Book dossier

Mothers of the South; portraiture of the white tenant farm woman

by Margaret Jarman Hagood

A generation of social scientists was raised on the work of Margaret Jarman Hagood, a leading sociologist of the Depression South. In 1937 Hagood visited 254 tenant houses in the Carolina Piedmont, Georgia, and Alabama, talking with and listening to southern mothers. Mothers of the South records not only the results of her work but the voices, attitudes, and expectations of the people she interviewed. Tenant farming, a widespread way of life in the thirties, began to disappear with the coming of World War II and increased farm mechanization and became virtually nonexistent by the 1970s. Hagood's work is invaluable for its insight into this lost world. It serves as a window into the life experiences, agricultural practices, social organization, and values of tenant families.