Annie Kreiser

Lived in a bunk with 10 9 year old girls and 3 other counselors for 2 months. Provided emotional support and conflict resolution for campers. Assisted activity staff with various outdoor and crafts programming. Devised stalling games.

Cared for children between the ages of 11 months and 14 years in their family homes. Prepared balanced meals and did housekeeping. Engaged children in developmentally appropriate activities.

Taught snowboarding lessons and safety procedures to guests ages 5-65 years. Worked and drove in rain and heavy snow. Participated in early morning professional development. Maintained guest and resort snowboards, boots, and bindings.

Presented at the North East Regional Honors Society Conference. This research seeks to understand Appalachian women’s rights movements through country music artists from the region. Appalachian women’s rights movements are distinct from urban middle-class feminist movements. For one, urban feminists were often less racially integrated than rural Appalachian feminists, particularly from the 1930s-1960s. Whereas many white urban feminists did not place welfare access as central to their platform and focused instead on women’s integration into the workforce, Appalachian mothers with several children, husbands dead or disabled from the mines, and dismal job prospects knew that simply getting a job was not enough; they needed the support of social services. Black middle-class urban feminists sought mainly to improve white people’s perception of Black people and viewed the blues culture, songs, and protests of many Black women from poor rural backgrounds as primitive and shameful. Appalachian ideals of resistance and persistence were passed down from mothers and grandmothers to produce an intergenerational tapestry of evolving women’s rights issues in song. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” by Loretta Lynn and “Daughter’s Lament” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops speak out against the disastrous effects of coal mining on women and their families and illustrate the interracial characteristic of many Appalachian women’s and worker’s rights movements. For poor Appalachian feminists, women’s and workers’ rights were inseparable. Bessie Smith’s “Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair” and Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” are examples of the work many Appalachian women did to rewrite cultural narratives of the violence perpetrated by men towards women preserved in murder ballads such as "Knoxville Girl” and “Cruel Ship’s Carpenter”. The backgrounds and convictions of female country music artists from Appalachia have given birth to a multitude of songs whose messages tell not only of suffering and tragedy, but of resiliency and power.

This thesis analyzes three stories from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories trilogy: “The Hook”, “The Babysitter”, and “A Ghost in the Mirror.” These stories are analyzed through cultural and feminist lenses to assess how they reflect societal fears about women’s sexuality and independence and encourage women to be fearful of these things. The social atmosphere of the 1980s was one of intense anxiety among the white middle class about women entering the workforce, stranger danger, and teenage driving and sex. These fears compounded to fuel exchanges of oral urban legends that Schwartz would eventually collect into his three Scary Stories anthologies over the course of the decade. The resulting anthologies became immensely popular among youths while suburban parents across the nation campaigned to ban the books on the basis of their content and disturbing illustrations. In order to provide a starting point for analyzing these stories, three questions are asked: “What is the sin or danger?,” “Who is punished?,” and “By whom?.” For each story, the answers to these questions illuminate relationships between the stories and the society they reflected, especially with regards to expectations for young women. The work of Diana Taylor on archives and repertoires informs the expansion of the analysis for the stories as they were transferred from the repertoire of urban legends to the archived stories by Schwartz and other scholars.

Various fiction and poetry pieces published in Pitch, volumes 10-13.