Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Summer II/Section 01/Mandy Johnson

Mandy Johnson

Overview

Mandy Johnson was an African American midwife in Alabama in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During the Federal Writers Project During the Grean Depression, journalist Ida Prine recorded an interview with her, the only piece of information personally about Johnson.

Mandy Johnson
Born	1867
Died	unknown
Nationality	American
Occupation	Midwife
Spouse(s)	unknown

Personal Life

Mandy Johnson was born in 1867 in Cottage Hill, Alabama. Her father, Levi Johnson, worked for a white land owner named Mr. Lebuzan. In her childhood, Mandy and her 5 siblings, 2 sisters and 3 brothers, would help her father take care of the pigs and chickens on the farm. They lived on the Lebuzan’s land, and Johnson continued to live there until her death.

Johnson married in her youth and had 12 children. Her husband began worked in a sawmill, until an accident left him unable to work there. He transferred to a sugar mill and worked there until he died. His accident led Johnson to become a midwife, since that was one of a few work options available to her. She gained her license soon after and practiced until late into her life. One of her daughters, Rosie, also became a midwife.

Midwifery

African American midwives were popular due to a lack of medical access for African Americans. Like many midwives, Johnson lacked access to a variety of medical equipment and other medicines. Johnson got her papers early in her life, and by the late 1930’s had been retired for a while .

Midwives from Ft. Myers, Florida in 1944

Although she was licensed, the practice of midwifery changed during the time she practiced, gaining more regulations.

Some of the midwifery practices that Johnson described were no longer permitted. One, which involved putting an ax under the bed of a woman in labor, “to cut the pain” , she said helped the midwife and woman get along. Other practices included putting the husband’s hat on top of the wife’s head, giving the women gopher grass tea, and removing the umbilical cord with a piece of linen that was burnt over a fire.

Social Issues

Intersectionality of being a "Modern" Woman and African American

The idea of the “modern” woman began to take hold in the early 20th century. Women began to live in very different ways: flappers challenged the notion of sexuality, suffragists challenged the rights of women, and the beginning of World War II sparked more careers for women . However, African American women did not experience many of those changes1. Many of the prominent suffragists were openly racist, and those that were not “had come to believe that focusing on white women voting was the only way they could get the 19th Amendment through Congress,” . Before the rise of the “modern’ woman, African American woman were a large part of the workforce . However, the jobs that they did were largely low-wage agricultural and domestic service. In the south, many African American women worked as midwives in their societies .

Smith in 1936

Despite the 13th, 15th, and 19th, African American women in the U.S. did not experience the same social privileges and changes as their white counterparts. The “modern” woman in the early 20th century paved the way for many reforms, but was largely based on the lives of white, middle and upper class, women. Instead, African American “New Women” emphasizes motherhood, education, work, and respectability . While both white and Black women used this time to create new identities, the idea of promiscuity and freedoms that white women now championed was not seen as acceptable for Black women. Racism still dictated many parts of their lives, and intersectionality meant that the “Modern” Black Woman was redefined as a better, harder worker rather than free and independent women.

African American Sharecroppers in the South from 1870-1940

After the end of The Civil War in 1965, farmers needed laborers and recently freed slaves needed work. Originally, freed slaves were promised “40 acres and a mule”, their own land to work on. However, Andrew Johnson returned the land to its previous owners in mid 1965, leaving the recently freed slaves to lack land, money and resources . This led to the creation of the sharecropping system, in which white landowners rented land to poor farmers—both black and white—which included a large population of recently freed slaves . This system trapped sharecroppers in a cycle of debt, with unfair conditions that and a “new slavery”. Although technically “free”, many African Americans found themselves in similar situations to slavery, without real opportunity for social mobility.

Sharecropper plowing loc

By 1870, sharecropping was an important part of the southern cotton-planting agriculture. Many African-Americans found themselves struggling to get by. Debt and poverty lead to a lack of opportunities, as many became evicted and had to settle for less pay, work, or land somewhere else. This practice continued until the 1940’s. After the Great Depression, sharecropping began to disappear due to the mechanization of the farming industry .

References

--Sscombs (discuss • contribs) 17:56, 13 July 2020 (UTC)July 13th, 2020 Sarah Combs