Among the many outside influences on Appalachian culture in the late 19th-early 20th centuries were reformers and educators, many of them women who came to the mountains to work as teachers, settlement workers, and nurses. This paper focuses on settlement schools in eastern Kentucky as the locus of interaction between reformers and mountain women. It addresses P. Pascoe's theory of reform work as "rescue" operations and questions whether mountain settlements were successful as rescue missions for Appalachian women and children. As in urban settlements of the Progressive Era, mountain settlements concentrated on providing Christian, morally uplifting environments, and aimed to establish the mother as the moral authority in the family. The isolated region was seen as relatively untouched by "corrupting" outside influences and, therefore, ideal for carrying out systematic cultural intervention. College educated women from the East found a sense of purpose in the settlement schools: to educate and enlighten the backward mountain people by teaching them moral values, proper nutrition and health care, sanitary housekeeping practices, and community values. Welcomed and respected by their communities, the teachers and staff found a viable alternative to marriage and motherhood. Unquestionably, the settlement workers brought improvements to the region, but their Victorian ideology prevented them from challenging the patriarchal power structure; confronting the realities of exploitative, outside economic forces; or empowering the people, especially women, to deal with the challenges of the future. (Contains 42 references.) (SV)