California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and the Making of a New Deal Narrative

6. Women on the Breadlines

183 When Lange first stepped out of her studio, she took her camera onto a street that was predominantly male. Breadlines and social agencies, while staffing women, employed more men and served more men, making women a minority in the visual landscape.1 As a woman on the street, Lange was forced to work within a context historically shaped by social stereotypes, none of which looked favorably at women on the street. Despite the constructs she faced, some of her first photographs articulated the Great Depression through a distinctively female vernacular, protesting conditions through feminine signifiers rather than strike signs. Recognizing early on that women suffered a double onus, even at the very onset of the Depression, Lange recorded in one of her earliest street photographs a simple testimony to the expectation that, despite economic conditions, women must conform to socially constructed behaviors, including visual markers: good women still “looked” a certain way. In her photograph of a woman’s legs, the rent hosiery, the intricate and even arduous cha p t er 6 Women on the Breadlines 184 / Women on the Breadlines process, repeated again and again, of stitching up stockings when it proved too costly either to buy new or to forego altogether— all are conveyed in the hard focus and crystalline detail. Lange’s photograph of mended hosiery insists on the difficulty a woman faced when she was not provided the means to meet the expectations society held for her. Those expectations carried deep and volatile meanings when it came to public assistance, and before Lange headed into the fields, she produced a remarkable series of photographs taken at a government relief line. Unlike her photograph “White Angel Breadline ,” which would become famous, these photographs document women lining up for food. The differences in the photographs reveal much of what Lange recorded socially. “White Angel Breadline ,” with its distant range, suggests the photographic subject as one of many; he is outside, a man among many men in a crowded, open-air forum. The photographs Lange took of women are inside a building, capturing a darkened, interior aspect suggesting a very different kind of breadline. Eight are intimate portraits, taken from close range, suggesting some level of acceptance or even participation from the women. One woman hunts through her brown paper bag. Another stares, a pained expression on her face, at a block of cheese or butter. Three more women accept brown bags, all looking grim or unhappy. In one, a young Asian American woman stands at the front of the line, waiting, her face in neutral composition. None of the women looks happy except for one, a woman in a beret and tattered fur collar, a clutch purse tucked beneath her arm, looking pleased . . . or perhaps looking as she thinks she should.2 Lange’s photographs are in many ways a mirror of Meridel Le Sueur’s article “Women on the Breadlines,” published in the Untitled, c. 1933. Dorothea Lange, American, 1895–1965.© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor. 186 / Women on the Breadlines journal New Masses (1926–1948), the leading Communist mouthpiece .3 Considering the differences in the women’s backgrounds and the path each took to confronting women on the breadlines, it is remarkable that they would produce such similar texts. Born five years after Lange, Le Sueur took an indirect and often difficult route from her Anglo, middle-class origins to “red” writing .4 She was raised by a grandmother who lectured on temperance and a mother who made money by lecturing on women’s issues. After leaving her first husband (Meridel’s father, William Wharton), Marian Wharton married Arthur Le Sueur, an active socialist, when Meridel was seventeen. Taking her stepfather’s last name, Le Sueur herself joined the Communist Party (CP) in 1924, writing regularly for the Daily Worker, and in 1927 went to jail for protesting the Sacco and Vanzetti executions. After the birth of her second daughter, she divorced her husband in 1930, but continued her work for the CP, amid some controversy. It was, one member recalled, “generally felt that it was not only foolish but even wrong to have a child . . . because you couldn’t feed it [and] because you wouldn’t be able to do what you should be doing.” As a single mother, Le Sueur’s life could be economically marginal, allowing her to...