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An engaging study... For upcountry southern women, the years 1919-1941 were indicative of the economic, political, and social chaos existing throughout segregated America... Walker capably demonstrates how families were forced by the limitations of race and class to choose situations that provided little or no real opportunity, but she also brilliantly illustrates how some rural people were able to adapt to change.
Voices of ordinary women who experienced extraordinary changes resonate in Melissa Walker's incisive study of twentieth-century transformations of southern agricultural communities.
Melissa Walker has done an admirable job of mining oral interviews, TVA records, letters, diaries, and farming magazines to piece together the story of how women contributed to the family income... Walker deftly negotiates the intersection of race, class, and gender.
Walker shows how women adapted to rapid change with courage, strength, creativity, and persistence... Walker's fine regional study will be useful to historians of women, the South, Appalachia, rural life, and labor issues. A valuable addition to the growing number of works on women in the early-twentieth-century South.
Historian Melissa Walker provides an account of changes in women's labor practices and economic activity in the upcountry South during the inter-war years... Readable, credible, and well-researched.
The theme of the study is to show how the status of farm women changes from 1919-1941 in a period of economic crisis. Changing from a region of subsistence farming to one of commercial farming and interference by government action during the depression and New Deal years, women learned to cope... [Walker's] descriptions of rural ways and beliefs are true to form.
Walker does a particularly good job of emphasizing the ambivalence that upcountry farm women felt about leaving the farms... All We Knew Was to Farm makes an extremely important contribution to rural literature by gendering the transformation of the upland South.
Walker provides a much needed account of the South that should be of interest to all those who study the twentieth century.
Walker's thoroughly researched study of upcountry farm women in the interwar era does for women of this region of the South what Mary Neth's Preserving the Family Farm does for midwestern farm women, meticulously recounting their experience as they cope with economic depression, the increasing influence in their lives of the federal government and urban institutions, and the beginnings of modern agribusiness. Her careful consideration of race and class moves us a step closer to dismantling the myth of Appalachian homogeneity. Her sources are appropriate, and her use of oral history material is particularly skillful.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
344
ISBN
9780801869242
Illustration Description
13 b&w illus.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: "All We Knew Was to Farm"
Chapter 1. Rural Life in the Upcountry South: The Scene in 1920
Chapter 2. Making Do and Doing Without: Farm Women
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: "All We Knew Was to Farm"
Chapter 1. Rural Life in the Upcountry South: The Scene in 1920
Chapter 2. Making Do and Doing Without: Farm Women Cope with the Economic Crisis, 1920-1941
Chapter 3. "Grandma Would Find Some Way to Make Some Money": Farm Women's Cash Incomes
Chapter 4. Mixed Messages: Home Extension Work among Upcountry Farm Women in the 1920s and 1930s
Chapter 5. Government Relocation and Upcountry Women
Chapter 6. Rural Women and Industrialization
Chapter 7. Farm Wives and Commercial Farming
Chapter 8. "The Land of Do Without": The Changing Face of Sevier County, Tennessee, 1908-1940
Epilogue: The Persistence of Rural Values
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliographical Essay
Index
