By: Rebecca Sharpless (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xxiii + 319 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.)
| In her poignant account of women living on the cotton farms in the Blacklands region of central Texas, Rebecca Sharpless contributes significantly to the growing body of scholarship on rural women and farm life during the tumultuous years of the early twentieth century. Drawing her inspiration from Margaret Hagood’s classic study of North Carolina tenant women, Sharpless paints a portrait that depicts the limited opportunities available for Texas farm women under the crop-lien system, narrowed to a great extent by their gender. Sharpless balances this portrait by describing the ways in which they sought to forge acceptable lives for themselves and their families. | 1 |
| In a rich ethnographic approach, the author describes farm women’s various roles on the farm and in the community: building and sustaining family networks, creating homes, producing family food supply, working in the fields, and engaging in community activities. The author pays close attention to the diversity of women in her study area, illustrating how race and ethnicity further restricted women’s options and choices, even among members of the same economic class, such as sharecroppers or tenants. Her descriptions of various work processes provide insight into both folk customs and newly available technology and modern methods promoted by government reformers. Sharpless concludes by detailing the rural to urban migration, a reaction to the Depression and World War II, but she also reveals the ambivalent responses that women had about this migration. | 2 |
| For this study, Sharpless draws heavily on women’s own accounts, including autobiographies, written memoirs, and, particularly, oral histories, many of which she conducted herself and which are one of the greatest strengths of the book. The author’s use of folksongs, vernacular architecture, foodways, and other folklife sources further enriches the regional character of this work. She weaves these primary sources together with government reports and studies that allow her to put her research into the wider context of the Blacklands region. At times, however, the richness of the narrative masks the stark reality of these women’s lives. | 3 |
| Several Farm Security Administration photographs offer visual representation of the rural women Sharpless describes. Additional FSA photographs or historical photographs taken by farm families themselves, would have enriched the study, the latter offering an “insider” rather than “outsider” perspective. More illustrations or floor plans of farm houses or farmsteads from the period would have helped the non-architecture specialist to envision the envelopes in which women worked. | 4 |
| One of the first works to portray the everyday life of marginal southern farm women before World War II, this book will prove useful to many scholars of women’s history, southern history, rural history, and the Progressive Era and New Deal, as well as to public historians working in museum interpretation, folklife documentation, and oral history projects. | 5 |
Ann E. McClearyState University of West Georgia | |
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ISSN 1939-8603