All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941

The years between the world wars marked a turning point in the struggle of upcountry women in the US to shape their own lives. New industry and the intervening hand of big government, intruding on once insular communities, forced new choices and redefined their roles. This text examines these developments, depicting the southern farm woman’s confrontation with modern America. Drawing on personal interviews, archives, family papers and government records, Melissa Walker reconstructs the stories of rural women dealing with bewildering and unsettling change. Some of them, she finds, were forced by the constraints of race and class to choose the best of a bad set of options. Others adapted to change by becoming partners in farm operations, adopting the roles of consumers and homemakers, taking off-farm jobs, or leaving the land. Materially, the lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by mid-century; yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, they found their lives both broadened and circumscribed.