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Cover image of All We Knew Was to Farm
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All We Knew Was to Farm

Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941

Melissa Walker

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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...

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.

Reviews

Reviews

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.

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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

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

Melissa Walker, Ph.D.

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