Daughter of the Hills: A Womans Part in the Coal Miners Struggle Novel of the Thirties

Daughter of the Hills is a novel based on the true story of Dolly Hawkins Cooper's life - of her home in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, of her coal-mining family and their heritage of labor and political struggle, of her love for the miner John Cooper and their enviable marriage, of his death, and of battles with the coal company to provide medical and environmental protection for its workers. As Dolly grows from girlhood into womanhood, so her sense of responsibility evolves from love and concern for her immediate family to her community and eventually to mining communities throughout the country. The novel takes us up through Dolly's husband's death; the preface and afterword describe Dolly's development into a speaker and community organizer and her studies at Commonwealth College in Arkansas, an experimental college founded in the 1930s upon the themes of labor history, organizing strategy and Marxist Theory. It was there that she and her teacher Myra Page, working together in the classroom and in the fields, became close friends. Written in the tradition of social activism and the political literature of the 1930s, with ardent attention to the dialect, customs, music, folklore, and scenery of the Tennessee mountain coal-mining world, Daughter of the Hills is both a powerful love story and a novel of social protest for the people and communities who live as victims of corporate power and greed. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kate Boris-Brown