
Mama Learned Us to Work
Farm Women in the New South
Lu Ann Jones(Author)
The University of North Carolina Press
Published on 30. September 2002
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-0-8078-5384-9 (ISBN)
Description
Black and white farm women as consumers, producers, and agents of change; 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.
Reviews / Votes
"Lu Ann Jones's exhaustive research and careful analysis vividly recreates country life in the first half of the twentieth century. Mama Learned Us to Work focuses on the hopes, dreams, and immense resourcefulness of southern rural women, who were at the center of sweeping rural transformation." - Pete Daniel, author of Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950sMore details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Chapel Hill
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 163 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
331 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8078-5384-9 (9780807853849)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
10/2003
The University of North Carolina Press
€29.49
Available for download
Person
Lu Ann Jones is associate professor of history at the University of South Florida. She is a coauthor of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World.