Why read Mothers of the South?

Book cover of Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman

Book description

This study is based primarily on case records of more than one hundred white tenant farm mothers living in North Carolina, but comparisons are made with an equal number living in the Deep South. Through its scientific approach, this study serves all those who seek a better understanding of rural…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Mothers of the South as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Melissa Walker

Author

Strictly speaking, this is not a first-person account, but it includes dozens of detailed case studies drawn from interviews with white tenant farm women in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It was written in the 1930s by the pioneering sociologist Margaret Jarman Hagood, one of a group of practitioners at University of North Carolina who sought to produce academic studies that advanced solutions to the socio-economic problems that plagued the rural South. Although Hagood feared that “it is impossible for me to do justice to it either in observing or recording,” her study paints a vivid picture of…

From Melissa's list on The best books for first-person accounts of life in the twentieth century South.