Contact:
Elizabeth Blevins, Director, Office of Communications
Office: (740) 351-3810; FAX: (740) 351-3179; Cell: (740) 464-4854
940 Second Street – Portsmouth, Ohio 45662
E-mail: eblevins@shawnee.edu 
Web site: www.shawnee.edu

            Monique Diderich, Ph.D., author and assistant professor in Sociology at Shawnee State University, is working on a new gender project proposal with a colleague, Veronica Manlow, Ph.D., author and assistant professor in the Business Department at Brooklyn College in New York City that is about the role of women in Appalachia.
            “We are going to interview females 65 years of age and older in Appalachia,” Diderich said. “We are interested in how they view their role in society and how they view their educational opportunities, how they view their role as women and how they view the role of younger women in contemporary society.”
            Diderich teaches gender association and when she started teaching at SSU, she gave the students a project where they would interview elderly women they knew, their grandmother or anyone over the age of 65 living in Appalachia.
            What she noticed about the students’ interviews was a rich history so what she and Manlow want to do is interview Appalachian women about many different areas of their lives. Then, they may expand the interviews to New York and other areas of the country and possibly outside the United States.
            They would then present preliminary data of a few case studies at the meeting in November of the Gerontological Society of America.
            “It will be like a life history,” Diderich said. “We also will guarantee anonymity and confidentiality.”
            When they do a report, names will never be mentioned and will only give a general description of the person and where they live, such as, northern Kentucky/southern Ohio area, so no one will be able to identify the women interviewed.
            Diderich and Manlow plan to do three different research projects including the construction of male identity in Appalachia and a project about Appalachian fashion.
            For more information or to volunteer to tell your life story, call Social Sciences secretary Sandy Delabar at (740) 351-3234.