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

4. UP FROM EUGENICS: The Gastonia Novels and the Redefining of the Southern Poor White Woman

134 4 up from eugenics The Gastonia Novels and the Redefining of the Southern Poor White Woman because the dualistic images of poor white women as either altruistic mothers or sexual degenerates appeared in “scientific” studies, government-supported publications, and bestselling novels and documentaries , American society had become infiltrated with these stereotypes in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Placing poor white southern women in these stereotypes often required authors to overlook women’s work as farm laborers and their entrance into the “public” workforce during this period (Hall et al. 154). Even authors such as Margaret Jarman Hagood and Erskine Caldwell, who do portray poor white women as laborers, frame the characters within the stereotypes. Hagood acknowledges, in Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman, that poor white farm women work not only as mothers but also as fellow farmhands with their husbands and children (92); however, her discussion of the women’s lives is still centered on their mothering abilities. In God’s Little Acre, Caldwell describes the female mill workers in overtly sexual terms, thereby concentrating more on their sexual freedom than on their economic activity (69). By taking the focus off of the women’s participation in labor, Hagood and Caldwell effectively erase the roles that women play in the maledominated labor force. Despite the absence or the dismissive literary representations of lower-class women’s labor, the entrance of these women into the “public ” workforce as a result of increasing industrialism and decreasing child labor allowed them to participate in a new role as financial providers, a role that actually expanded the altruistic mother expectations. Unlike Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, who just provided emotional support for her family, women working in the mills had to support their families 135 up from eugenics financially as well as emotionally. As familial financial supporters, they had to contend with decreased wages because of their gender (Hall et al. 67), and since they earned less than their male counterparts, women were often employed instead of men, thereby creating animosity amongst the men, some of whom left their families (Hutchins 28). The children of working mothers also suffered because mothers spent less time caring for them and because those families that depended solely upon a mother’s decreased wages often went malnourished (Hall et al. 41). Young, single female workers who did not have to support families with their low wages still suffered because the ruling classes associated their financial freedom with sexual freedom, just as Caldwell does in God’s Little Acre. Of course, their socially misconstrued financial freedom was also hindered as a result of the mill owners’ gender-based wage system (Hall et al. 219). In spite of what these women had to face, they did not simply accept their meager working conditions. Although Caldwell’s female mill workers do not actively participate in the labor strike that the male workers begin (God’s 168–69), many mill women did participate in the labor movement. They fought against their poverty and, when applicable, their children’s poverty, as active participants in labor strikes, advocating for higher wages and shorter work days. Because women made up a higher percentage of the workers due to the gendered wage system, women actually led many of the labor strikes (Hutchins 213, 219). The women’s participation had to be qualified, however. Although working mill mothers and single working women both participated as labor activists, the mill mother’s activism was generally more accepted by communist labor leaders and society leaders. Since the activism of working mill mothers could be directly linked to the welfare of the children rather than to the rights of women laborers, their activism was more accepted than the activism of female workers who had no dependents to support (Hutchins 58). As a result, labor issues affecting the lives of female workers, whether they had dependents or not, were often overlooked both by the CPUSA and the upper and middle classes.The CPUSA continued to focus on the altruistic mother figure, and the ruling classes used the activism of the unmarried working women as another reason to label them as sexual miscreants and troublemakers. As a result, even the labor activities of women were diluted through the dualistic stereotypes. the angelic mother and the predatory seductress 136 Despite the lack of attention...