Gender Inequality In The New South

After the Civil War the Southern economy which relied on slavery was destroyed. New South boosters came in during the industrial era and worked to improve the South by building railroads and factories. Southerners also began shipping out raw materials such and timber and coal. Just as before the war a majority of the South was poor. In books such as Rick Bragg’s Ava’s Man and Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls by Victoria Byerly the lives of the working class poor in the New South were described in detailed oral histories. The working poor of the New South era is a broad category which includes a wide variety of groups that all share similar obstacles because of their poverty. A few of these groups lived in mill villages. Work in the mills could be dangerous. Aliene Walser knew of a girl that had her hair and scalp pulled off by a machine and the insurance company brought her to court to try to avoid paying for the injury (Byerly 85). Women were afraid of their jobs. They worked around dangerous machines and were …show more content…
Women and African American had it off worse. Women got paid less than men even when they had to do more work, and African Americans had to put up with subordination because of their job as domestic and just because poverty didn’t make the color line go away. The working class poor had many different groups, including mill workers, domestics, and rural migrant workers. Although these groups would not have identified themselves together they had common beliefs and obstacles because of their poverty. Due to the lack of material wealth and short dangerous lives, people placed and emphasis on family. All these groups also had a hard time of advancing because there was very little economic mobility available to them, in part because of limited education. Poverty effected the way people in the New South lived and how they viewed life, in unique ways sometimes without regard to race, gender, or