New in paperback
Country Women Cope with Hard Times
A Collection of Oral Histories
Edited by Melissa Walker
“In vivid, compelling accounts, women tell how they cared for their families, sought
educational opportunities for their children, celebrated holidays and assisted neighbors through mutual aid networks. . . . A wonderful collection for historians and scholars interested in what southern rural women have to say about their lives in the early
twentieth century.”—Labor History
“It was hard times,” French Carpenter Clark recalls, a sentiment unanimously echoed by
the sixteen other women who talk about their lives in Country Women Cope with Hard
Times. Born between 1890 and 1940 in eastern Tennessee and western South Carolina,
these women grew up on farms, in labor camps, and in remote towns during an era
when the region’s agricultural system changed dramatically. As daughters and wives,
they milked cows, raised livestock, planted and harvested crops, worked in textile
mills, sold butter and eggs, preserved food, made cloth, sewed clothes, and practiced
remarkable resourcefulness. Their recollections paint a vivid picture of rural life in the
first half of the twentieth century for a class of women underrepresented in historical
accounts.
Through her edited interviews with these women, Melissa Walker provides firsthand
descriptions of the influence of modernization on ordinary people struggling through
the agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s and its aftermath. Their oral histories make plain the challenges such women faced and the self-sacrificing ways they
found to confront hardship. While the women detail the difficulties of their existence—
the drought years, early freezes, low crop prices, and tenant farming—they also recall
the good times and the neighborly assistance of well-developed mutual aid networks,
of which women were the primary participants.
Melissa Walker is the George Dean
Johnson Jr. Professor of History at Converse College in Spartanburg, South
Carolina. President of the Agricultural
History Society and past president of
the Southern Association for Women
Historians (SAWH), Walker is also the
author of Southern Farmers and Their
Stories and All We Knew Was to Farm:
Rural Women in the Upcountry South,
1919-1941, winner of the SAWH Willie
Lee Rose Prize.
Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South • Carol Bleser, series editor
April 2010, 240 pages, 7 illus.
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