“This collection . . . represents state-of-the-art women’s history. It proves the point that women’s historians have long asserted but not always demonstrated: that unless women’s lives are considered, the history of societies’ economic, political, and social realms will remain incomplete and inadequately understood.”
—Victoria Bynum, author of Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South

          At the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of rural southerners were dependent on agriculture and eked out a living as tenants on land owned by someone else. Women took on multiple duties, from child rearing to labor in the fields, to help meet their own goals of independence, well-being, and family persistence on the land. Over the course of the century, however, women found their lives and their work transformed. Government intervention, the Great Depression, and industrial job opportunities created by the two world wars and the development of Sun Belt industries lured or pushed tens of thousands of black and white rural southerners off the land.

          As the American South changed around them, becoming more urban and industrialized, some women struggled to help their families survive in the increasingly large-scale and commercial agricultural economy, while other women eagerly seized opportunities to engage in rural reform, get better educations, and work at off-farm jobs. Whether they moved to the cities or stayed on the farms, most of these women continued to struggle against poverty and relied on tradition and inner strength to get by.

          This well-researched, sharply focused, and keenly insightful collection of essays takes readers across the twentieth-century South, from rural roadside stands to tobacco fields to Sloss-Sheffield Steel’s “Sloss Quarters” in Birmingham. Covering the full scope of southern rural women’s varied lives, this book will be of particular interest to anyone interested in sociology, women’s studies, or southern history.

About the Editors

          Melissa Walker is Associate Professor of History at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She is the coeditor of Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective (University of Missouri Press) and the author  of All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941.

                      Rebecca Sharpless is Director of the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She is the author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900–1940 and the coauthor of Rock Beneath the Sand: Country Churches in Texas.

Contents        

Introduction by Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker 

Part One:  Life on the Farm

“Work Was My Pleasure”: An Oral History of Nellie Stancil Langley by Lu Ann Jone

“Pretty Near Every Woman Done a Man’s Work”:  Women and Field Work in the Rural South by Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker

 Part Two: Rural Reformers at Work

“A Responsibility on Women That Cannot Be Delegated to Father, Husband, or Son”: Farm Women and Cooperation in the Tobacco South by Evan P. Bennett

 “Seizing the Opportunity”:  Home Demonstration Curb Markets in Virginia by Ann E. McCleary

 Revitalizing Southern Homes: Rural Women, the Professionalization of Home Demonstration Work, and the Limits of Reform, 1917–1945 by Lynne Rieff

 “You Got Us All A-Pullin’ Together”: Southern Methodist Deaconesses in the Rural South, 1922–1940 by Lois E. Myers

“Shepherdess of the Hills”:  The Salvation Army Mountain Ministry of Cecil Brown by Connie Park Rice

 Part Three:  Town and Country Come Together

Goin’ North: The African American Women of Sloss Quarters by Karen R. Utz

“It Takes a Special Kind of Woman to Work Up There”:  Race, Gender and the Impact of the Apparel Industry on Southern Alabama, 1937–2001 by Michelle Haberland