Tenant Housewife Essay

The tenant farm mother of the South was in a very unique position compared to almost every other person in the United States at the time. These women were put into almost every imaginable adverse external condition while filling the roles of mother, housekeeper, and field laborer. The white tenant farm woman was put into many types of dilemmas that would test the endurance of the whole South. Living in the South during the 1930s was a mixed bag of troubles and livelihoods. The economics of the time put a stranglehold on many families, while social level kept the families going and attending church as well as school. The cultural practices reinforced the notion that women were the housemother and the father the breadwinner trying to remain the …show more content…
There were many ways the tenant housewife stayed social even with the constant moving around of others or the children growing up to become adults. Throughout the South there were many families that lived between 3 to 18 miles from a town making visiting a town an experience in itself. This being though, many families were not far from a store to which the tenants would buy their goods from. When many of the women were asked what neighborhood they preferred, 2/3 wanted to remain where they were, suggesting that they merely were used to the area and did not want to move. One large aspect of the social practices in the South were churches and religion. The church was an important aspect of the South because it played a big part in the lives of families and the upbringing to which the children would be raised. Next to the church, a social presence that was prevalent were schools and clubs like the Parent-Teach Association and demonstration clubs. Clubs like these were hard to maintain much like corn shucking meetings where woman watched the men shuck corn and they made food for them. All these types of social experiences attempted to keep neighbors and neighborhoods together, but they were not strong enough of groups to do so. A lot of the time put into these group experiences could be better suited to doing things in the home or helping in the field and this was an excuse that many tenant …show more content…
One very large practice was the conception of multiple children and then raising the children up until adulthood. There was a very high fertility rate and even though this was true, it did not stop the southern tenant wife from continuing on with her work in making sure the household remained afloat. It was almost a cultural norm to reproduce and have a decent amount of children instead of only 1 or 2. Many women in the South did not practice contraception in the not for lack of trying, but because of a number of reasons. There were 5 distinct reasons they did not practice it. One was changing of old habits was hard since they had already standardized sexual relations in the marriage, another was insufficient knowledge of contraceptive methods and embarrassment of searching for help. A third reason was the expense factor for methods that prevented anything. The fourth method was a lack of willingness from one of the partners because it prevented the reason for child bearing and the fifth reason was because of religious prejudice. These were all reasons a high number of children were constantly being born in this era of depression and low yielding crops. Along with this standard cultural practice, there were a number of reasons it made it harder for child raising because of a number of physical and emotional needs. Supplying children from birth to moving out with physical needs such as clothing and