Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940
Journal article by Lu Ann Jones; Journal of Southern History, Vol. 66, 2000
Journal Article Excerpt
Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940. by LU ANN JONES Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940. By Rebecca Sharpless. Studies in Rural Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxvi, 319. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4760-7; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2456-9.) The scholarship on American farmwomen has flowered during the past two decades, but no systematic study of rural southern women has replaced sociologist Margaret Jarman Hagood's documentary classic, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (Chapel Hill, 1939; rprt, 1977), published sixty years ago. Historian Rebecca Sharpless has stepped into this void, and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices is a smart and humane study that gives voice to women who toiled on cotton farms in the Blackland Prairie region of Texas in the first half of this century. It is an important contribution to the literature on the modern rural South, the region's women, and oral history. Sharpless has written "a book of memories turned to stories" (p. xii). Oral history interviews with white, African American, and Mexican women join a handful of written memoirs, autobiographies, and contemporary sociological studies such as Ruth Allen's The Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton (University of Texas Bulletin no. 3134, September 8, 1931) to provide a base of evidence. Sharpless seeks to discern "the physical conditions of women's lives in the cotton South" and "how they coped with a reality that was bleak for many" (p. xviii). After a short introduction to the cotton economy and the crop-lien credit system in east central Texas, Sharpless settles into a rich ethnography of women's work. The first three chapters focus on rural women's domestic activities, and Sharpless uses stories to catalog the nature of her subjects' family relationships from the cradle to the grave, how they housed and clothed their families, and the food they raised and fixed to feed them. From daily household routines, Sharpless follows the women into broader economic and social worlds. "Whether they were hired by strangers or neighbors, or worked only for their own families," Sharpless observes, "women played a critical part in the production of cotton" (p. 159) as they chopped and picked the crop. They also defined their communities as they visited neighbors, cared for the sick, mourned the dead, and worshipped at church. By the 1930s women further shaped the Blackland Prairie as they flocked to the region's burgeoning towns and cities. In a world where gender, race, and class constrained their choices, women exercised autonomy and agency in small but meaningful ways. They used pretty pages from magazines to insulate the drafty walls of ramshackle houses. They grew as much food as possible in order to decrease their dependence on merchants and "to subvert the crop-lien system" (p. 110). They offered intercessory prayers on behalf of friends and relatives who needed the Lord's help to ease their burdens. In the end, many young single women traded the narrow choices of the countryside for the wider options of town. The book's strength--the exquisite detail of the stories told--can at times be its weakness. Through the memories, Sharpless evokes much of rural worlds lost. One can taste artfully seasoned sausage, grieve an infant's sudden death, and feel one's back break as, a woman plucks bolls and fills a heavy cotton sack made all the more burdensome by the weight of a toddler in tow. At times, however, one longs for fewer stories and more of Sharpless's astute analysis and graceful prose. Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices is a careful regional study, sensitive to the differences among rural women as well as the common ground that they shared. Sharpless respects her subjects and the ambiguities of rural life; perhaps best of all, she has written a book that farmwomen and scholars alike can enjoy. LU ANN JONES East Carolina University -1- |
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