The crash of the stock market late in 1929 ushered in the Great Depression when a failing economy gripped the nation. Businesses and banks failed, workers lost their jobs and many families lost their homes. In Arkansas, women struggled to survive and make a life for themselves and their loved ones during this economic disaster.

Families of evicted sharecroppers, 1936
Courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission

The depression affected women directly and indirectly. Females comprised a quarter of the workforce and suffered the loss of needed jobs. Married women who worked faced discrimination and public resentment because society viewed them as taking jobs away from men, even though their jobs stayed within the traditional women’s sphere. Couples married less frequently because men lacked the ability to support a family. Husbands abandoned their families and left their wives to provide for the family.

Arkansans found help in charitable organizations and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government programs. In 1935, Arkansas became the first southern state to fill all its Works Progress Administration slots for women. Throughout the state, in towns such as Dewitt, Paragould, Malvern and Harrison, WPA workers served hot lunches to school children, made clothes in sewing rooms, tended to the sick in household aid programs and taught adult education classes.

Group of people in an emergency shelter being served hot meals during the 1937 flood
Courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission

Arkansas also housed one of five National Youth Administration Camps for young black women sponsored by the WPA. Named for Mary McLeod Bethune, director of the National Youth Administration-Negro Division, the camp offered liberal arts and vocational training classes.

Arkansas women did more than just seek help during the Depression; they also provided help. They volunteered and contributed to charitable causes. For example, Mrs. Leona Marks sponsored a health class in Stuttgart taught by Mrs. Belle Barnett. Topics included how to disinfect a room, the number of bones in the body and the number of heartbeats per minute. Other women sponsored WPA projects that provided jobs for the female applicants. They also opened their homes to extended family members who had nowhere else to go.

Distribution of clothing through the "Save the Children" Federation
Courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission

Women persevered by doing what they did best. At home they grew gardens and canned food. They sewed clothes for themselves and children and when those wore out they remade the material into something else. They scrimped, saved and shared. Some worked outside the home and they all worked inside the home. They survived, lived and learned during the 1930’s and passed on that knowledge to their daughters.

“Times for my family were hard…We had to put our automobile ‘up on blocks’ and go back to using a team and wagon for transportation…We didn’t consider ourselves to be poor, as we thought everyone was ‘in the same boat.’”