All We Knew Was to Farm

Melissa Walker is an associate professor of history at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

An engaging study... For upcountry southern women, the years 1919-1941 were indicative of the economic, political, and social chaos existing throughout segregated America... Walker capably demonstrates how families were forced by the limitations of race and class to choose situations that provided little or no real opportunity, but she also brilliantly illustrates how some rural people were able to adapt to change. -- Valerie Grim Journal of American History Voices of ordinary women who experienced extraordinary changes resonate in Melissa Walker's incisive study of twentieth-century transformations of southern agricultural communities. -- Elizabeth D. Schafer H-SAWH, H-Net Reviews Melissa Walker has done an admirable job of mining oral interviews, TVA records, letters, diaries, and farming magazines to piece together the story of how women contributed to the family income... Walker deftly negotiates the intersection of race, class, and gender. -- Gaul Graham Journal of East Tennessee History Walker shows how women adapted to rapid change with courage, strength, creativity, and persistence... Walker's fine regional study will be useful to historians of women, the South, Appalachia, rural life, and labor issues. A valuable addition to the growing number of works on women in the early-twentieth-century South. -- Suzanne Marshall History: Reviews of New Books Historian Melissa Walker provides an account of changes in women's labor practices and economic activity in the upcountry South during the inter-war years... Readable, credible, and well-researched. -- Shaunna L. Scott Journal of Appalachian Studies The theme of the study is to show how the status of farm women changes from 1919-1941 in a period of economic crisis. Changing from a region of subsistence farming to one of commercial farming and interference by government action during the depression and New Deal years, women learned to cope... [Walker's] descriptions of rural ways and beliefs are true to form. -- Cline E. Hall South Carolina Historical Magazine Walker does a particularly good job of emphasizing the ambivalence that upcountry farm women felt about leaving the farms... All We Knew Was to Farm makes an extremely important contribution to rural literature by gendering the transformation of the upland South. -- Rebecca Sharpless Georgia Historical Quarterly Walker provides a much needed account of the South that should be of interest to all those who study the twentieth century. -- Kathleen Mapes Journal of Social History 2005

• Contents:List of Figures List of Tables AcknowledgementsIntroduction: "All We Knew Was to Farm" 1. Rural Life in the Upcountry South: The Scene in 1920 2. Making Do and Doing Without: Farm Women Cope with the Economic Crisis, 1920-1941 3. "Grandma Would Find Some Way to Make Some Money": Farm Women's Cash Incomes 4. Mixed Messages: Home Extension Work among Upcountry Farm Women in the 1920s and 1930s 5. Government Relocation and Upcountry Women 6. Rural Women and Industrialization 7. Farm Wives and Commercial Farming 8. "The Land of Do Without": The Changing Face of Sevier County, Tennessee, 1908-1940 Epilogue: The Persistence of Rural ValuesAbbreviations Notes Bibliographical Essay Index