The Angelic Mother and the Predatory Seductress: Poor White Women in Southern Literature of the Great Depression

3. MAKING THE EUGENIC “MYTH” A REALITY: The Fictionalizing of Depression-Era Documentary Work

98 3 making the eugenic “myth” a reality The Fictionalizing of Depression-Era Documentary Work along with william faulkner’s, Erskine Caldwell’s, and John Steinbeck’s fictional representations, the Depression also provided a fertile ground for nonfiction works about poor white families. In fact, William Stott has argued that documentary work became “the primary expression of thirties America” (x–xi). The reality of the Depression proved much more dynamic and shocking than any fiction an author could create, and because of this real drama permeating American society, authors used “social documentary” to tell the stories of the afflicted and downtrodden citizens affected by this devastating historical event (Stott 20). New Deal affiliates, Communist supporters and sympathizers, and sociologists used documentary methods to create public and political sympathy for poverty-stricken Americans, and through their documentaries, they hoped to spur the nation into action. That action, however, did not just consist of calls for economic relief; it also raised the possibility of using eugenic “relief”to assist those affected. Documentary works tested the iconic “Mom” image used during this period by presenting mothers who had to face poverty surrounded by their often starving children (Rabinowitz , Labor 58).These images of Depression motherhood often created conflicting messages, though, because, while the mothers could be thought of as representatives of the nation standing firm in the face of despair, they and their children could also be thought of as economic burdens. As a result, the possibility of eugenic sterilization and segregation became a common feature of contemporary documentary work as authors suggested methods that might stop America’s plunge into total devastation. With the national interest in the South and how its economic failures and reproductive rate would affect the rest of the nation, many of the 99 making the eugenic “myth” a reality documentary authors focused their studies on this troubled region. Such works generally highlighted the effects of economic depression by focusing both on the tenant and sharecropping systems that continued to keep farmers from succeeding and on the ever-expanding families that farmers had. Since many of the tenant and sharecropping families could not escape their poverty, many of them looked at having children as a way to increase their labor force, thereby increasing their ability to support their families.The desire for a large labor force, coupled with lower-class women ’s lack of knowledge about birth control, made the prospect of having a large family almost inevitable. Large southern families, however, were not looked upon as economic necessities by others in the nation. Instead, the large number of southern children was thought of as an unsettling image of the future of America. Since the women of the Southeast produced so many children,“[t]he more than twenty-two million native white women of childbearing age were destined not only to be mothers of the next generation of southerners, but, to a significant degree, of the next generation of Americans” (Scott v). The cultural and social implications of this possibility pervaded documentary works about the South. Because of the national implications of southern poor white motherhood , documentary authors put a great emphasis on the child-rearing abilities of these mothers and on the future capabilities of the children these women had. Just as in the supposedly documentary eugenic family studies, the “good” mother / “bad” mother theme resonated throughout these works (Gertrude C. Davenport 68–69). For every “Migrant Mother” and Annie Mae Gudger persistently keeping her family from falling into deplorable conditions, women such as Mollie Goodwin and Ivy Woods represented the problematic southern mother afflicted by excessive sexuality and insufficient maternal capabilities. If these mothers really were going to bear and raise the next generation of Americans, documentary authors intended to assess their capabilities even as they sympathized with their economic situation.The documentary work of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, directly sponsored by New Deal programs, along with Margaret Jarman Hagood’s sociological study Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, put these families and mothers at the forefront of documentary work on the Great Depression, and each the angelic mother and the predatory seductress 100 of these books takes the altruistic mother symbol of American hope and complicates it with the concerns of eugenic...