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REVIEWS
| All We Know Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941. By Melissa Walker (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 341 pp.).
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| Melissa Walker's book, All We Know Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941 is a fascinating account of twentieth-century rural America that should be read by all those interested in class relations, commercial agriculture, industrialization, the role of the state, and gender roles. In spite of the somewhat misleading title, Walker's book is not just about women or farming in the Upcountry South. Rather this book is a well researched, imaginatively conceptualized, and readable book about the ways both men and women in the rural South encountered and negotiated numerous facets of modernization. |
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Instead of using the homogenizing term the South or the myth-laden label Appalachia, Walker created the term upcountry South to capture the distinctiveness of the geographic area she discusses in this book: the foothills and mountains of southwestern West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and northwestern South Carolina. While not overlooking the economic, political, and social differences among these three states, Walker makes a strong case that the women and men of all three areas faced similar pressures from the growing intrusion of the government and the growing presence of industrialization between the two world wars. Labeling this moment as a "liminal", Walker argues that the women and men of the upcountry South struggled to shape their own lives, families, and communities while negotiating the increasingly modern and industrial world that had come in the form of the commercial agriculture, home extension agents, the Tennessee Valley Authority, industry, mining, and tourism. |
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