A01=Melissa Walker
Author_Melissa Walker
Category=JBSF1
Category=KCZ
Category=NHK
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eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
rural women southern women upcountry south farm life agriculture history women farmers women homemakers family farms new deal era twentieth century south southern history women s labor economic change oral history gender roles class mobility
Product details
- ISBN 9780801863189
- Weight: 624g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jul 2000
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Melissa Walker is an associate professor of history at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
