All We Knew Was to Farm : Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941

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.

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.

Walker''s thoroughly researched study of upcountry farm women in the interwar era does for women of this region of the South what Mary Neth''s Preserving the Family Farm does for midwestern farm women, meticulously recounting their experience as they cope with economic depression, the increasing influence in their lives of the federal government and urban institutions, and the beginnings of modern agribusiness. Her careful consideration of race and class moves us a step closer to dismantling the myth of Appalachian homogeneity. Her sources are appropriate, and her use of oral history material is particularly skillful.
—Katherine Jellison, Ohio University