Mothers of the South
Subtitle: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman
Contributors: Anne Firor Scott (Introduction); Marion Post (Photographer); Dorothea Lange (Photographer)
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: December 1996
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9780813916965
Subjects: Rural communities; Social classes; Social history; Women's studies; Inter-war period, 1918-1939; Sociology; Rural Sociology; Sociology Of Women; Women's Studies - History; USA; Rural conditions; Sharecropping; Southern States; Women
Description: 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. Mothers of the South records not only the results of her work but the voices, attitudes, and expectations of the people she interviewed. Tenant farming, a widespread way of life in the thirties, began to disappear with the coming of World War II and increased farm mechanization and became virtually nonexistent by the 1970s. Hagood's work is invaluable for its insight into this lost world. It serves as a window into the life experiences, agricultural practices, social organization, and values of tenant families.