Women’s lot in rural Texas a Southern story

Rebecca Sharpless’s book Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 delves into a little explored aspect of 20th century culture – what life was like for the average Southerner – with far more depth than any high school history textbook or PBS program could hope for.

What might at first seem a dry, academic topic is, in reality, the story of the South for the vast multitude of individuals who lived their lives below the Mason-Dixon line up until the start of World War II, and beyond.

Rural women, according to Sharpless, a professor at Texas Christian University, comprised the largest part of the adult population of Texas until 1940 and in the American South until 1960.

On the cotton farms of Central Texas, women’s labor was essential. In addition to working untold hours in the fields, women shouldered most family responsibilities, including raising the kids, cooking food, keeping house and raising vegetables and fruit to feed the family, Sharpless writes.

Much like the contributions of poor white males, the contributions of rural women to the southern agricultural economy have remained largely overlooked and untold.

Using oral history interviews and written memoirs to describe the shared poverty and hard labor of these women, Sharpless weaves a moving account of women’s lives on Texas cotton farms.

Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices looks at women from a variety of different backgrounds, including blacks, whites, Mexicans, Germans and Czechs, and how they managed to muddle through circumstances that would break many today.

Given the reputation that the blue-collar Southern male of 75 to 100 years ago had for hard living, Sharpless is no doubt correct that the welfare of a family depended heavily upon the efforts the family’s matriarch.