Farm women of the twentieth-century South have been portrayed as
oppressed, worn out, and isolated. Lu Ann Jones tells quite a
different story in
Mama Learned Us to Work. Building upon
evocative oral histories, she encourages us to understand these
women as consumers, producers, and agents of economic and cultural
change.
As consumers, farm women bargained with peddlers at their
backdoors. A key business for many farm women was the "butter and
egg trade--small-scale dairying and raising chickens. Their
earnings provided a crucial margin of economic safety for many
families during the 1920s and 1930s and offered women some
independence from their men folks. These innovative women showed
that poultry production paid off and laid the foundation for the
agribusiness poultry industry that emerged after World War II.
Jones also examines the relationships between farm women and home
demonstration agents and the effect of government-sponsored rural
reform. She discusses the professional culture that developed among
white agents as they reconciled new and old ideas about women's
roles and shows that black agents, despite prejudice, linked their
clients to valuable government resources and gave new meanings to
traditions of self-help, mutual aid, and racial uplift.