Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Fall/Section009/Gertrude Hall

Gertrude Hall
Other names	"Mary Green"
Occupation	Domestic service
Parent(s)	Nancy Lawson, Sam Lawson

Overview

African American owned "shack" in Columbia, South Carolina

Gertrude Hall of Columbia, South Carolina is initially described by her interviewer as resembling an “animal in distress.” (Lea 1938, 1151) At age forty-four, her tall, emaciated frame reflects a life of hardships and struggle. Hall shares her small, shack-like home with her sick mother, two daughters, four grandchildren, and occasionally her husband who is brought up as a mean man. She is the last of Nancy Lawson’s children, so it is her who bears the brunt of her mother’s care. Hall has been unable to work after a malaria fever she caught in 1936, so, as shown by the undernourished children in the Hall household, money has been tight for a while. For years, Hall has been attempting to collect Lawson’s promised, old-age pension but to no avail. She states that she wants all her children and grandchildren to go to school as she did in hopes of them having a better life with some education.

The personal history of Gertrude Hall reflects the economic situation of America around the time of the 1930’s Great Depression. It also brings into consideration topics of race and gender in regard to the political sphere of the South at the time.

Biography

Living Through the Great Depression

As a black woman in the south during the Great Depression, Gertrude Hall did not have many opportunities for employment. The opportunities she did have fell under the category of “informal economy” jobs such as domestic service which Hall did for several years. Despite not holding a stable job or making a sufficient income, Hall was not officially qualified as unemployed while working in domestic service. Because of this, she was unable to obtain financial aid (her mother’s old age pension, relief for costs of food/housing) from the government during the Great Depression. This contributed to her struggles in sustaining herself and her family but it also reflected the country’s view on gender at the time by promoting the idea that only worthy, male bread winners deserved to reap the benefits of government plans designed to help the less fortunate (which typically included black women).

Hall has been severely impacted by the financial situation of the Great Depression. Hall describes her monetary struggles by detailing her current expenses in contrast with her limited earnings. Since being out of work, Hall has found it difficult to feed her family, especially since her husband has been of no help. She also mentions how she has been unable to collect pension money for her old and ailing mother. Hall and her large family are forced to live in a small shack in an area described as a slum. They are also noticeably undernourished and inadequately clothed.

Social Context

Black domestic servant in Atlanta, Georgia

The Female Experience During the Great Depression

During the financial crisis of the Great Depression, “more women entered the work force during the economically tough era, but the jobs they took were relegated as "women's work" and poorly paid.” (Rotondi 2019) This included odd jobs such as domestic service which was relatively unstable and set women up for financial hardships unique to those experienced by men.

Adding to the barrier between women and financial stability during the 1930s, after WWII and during the Great Depression, the US government “lost interest in providing surplus commodities to the destitute” (Sato 2020, 297) Gendered principles permeated certain aspects of welfare plans which “prevented many low-income women from participating in the food stamp plan. Most women could become beneficiaries of the plan only through their husbands. Those who fell outside the category were marginalized and mostly excluded from the plan. African American women particularly faced discrimination from local administration in the South.” (Sato 2020, 298) This contributed to female struggles in sustaining oneself but it also reflected the country’s view on gender at the time by promoting the idea that only worthy, male bread winners deserved to reap the benefits of government plans designed to help the less fortunate (which typically included black women).

Race and Jim Crow in the South

On top of fighting against the financial catastrophe of the 1930s, Hall had to also fight against the discrimination and prejudice that plagued the South during the Jim Crow Era. It was most harder for Hall as a black woman in the South during the Jim Crow Era to sustain herself and her family even before she was put out of work.

During the Great Depression, "few suffered more than African Americans, who experienced the highest unemployment rate during the 1930s.” (Klein 2018) The employment that was offered to black people tended to be unstable. “In the South, though, the jobs underlined the social distance between white women's families who deserved household help and black women's families who provided it.” (Palmer 1997) More black women than white women who were financially unstable/unemployed and seeking work were absorbed into the “informal economy” as domestic service workers. “An analysis of Census data showed that, in large southern cities in 1940, the relationship between unemployment, a measure of labor-market disadvantage, and women's self-employment in domestic service, a measure of self-employment in the informal sector, closely fits an inverted-U-shaped curve that can be called the labor absorption curve.” (Boyd 2012, 657) “At black women's higher values of these variables, the relationship was negative, suggesting that many black women who were unemployed and seeking work were absorbed into the informal economy as self-employed domestic service workers” (Boyd 2012, 657) This disqualified many black women from being deemed unemployed despite not making enough money to sustain oneself and one’s family which ameliorated unemployment for black women in particular in the South. This study challenges former studies which have assumed that “blacks in the South were not urgently searching for a means of livelihood in the early twentieth century because of the popular belief (later disputed) that the large agricultural sector of the region absorbed those blacks who were displaced from the urban workforce.” (Boyd 2012, 657)

Black women were also excluded from opportunities of self advancement. While it was hard to obtain education during the Jim Crow Era in the south as a black woman, “Getting a good education in the Jim Crow South was a major accomplishment if you were black” (Shaw 2004, 18) as “there were very few schools available to African American children” (Shaw 2004, 18) and “even into the 1940s, unequal funding made it impossible to support an adequate staff or provide sufficient books and supplies to those few available schools.” (Shaw 2004, 18)