This paper argues for the importance of subsistence as the basic value underlying what I call ``the subsistent subaltern women`s perspective`` in Cold Mountain (1997). Maria Mies argues that the production and sustaining of life must be a feminist objective to counter the capitalist patriarchal colonization of nature, women, and other races, while Gayatri Spivak conceptualizes women as subalterns constituted around the sex-class-race axis. This reading of the subsistent subaltern women`s perspective attempts to combine Mies` ecofeminist stance with Spivak`s theoretical definition of the subaltern. Among the diverse subaltern groups in the South during the Civil War era, white subaltern women such as Ada, Ruby, Goat-Woman, and Sarah are especially foregrounded in Cold Mountain. They are rooted in the Earth and produce food and sustain life, coexisting with other people and all nature. Their knowledge and strength is cultivated through everyday contact with small living things, which empowers them to fight against the predatory capitalist patriarchal attack on subsistence. This valuation of subsistence as a crucial element in overcoming the binary system of canon/counter-canon from a feminist point of view deserves serious critical attention.