This is the first study of 19th-century Appalachian women. Wilma A. Dunaway moves beyond the black-white dichotomy and the preoccupation with affluent females that handicap antebellum women's histories. By comparing white, American Indian, free black, and enslaved females, she argues that the nature of a woman's work was determined by her race, ethnicity, and/or class positions. Concomitantly, the degree to which laws shielded her family from disruption depended upon her race, her class, and the degree to which she adhered to patriarchal conventions about work and cross-racial liaisons.