Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In Work, Family, and Faith, the editors Melissa Walker and Rebecca Sharpless achieve their stated aim of providing an “accessible introduction to scholarship on twentieth-century southern rural women” (p. 3). The essays are based on a rich trove of evidence: fascinating oral history interviews, farm magazines of the era, works of the Federal Writers' Project, government documents of the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and material from the archives of the Methodist Church and the Salvation Army. The stories tell about the rural South from the perspective of ordinary women, whose voices come through strong and clear. Sharpless and Walker are to be thanked for sharing the results of their fifteen years of research on rural southern women. They have collected nine essays that tell powerful local stories and, through scholarly analysis by the authors, give those stories universal meaning. Women—black and white—in the poor rural South adapted heroically to the dramatic changes of the twentieth century, balancing work and family, and leavened both with faith.