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

1. EUGENICS AND POLITICS: Unlikely Unions and the Stereotyping of the Southern Poor White Woman

13 1 eugenics and politics Unlikely Unions and the Stereotyping of the Southern Poor White Woman during the late 1920s and the 1930s, representations of poor white women in literature became dominated by the issue of motherhood. In fact, because of the Great Depression and widespread anxiety about the economic hardships disrupting society, southern poor white mothers emerged as representatives of America’s future possibilities. These mothers , however, did not simply represent America’s desire to withstand dif- ficult times and to emerge from the struggle rejuvenated; for many thinkers , they also represented America’s possible failure if it did not remain entrenched in its conservative traditional values.These values centered on the country’s determination to adhere to traditional family structure and to the traditional gender roles of the Progressive movement.The ideology of the early twentieth century that men should work while women stayed at home with the children, however, no longer worked in this desperate new situation. Men could no longer act as sole “breadwinners” while women worked at home as the primary caretakers (Odem 105–6).Women had to begin working outside the home just so their families could survive (Hall et al. 310–11). While women seemed willing to accept their new role as “breadwinners”alongside their husbands, the majority of the population was not ready to accept this new facet of female identity, which created too many questions about “female independence and sexuality” (Rafter, Creating Born 48). As a result of this anxiety about the economy and changing familial roles, political parties once at odds began working together as they attempted to gain support for their causes and for their plans to revive America. Groups such as the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Roosevelt administration found common ground by the angelic mother and the predatory seductress 14 focusing on a return to family traditions and by focusing on the American mother figure.The CPUSA “promoted images of stable family values anchored by working-class women as sacrificing mother”as a way to become “an American party firmly within American political and cultural traditions ”(Rabinowitz, Labor 55; Shaffer 76), and the Roosevelt administration used these same images to garner support for the New Deal as the Democratic Party hoped to reestablish American power (Rabinowitz, Labor 57). By concentrating on “American [. . .] traditions,” the CPUSA and “New Deal Democrats”wanted to appeal to Americans’desire to normalize their now uncertain social and economic lives (57). This focus on family values and motherhood did not just connect these two dominant political parties to each other; it also helped align the CPUSA and “New Deal Democrats” with the American eugenics movement. Since the late nineteenth century, eugenicists had stressed the importance of motherhood to the future of America. Using the study of genetics and America’s conservative family values, eugenicists hoped to identify genetically “inferior” people, especially women, who would supposedly cause America’s downfall because of their ability to reproduce generations of “inferior” people. Eugenicists shifted their genetic identi- fication strategy by the 1920s and 1930s to become environmentally conscious so that Americans would not see them as class-stereotyping. Like the CPUSA and “New Deal Democrats,” eugenicists wanted to address economic concerns; however, eugenicists saw this as a way to uncover genetic inferiority. Despite this shift in eugenic ideology, however, the focus on poor white women still persisted. From eugenic family studies of the nineteenth century to “socialist eugenics” works of the 1930s, the eugenics movement continually focused on these women as either America’s saviors or America’s destroyers (Joravsky, Lysenko 260). As eugenics began to grow in popularity in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, it became a dominant part of America’s ideology, and both the CPUSA and the Roosevelt administration used the nation’s focus on eugenic concerns to create their own images of motherhood .These groups concentrated on labeling poor white mothers as either sexual deviants set to breed generations of “delinquents” or as “altruistic” mothers set on saving their own families as well as other needy families from destitution (Rafter, Creating Born 159, 89). These opposing images 15 eugenics and politics of poor white motherhood, however, did not allow for these women to emerge as anything more than symbols. Claire M. Roche has suggested that the identity of poor white women has been created in terms of their ability to...