing, about resisting evil, and about how “I still don’t know the statute of limitations on river conspiracies.”