All We Knew Was to Farm

Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941
Erscheinungsjahr 2002
ISBN: 978-0-8018-6924-2
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 344 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 680 g

Reihe: Revisiting Rural America

Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians

In the years after World War I, Southern farm women found their world changing. A postwar plunge in farm prices stretched into a twenty-year agricultural depression and New Deal programs eventually transformed the economy. Many families left their land to make way for larger commercial farms. New industries and the intervention of big government in once insular communities marked a turning point in the struggle of upcountry women—forcing new choices and the redefinition of traditional ways of life.

Melissa Walker's All We Knew Was to Farm draws on interviews, archives, and family and government records to reconstruct the conflict between rural women and bewildering and unsettling change. Some women adapted by becoming partners in farm operations, adopting the roles of consumers and homemakers, taking off-farm jobs, or leaving the land. The material lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by midcentury—yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, the women found their experiences both broadened and circumscribed.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Walker, Melissa

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Agrarsoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Walker, Melissa
Melissa Walker is an associate professor of history at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.