Country Women Cope with Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories

Introduction: Farm Women and Their Stories

Introduction Farm Women and Their Stories Stories . . . are the tale, the people who tell them, the words they are made of, the knot of memory and imagination that turns material facts into cultural meanings. Stories . . . communicate what history means to human beings. Alessandro Portelli I have listened to stories about hard times on the farm for my whole life. Growing up on an east Tennessee dairy farm in the heart of what was then a thoroughly rural community, I spent many hours listening to the older people around me describe those challenging early-twentieth-century farm years. I heard my grandparents and their friends lament drought years, early freezes, and low livestock and crop prices. They told vivid stories about farmhouses burning, children falling out of cherry trees, and colorful hired hands. Even my parents’ generation got in on the act, comparing new farming disasters to the year the hail destroyed the wheat crop and measuring new ideas to improve profitability against the years “we grew tomatoes.” Given the way that these stories molded my consciousness—the way they provided me with a way of understanding my family’s past—I guess it is no surprise that I have centered my academic studies on the stories that people tell about farm life. I turned to historians’ accounts of life on the land in the early-twentieth-century South to place the stories I heard in a larger context, first writing an undergraduate thesis on the impact of the Tennessee Valley Authority on agriculture. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the impact of twentieth-century transformations of southern agriculture on the region’s women. Although government records and other documents provided plenty of details about the nature of the transformation, these written sources provided few clues to what women themselves were thinking and feeling. To understand women’s responses to the changes sweeping their lives, I turned again to the stories the old farm people told. Alessandro Portelli is right that stories “communicate what history means to human beings.” Stories are powerful tools for understanding the ways ordinary people interpret the larger events shaping their lives. People tell stories to make sense of the world around them; in the words of historian Rhys xvi Introduction Isaac, the story is “a developed form of narrative that pervasively orders our worlds.” He goes on to explain that Stories generate and sustain most of our knowledge of human affairs through their terse presentation, review, and evaluation of particular actions, great and small. In telling, interpreting, and commenting on our own and others’ actions, we gain our most valued knowledge of ourselves and others. In establishing a sense of person and a sense of self, stories do essential cultural work.1 Isaac points to another function of stories: people use stories to express their sense of who they are—their identity. By telling a life story, an individual not only talks about the activities that filled her days, but she can also assert to a listener her values, hopes and dreams, disappointments and setbacks— all the facets that make an individual unique. People tell stories as a means of sustaining their personal identities—their sense of uniqueness.2 Finally, people use stories to educate others about the past—their personal past and the way the larger historical past affected ordinary people. In the process they communicate ideas about how people should live their lives and about the range of possibilities for human beings in any given setting. As Tim O’Brien has observed, “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”3 First and foremost, then, this is a book of stories. It is an edited collection of oral histories from women who lived in rural South Carolina and Tennessee in the first half of the twentieth century. The stories that these women tell provide readers with insights into the ways ordinary women experienced economic hardship, agricultural transformation, and the joys and challenges of rural life. By reading their stories, we get a sense of the things these women thought were important and the lessons they wanted to pass on to the next generation. They share vivid memories of the transformations that gripped the rural South during the early and mid...