Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105/Section068/Ms. Moore

Farm near Asheville, North Carolina.

Federal Writers Project: Ms. Moore

Overview-

Ms. Moore was a country-style women who worked hard in life. She fashioned several jobs as a convenience store employee and later in life decided to open her own boarding school. She gets engaged twice but marries a man named Sam who her mother warns against. She eventually losses a child to miscarriage and then another in a tragic accident. She sometimes struggles to make ends meet financially but continues persevering no matter what.

Early Life and Education-

Ms. Moore was born in Madison County North Carolina in 1911. When she was a young girl around the age of 7, she had to work on the farm and take care of her sick father who was suffering from tuberculosis and heart disease. Ms. Moore’s father eventually passed away and her mother was left with little money. After Ms. Moore’s father dies, the family buys back their land but a terrible hailstorm comes along the next year that wipes out all the crops and their prize cow. With little left, Moore starts a new school when the family moved in with her oldest sister in Athens Georgia. When she turns 13 (before she goes back to school) she has to work hard at taking care of 3 of her sister’s children. They save enough money and eventually have enough to pay a servant to help them out. At almost 14, she was placed in the 4th grade because she was so behind in her academics. Some of her physical work was relieved in going back to school but educating herself was a miserable experience because she was too old for her grade and always behind in the schoolwork. She only stayed in school for 2 more years from when she started. The guilt of being behind made her want to drop-out. Ms. Moore later states that only people without an education understand the burden of not being fortunate enough to have one.

Mid to Late Life-

The family collectively worked odd jobs until they saved enough money to pay off some debts. Their bills had been piling up as they were forced to take out loans, mortgages, and other financial support to make ends meet. She eventually gets engaged to a man named Sam who she went to school with all her life. Prior to Sam, Moore gets somewhat engaged to a man named Clem, but she does not accept his ring for very long. She takes Sam away from one of her close girlfriends because she believes that he is her “prince charming.” Her mother forbids the marriage because she knows that Sam, like his father before him, is a drunk. Young Ms. Moore does not listen and proceeds to marry him. Ms. Moore recalls that life became a bit easier for a short time as Sam earns a good living, but alcohol makes him lose job after job. In the meantime, two babies are born that need to be provided for. So, she stops relying on Sam and works at several convenient stores for varying owners. Moore ends up having a 3rd child but unfortunately has a miscarriage that leaves her bedridden for 6 weeks. Moore discovers that Sam is cheating on her with the town Sunday school teacher. The devastating news takes a mental toll on Ms. Moore and she tries to ignore the knowledge for some time. After knowing this for years, she finally confronts him and his mistress. Nothing changes in their marriage, but she decides to quit her job and work for herself. She had a lot of debt, but she works hard to keep the collectors away. One of the children dies in a car accident with Sam’s father who like Sam was also an alcoholic. Ms. Moore quits her job and opens up her own boarding school, like her mother, and works off her debts as an independent woman.

Social Context:

Women’s role in the workforce and Education

It wasn’t until 1940 that half of the students in the USA would graduate from high school. War times and the great depression made school take the back seat. Help was needed around the home and many of the previously working men were shipped off to war. Women picked up a new and important role in the workforce. “From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million. The main reason for women’s higher employment rates was the fact that the jobs available to women—so called “women’s work”— were in industries that were less impacted by the stock market.”

Prohibition and Alcohol Consumption

Prohibition ends in 1933 not long before the time when Sam’s drinking starts to consume his life. After prohibition ends, many were excited about alcohol being legal and sadly turned to the bottle when times got hard during the great depression. “In the 17th and 18th centuries alcohol was highly regarded, universally consumed, and even Puritans called it the Good Creature of God.”

The Great Depression on Economy, Dept, and Financial Circumstances

The establishment of credit and buying on the margin in the early 1900s gave many people the opportunity to spend money they never had which was great. However, when the economy crashed after the roaring ’20s, many were left in debt. Before the 1930s there was very little regulation on the free markets in which people were investing in. In the early 1920s, New York-based banks were lending out millions of dollars to ordinary people and placing interest rates around 10%. Which would result in amounts of money that people could never payback.

Women’s Health and Sex Education

Miscarriage was sadly not unusual. A miscarriage was expected in a family of many sizes and sometimes not even considered a loss because the burden of a child was so large. This is a sad reality because birth control was not accessible or hardly even invented. Sex education was unheard of as not yet established by the United States vs. Dennett case. “The 1873 Comstock Act outlawed the production and distribution of any materials that were deemed to be obscene or capable of arousing adolescents. Mary Ware Dennett, a women's rights activist and pioneer in birth control and sex education, was one of the many who fell victim to this law. Dennett was arrested in 1929 for distributing her sex education pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life, written for her teenage sons after finding the sex education materials produced by the government to be insufficient. This paper argues that Dennett's pamphlet was scrutinized in United States v. Dennett because it emphasized not only the procreative and health aspects of sex, but also the emotional and physical pleasures of sex, which were topics that were avoided within the government's work. This paper compares The Sex Side of Life to the government's sex education materials from the early 1900s to provide insight into the inadequacies she found within them and to show the specific ways in which the content of her pamphlet differed from the work produced by the government.”

Citations:

Rotondi, Jessica Pearce. “Underpaid, But Employed: How the Great Depression Affected Working Women.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, March 11, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/working-women-great-depression.

Levine, Harry Gene. “The Alcohol Problem in America: From Temperance to Alcoholism,” January 24, 2006 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.13600443.1984.tb03845.x.

Goldfarb, Brent, and David A. Kirsch. “There Is No Direct Access to This Service.,” Spring 2019.  The Museum of American Finance http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fdocview%2F2276829301%3Faccountid.

Breda, H. (n.d.). United States v. Dennett: United States v. Dennett: The Battle for Sex Education in the Early 1900s. Retrieved October 20, 2020, from https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/curce/2019/posters/57/