Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman

by Margaret Jarman Hagood

A generation of social scientists was raised on the work of Margaret Jarman Hagood, a leading sociologist of the Depression South. In 1937 Hagood visited 254 tenant houses in the Carolina Piedmont, Georgia, and Alabama, talking with and listening to southern mothers.

Genres: History

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

Reviews

[Karen Witzler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing look at the everyday lives of rural Deep South white farm women in the 20's and 30's - my grandmother and great-grandmothers' lives. Read in early '80's; a valuable documentation.

[Meen · Rating 5 out of 5]

1. Wow, incredible women doing social science back then! (That I totally never heard about in any of my methods classes, of course.) Brilliant work, really well written and researched. Interesting on its own as research *and* as an historical document. (Dorothea Lange did the pictures that went along with the project. Amazing photos.)

2. This is my family's story. (Well, on my Daddy's side, my mom was a German immigrant in the 1960s.) Not specifically about them and not in north Mississippi, but ethnographically speaking. It gave me a lot of insight into my Mamaw and her life and development in the incredibly rural South.

3. Very little discussion of race, actually. The few times that black people are mentioned all serve to demonstrate the intensity of white supremacy, especially among lower class whites. Again, not that I didn't know this intellectually before, but it gave me more insight into my family's own racism.

[Steph Post · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book for anyone looking to research women in the South during the Great Depression. Lots of facts and detailed information.

[TheOldBookLady · Rating 4 out of 5]

My great grandmother was a sharecropper in Alabama during the 1930s and before, she made shoes for my great grandfather from old inner tubes from tires and canvas. They owned nothing except a mule. This book, although about women in North Carolina brought me close to my great grandmother and my grandmother, born in 1935.