‘Hillbilly’ Women Will Get No Help From J. D. Vance

The one time I met J. D. Vance was shortly after his book, Hillbilly Elegy , came out, at an event in Kentucky—the state where his grandparents were from and that he wrote about in the memoir. I told him I was working on a book about women from the Appalachian Mountains, about the hill women who hold communities together. He seemed interested. “My mamaw was a hill woman,” he said. “I wrote about her.”

But Vance, it soon became clear, had no business speaking for the people of Appalachia. He capitalized on Americans’ interest in the area, turning a tenuous family connection to the mountains into a lucrative and powerful platform. He then abandoned Appalachia when he ran for Senate, trading in his “hillbilly” rhetoric for speeches about his “Ohio values.”

But what bothers me more is the impact that Vance’s policies and rhetoric have on the Appalachian people that he claims to care about—particularly its women.

Vance has said that nowadays, people “shift spouses like they change their underwear” and implied that they should remain in a marriage even if it is abusive. The idea that leaving a bad marriage that is “maybe even violent” would make you happier, he said, was “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace.”

I serve in Kentucky’s state Senate, but I began my legal career providing free assistance to survivors of domestic violence. In that role, I used the law to help women divorce their abusive spouses. Navigating divorce can be hard anywhere. But in rural areas, many people have to drive hours to reach a court. These places are legal deserts, with far too few lawyers handling far too many cases. It’s difficult to take off work and find child care to sit in court all day.

I now research domestic violence and rural courts. In a new study of mine , forthcoming in the Kentucky Law Journal , the numbers paint a bleak picture. Rural women seeking domestic-violence protective orders are less likely to have an attorney and less likely to receive information about supportive services than those in urban areas. A lack of resources means that they are less likely to have access to a specialized family-court judge and are more likely to have their case heard in open court, before strangers, instead of in a private proceeding. In my experience, a lot of people will decide not to get a protective order solely because they are worried about all of the people who will be in the courtroom as they tell their story of abuse.

I met one woman who lived about an hour outside of Louisville who had been trying for years to get divorced. She couldn’t afford an attorney, so she tried to file the paperwork herself. Without a lawyer to move it along, her case went nowhere. Over the next few years, her husband would find her every so often. He would show up wherever she was staying, tell the landlord that they were married to get into the apartment, beat her up, and leave. I thought about her when I heard Vance speak so flippantly about the choice to divorce an abusive partner.

Vance has also supported an extreme abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest—another policy that particularly harms women in rural communities. Just two years ago, he expressed support for a national abortion ban, saying that he “certainly would like for abortion to be illegal nationally.”

I serve in the state legislature of a place with one of the most extreme abortion bans in the nation. Kentucky, like 13 other states, has a law that criminalizes abortion at all stages of pregnancy. It has one narrow exception that permits a doctor to terminate a pregnancy to prevent the death or “the serious, permanent impairment of a life-sustaining organ of a pregnant woman.” Many of the doctors I have spoken with tell me that the language is so vague, it’s hard to use in practice. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the point.

Here, too, we know that Vance’s policy stances have a real impact. One study suggests that nearly 65,000 women living in states with total abortion bans have experienced rape-related pregnancies since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And women living in rural communities have always struggled to access abortion services, just as they struggle to access health care in general.

Last year, one Kentucky woman, Hadley Duvall, became a nationally recognized leader on this issue when she shared her story of becoming pregnant at 12 after she was raped by her stepfather. Duvall miscarried, but she has spoken powerfully—most recently in a campaign ad for President Joe Biden —about what it meant to have choices. Vance would take that choice away.

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Vance has also told us his position on day-care access, one of the most important policy issues for women in rural areas. He seems uninterested in supporting this struggling sector or the families who depend on it. He has said that funding universal day care would be “class warfare against normal people,” by which he presumably meant families with mothers who wanted to and could afford to stay home full-time.

I was sworn into my first elected office when my youngest child was six weeks old. I’ve focused on child-care policy in part because I’ve had to. COVID forced 100,000 Kentucky women to leave the workforce. About 40 percent of unemployed Kentuckians currently cite a lack of child care as the reason they are not working. Statewide, we’ve lost 46 percent of our child-care centers since 2012, and many of those closures have been in rural areas.

I’m proud of the work our legislature is doing on this issue. This past session, a rural Republican sponsored a bipartisan bill to reward local communities for eliminating zoning barriers that restrict child-care centers. We need policy makers who will bring resources and attention to this crisis, not leaders like Vance who try to gaslight women into believing it doesn’t exist.

Like Vance, I, too, carry the stories of women from the mountains. Stories of women like my granny, who was from Owsley County, one of the poorest places in America. She never finished elementary school, but she pushed each of her seven children to get an education. My aunt Ruth dropped out of high school, but she was the best farmworker in the area and saved up money so her little sister could afford college. My mom was that little sister, the first of Granny’s kids to graduate high school, the first who left her holler and everything she knew in search of a better life. She built that better life for me.

The Appalachian Mountains are full of hill women holding their communities together. They don’t have the resources or support that they need to enact sweeping change. But they find creative ways to make quiet progress. We don’t hear their stories enough. More important, we don’t pass enough policies that help them. Electing J. D. Vance as vice president would only hurt them more.