LYNDA ANN EWEN

Al's and Betty Lee's lives symbolized the struggle for a sociology that served humanity rather than individual or elites. Their struggle opened spaces for our generation to act, teach and write a sociology that defied the restrictive canons dominant in the discipline. In writing this autobiography I have been struck by the deep debt that L and so many others, owe the Lees. Because of them I did not have to buy into an elitist social science; I could be an ordinary person who served ordinary people.

I always felt extraordinarily ordinary. I went to my first anti-war rally at the University of Wisconsin dressed in a white cotton blouse, full skirt, white socks and loafers - obviously out-of-place. As an instructor at Wisconsin I helped local farm students organize "The Committee to End Rhetoric." They wanted to be involved in the issues of the movement but were turned off by the rhetoric, stridency, and life style of the Left. They wanted to remain ordinary.

White, middle class, Methodist and a Girl Scout. Equipped with a prestigious degree (I was only the second won-man to ever get the Ph.D. in sociology at Wisconsin), I had to decide what to do with my life. I didn't want to be rich or even famous. But I wanted to make a difference in the world. I was raised with a compelling sense of the privileges I had been given (my mother called them "blessings") and a deep sense of outrage at injustice (a gift from my Appalachian father). I turned down a job offer at Columbia University and took a position at Wayne State University. To be with ordinary people.

My dissertation on Chile had propelled me into a position with NICH (Non-intervention in Chile Committee) and the Peace and justice Commission of the Catholic Church and I traveled to Chile in 1992. Subsequently I spoke across the country about Allende's assassination and the role of the U.S. (ITT and the CIA).

The five years in Detroit were perhaps the most intense of my life. It was almost a relief when my husband got a job offer to go back home. John (the son of a displaced WV coal miner) and I could go back to being ordinary people.

But history did not have that in store for us. John had taken the job as counsel to District 17 of the UMWA and I got a job in a small backwater state school -West Virginia Tech. We moved into a small integrated working class community that was in the heart of the battleground known as the "Kanawha County Textbook protest." Pregnant with my second child, I was preparing to go to a meeting to protest a KKK cross burning when I started to bleed and had to make the hard choice to stay home and in bed. My son (the fourth of the five children) was fine.

I wrote my second book and it was very different. It was the story of the women who held the picket lines during the Brookside Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky (Which Side are You On?). It was a book for ordinary people, written plainly, telling the story.

It didn't take long for the community in which we lived to realize we were professionals with skills and knowledge that could serve them in struggle. My sociology was transformed from book knowledge to a living, useful thing that could be given as a gift and received eagerly. I began power structure research on the right-wing lobby fighting public employee collective bargaining rights. This research quickly became a basis for the political strategizing of the WV Education Association. I agreed to run for the Kanawha County School Board in opposition to the. right-wing candidates, The WVEA, as well and the National Education Association, supported that campaign. It was a tremendous opportunity to educate ordinary people. There were two positions open and seventeen candidates. I came in third. So close! The campaign proved that the powerful hate propaganda of the Birchers and Klan can he successfully countered, I received several threats during the campaign and traveled to give talks With an armed guard. I learned firsthand that there are good reasons why people do not easily speak up and out.

The campaign exhausted me both psychologically and physically. I had yet to learn about rhythms and long-range perspectives. I resigned as editor of Humanity and Society, and then dropped out of professional sociology for several years. I continued work in the community, leading a Brownie Scout troop and helping to organize several food pantries. We effectively boycotted the County Court in a protest against high sewer rates, But I could not stop being a humanist sociologist. I taught the local committee how to research the power structures that turned public works into public troughs. And I desperately missed the perspectives arid support that came from participation in organizations like the AHS and the radical caucuses we had organized,

I began to attend professional meetings once again and reestablished the personal connections in the discipline that had been so important to me, By now (the late I 1980s) it was patently clear that Revolution was not going to happen "soon" and we had better begin to pace ourselves for the long haul. We were middle-aged and wiser. At least I was.

I was now tenured, promoted and in a position at WV Tech to struggle on behalf of students and faculty. A group of us "took over" the faculty assembly from the conservative engineers who had controlled faculty governance. I was sucked into the exhausting game of committee meetings, negotiations, and empty promises that included a two-year term as Tech's representative on the state-level Faculty Advisory Council to the Board of Advisors.

I helped develop an Honors Program and advised the women's groups on campus. The students were full of energy, angry and confused. The "apathy" of the early eighties was disappearing in the coal fields as fast as the jobs were. West Virginia was plunged into a deep depression.

But campus politics was an endless circle, and even the professional meetings seemed to have lost much of the political content. I needed a fresh perspective and applied for a Fulbright lectureship to Tanzania.

I went to the University of Dar Es Salaam in 1990 but the school was closed by a student strike. Without. a teaching job I had to create my own "place" alone in a beautiful but poor country I developed workshops on gender issues in methods of research and offered them to various women's groups throughout the country. 1 was able to meet a real felt need of a young country whose search for "development" had to, of necessity, include women The culmination came when the national business school asked me to give a week-long workshop for the all male faculty! I offered the classes through the day but met with the women administrators, secretaries and cooks during lunch and after class, because they wanted to understand as well! I also had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Zambia, giving gender workshops in Ndola and Lusaka,

Coming home I faced a school in decline. I buried myself in writing a social stratification textbook as a way to learn the new literature. It was my first text (Social Stratification and Power in America) for General Hall. I used several drafts in classes, struggling to write for students and not other sociologists.

The fight at WV Tech was a losing one. A position opened up at Marshall University to not only teach the race, gender, Appalachian, and stratification classes (my favorites), but also to be director of the Oral History of Appalachia Program. I jumped at the chance.

The first fall at Marshall (1995) 1 felt absolutely liberated. I was in a supportive environment Surrounded by people I could talk to. Faculty there even went to professional meetings (including the AHS), did research arid cared about students. There were women in the administration and in prominent faculty positions. I co-wrote a grant to the Rockefeller for the Humanities Foundation to establish it Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia and to our surprise, got funded for a quarter of a million dollars. Last summer student volunteers did a project on the life histories of poverty families and this summer students helped collect the oral histories of the first black 4-H camp in the Country.

Meanwhile, my church connections had been reinvigorated by the formation of the WV Methodist Federation for Social Action (affiliated with the national MFSA). The rightwing offensive in die church in West Virginia required an answer. I began to write a monthly column for the conference newspaper on "The Church in Society" (Appendix III). And I got entangled, once again, in school politics when a friend of my boys was embroiled in a racist incident at our local high school. The local NAACP got involved and I joined that organization and became a member of their education committee.

This summer I co-taught an honors seminar that created a 40-page web site on the lives of four outstanding West Virginia Black women (see www. marshall.edu/orahist/).  I also received a small research grant and have launched a new research project on Buffalo Creek. Six students are working with me. Once again, I am challenged to find ways in which research can serve the peoples of the southern coal fields.

I am currently president of the West Virginia Sociological Association, and our fall meeting will have the theme of "Women in West Virginia." I am trying to organize a place for academics who care about women's issues to dialogue and debate with policy makers and activists - a new kind of meeting for the WVSA.

I still struggle with priorities and integration. How to reconcile academic demands and standards with practical activity and personal morality? What is the balance that is most productive (at least for me)? The AHS has been an important organization for me because it is there, more than any other professional organization, that I have found others who carry on the same struggle, with the same ideals. And I suppose that there never will be an answer - that the answer lies in the search itself.