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Introduction -- No gendered sisterhood : ethnic and religious conflict among Euroamerican women -- Not a shared patriarchal space : imperialism, racism, and cultural persistence of indigenous Appalachian women -- Not a shared sisterhood of subordination : racism, slavery, and resistance by Black Appalachian females -- Not even sisters among their own kind : the centrality of class divisions among Appalachian women -- The myth of male farming and women's agricultural labor -- The myth of separate spheres and women's nonagricultural labor -- Family as privilege : public regulation of non-patriarchal households -- Motherhood as privilege : patriarchal intervention into women's reproductive labors

In The First American Frontier, Wilma Dunaway challenges many assumptions about the development of preindustrial Southern Appalachia's society and economy. Drawing on data from 215 counties in nine states from 1700 to 1860, she argues that capitalist exchange and production came to the region much earlier than has been previously thought. Her innovative book is the first regional history of antebellum Southern Appalachia and the first study to apply world-systems theory to the development of the American frontier.

Globally between 1980 and 2000, women's economic activity rate expanded, narrowing the gender gap in labor force participation. Thus, females now account for one-third or more of the "officially-counted" personnel of export industries (UNICEF 2007), and export agriculture is now feminized (Deere 2005). Today women account for one-third of the manufacturing labor force in developing countries, and females hold more than one-half of the industrial jobs in Asia (Barrientos, Kabeer and Hossain 2004). In much of the global South, females account for a majority of the waged labor force in export agriculture, and they are more heavily concentrated than men in service jobs that provision the supply chains of global production. As a reflection of fewer opportunities for males, women are now less likely to withdraw from the labor force during their childbearing years. In addition, females account for a majority of the income earners in the informal sectors of a majority of global South countries, generate a significant proportion of global commodities through subcontracted work they complete in their households, and provide most of the unpaid family labor needed to support household-based farms and businesses that are dominated by males (United Nations 2003).

Colonialism did not transform African peasants into waged labor. A majority of peasants worked as forced laborers, often unpaid, and they returned to their agricultural household labor as soon as they completed work assignments mandated by the colonizers. Colonial Africans resided in mixed livelihood households in which nonwaged labor forms (both free and unfree) predominated, and very few became dependent on wages. For a majority of colonial Africans, informal sector activities, tenancy, sharecropping, and subsistence production on communal plots were not temporary nonwaged forms on an inevitable path toward proletarianization. Wage earning was not the primary mechanism through which these households were integrated into the modern world-system. Instead, these households primarily provided nonwaged labors to capitalist commodity chains that, in turn, extracted surpluses from them and externalized costs of production to them.

This article recasts debates about the extent and causes of ethnic con?ict within the world-system framework. Ethni?cation and indigenism are inherent structural contradictions of the modern world-system, and there is the highest incidence of ethnic resistance at the peak of a hegemon's ascendancy. Consequently, there has not been a dramatic increase in ethnic con?ict since the end of the Cold War. However, ethnic mobilizations pose an increased challenge to the continued functioning of the world-system during the current age of transition. Ethnic mobilizations erode the capitalist civilizational project and increase costs to the system in ways that exacerbate the growing pro?t squeeze. I identify ?ve ways in which the counter-hegemonic mobilizations of ethnic minorities are costly to the world-system and can push it toward bifurcation and transformation.

By analyzing research and theoretical foci in its three major publication venues, we can judge how much attention the world-system perspective has been paying to women. After 25 years, women are only a faint ghost in the world-system perspective. In the ?rst twenty volumes of Review, less than 5 percent (16) of the articles deal with gendered exploitation, women, or households. In the ?rst ?ve volumes of the Journal of World-System Research, less than 4 percent of the articles address women's issues.2 By 1999, PEWS had published 21 annual monographs; yet less than 5 percent of the articles in those volumes integrated women or gender inequities.

In the southern Appalachian region of the early 1700s, the incorporation of the indigenous Cherokee economy into the capitalist world economy changed it from a communal system of subsistence production to one dependent on exports. From a world-systems perspective, focus here is on the impact of this shift on indigenous women's economic activities, which had been critical to community survival before the introduction of European trade. It is shown how a bifurcated system of labor developed, particularly around the fur trade, in which women could not participate equally with men. Capitalist expansion & export production also drained women's available labor time & decreased the role of men in indigenous production. Women's activities in such production became devalued, & they were forced into greater reliance on imported commodities, leading them into a cycle of debt. The disarticulation between women's subsistence activities & the male-dominated export sector had major repercussions for the indigenous Cherokee way of life; particular economic & physical risks for women & children as a result of their low political & economic status are detailed. Also of note is the ecological degradation that accompanied these economic changes, particularly the commodification of Cherokee land. 1 Figure, 46 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

Like capitalism itself, incorporation is a dialectical historical process that involves both social structure and human agency. On the one hand, transformations are determined by hegemonic forces in the capitalist world‐system itself. Incorporation is the long‐range civilizational project of capitalist colonizers. This historical process is best understood not as a cultural conflict between indigenes and European invaders, but as an economic conflict between precapitalist or communal modes of production and capitalist modes. Driven by the cultural logic of historical capitalism, the intruders mythologize their economic domination as a lofty mission to implant civilization on savages. On the other hand, indigenous people are not passive recipients of Western civilization. In sharp contrast to the imperialistic goals of the interlopers, the indigenous group seeks to safeguard its established way of life. The devastating effects of change are ameliorated because the impacted people act, react, and resist. As a result, the dominated disrupt the agenda of the colonizers and create a historical window by which they prevent their cultural annihilation.

This study pinpoints fallacies in three conventional explanations of the gender division of labor in rural households of the antebellum South. First, the conceptual focus on independent household producers ignores the large population of poor landless households who owned no means of production. Second, the experiences of poor Southern women contradict the agrarian vision of "separate but equal" labor spheres. Third, adequate explanations are not provided by the view that household labor was divided between males' wage labor and women's subsistence work. Conceptualizations of the "separate household-based sphere" of women's work ignore the extent to which antebellum Southern women's work varied by class and race. Working solely within the household was a luxury enjoyed only by the wives of more economically secure farm owners or proprietors. Nearly half of the wives and female heads of household engaged in income-generating activities outside the home, and the majority of them were employed in occupations culturally ascribed to be "men's work."