Working

by Robert A. Caro

I was looking up federal statistics and studies from New Deal days all the time now, and one study by a team of gynecologists had found that out of 275 Hill Country women, 158 had perineal tears, many of them third-degree “tears so bad that it is difficult to see how they stand on their feet.”) And yet, Ina would tell me, her eyes brimming, how these women had told her they had no choice but to stand on their feet and do the chores; with their husbands working “from dark to dark” (that was a phrase Ina and I learned during those three years) there was no one else to do them. I recall many moments of revelation like that; as I say, I hope to write about more of them someday. When Ina said to me one evening with real anger in her voice, “I don’t ever want to see another John Wayne movie again,” I knew exactly what she meant. So many of the women in Western movies were simply the background figures standing at stoves or pleading with their husbands not to go out to a gunfight.