Towards a Gendered Regional Geography: Women and Work in Rural Appalachia

Regional studies has reemerged in recent decades as an important area of geographic analysis. In contrast to the traditional regional school which offers static descriptions of particular places and people, reconstructed regional geography approaches the region as a dynamic process where social relations are linked to spatial structures. Reconstructed regional geography, however, has largely neglected gender as a social category and focuses on class as the fundamental social relation under capitalism. This paper demonstrates how regions are constructed through social processes which include gender as well as class. Historical and contemporary analyses of women and household economic strategies in rural Appalachia illustrate the intersection of gender, place, and scale. Specifically, employment and poverty conditions are examined using county‐level data and household strategies are analyzed through intensive interviews with West Virginia women. This paper concludes that gender relations at the household, subregional, and regional scales are critical to the analysis of social and spatial processes in regional geography.