Culling the Men Out from the Boys: Concepts of Success in the Recollections of a Southern Farmer

Abstract

Historians examining twentieth-century transformations of the Southern countryside have shown us how larger structural forces such as world commodities markets, farm mechanization, and government agricultural policy changed the lives of rural Southerners. They have used oral histories to demonstrate how race, class, and gender have shaped rural peoples' responses to those structural forces. Individual responses were highly personal. Southern farm folk exposed to the same structural forces responded in a wide variety of ways that the constraints of race, class, and gender alone do not explain. Personal desires, ambitions, and family concerns were also powerful motivators. Like all of us, rural people construct narratives about agricultural transformations in selective ways.'