The Pack Horse Librarians: Appalachian Bad Bitches on Mules

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There are certain women history quietly tried to keep in a filing cabinet labeled “miscellaneous.”

We’re not doing that.

This week on Bitchstory, we’re riding straight into the hills of Kentucky during the Great Depression to talk about the women of the Pack Horse Library Project — a New Deal program under the umbrella of the Works Progress Administration.

Translation: the federal government paid women to strap books onto mules and ride through the Appalachian mountains delivering literacy door to door.

Yes. That happened.

And it is exactly as badass as it sounds


Context: Poverty, Mountains, and Zero Infrastructure

In the 1930s, parts of Appalachian Kentucky had some of the lowest literacy rates in the country. Roads were barely roads. Schools were scattered and underfunded. Libraries? Mostly nonexistent.

So the WPA did something radical:

They hired local women — many of them poor themselves — and paid them about $28 a month to deliver books across rugged terrain.

These women rode 100–120 miles a week.

In all weather…Across creeks…Up mountains…Sometimes with pistols for protection. And they weren’t just dropping off novels.

They delivered:

  • School textbooks
  • Newspapers
  • Religious materials
  • Instructional pamphlets
  • Hand-sewn scrapbooks made from donated clippings

They built circulating libraries from almost nothing.

The OG Junk Journal Queens

Because funding was minimal, librarians often created their own books from donated magazines and newspapers. They stitched together collections of recipes, hygiene advice, farm tips, and children’s stories.

Imagine being a kid in a one-room mountain cabin, and once every couple of weeks a woman rides up on a mule carrying the outside world in a saddlebag.

That’s not just literacy…That’s oxygen.


Why This Is a Bitchstory


Because this wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t famous. It wasn’t led by men with statues.

It was local women — often mothers — navigating literal and structural barriers to education. They weren’t “empowered” in the Instagram sense. They were exhausted, underpaid, and determined.


And here’s the part that matters:

They did not wait for perfect systems…They became the system.

They stitched knowledge together. They carried it. They insisted it mattered.

That is quiet rebellion.


The Cultural Impact


By the program’s peak, Pack Horse librarians served around 100,000 people in Kentucky alone. The project ran from 1935 to 1943, ending as World War II shifted funding priorities.


It improved literacy rates. It connected isolated communities. It validated that rural women’s labor had public value.

And like so many women’s programs, it quietly disappeared without the national mythmaking it deserved.


The Feminist Undercurrent

During a time when women’s paid labor was still controversial, these librarians were federal employees. They were civil servants. They were infrastructure.

In mountains where roads were unreliable, women became the distribution network.

There’s something deliciously subversive about that. And that’s why we call it “Bitchstory”!