Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Spring/105/Section 60/Lolly Bleu

Overview

Lolly Bleu was interviewed by Barbara Berry Darsey in association with the Federal Writers' Project on November 29, 1938.

Biography

Lolly Bleu, a white woman, was born near Texas’s Gulf Coast around 1889 and grew up on a farm. As a girl, Lolly would occasionally go to school to learn how to read, write, and perform basic arithmetic, but she took a very strong liking to farm work; her love for growing plants, making jellies, and canning vegetables continued into adulthood. In Texas, she met and married a man seventeen years her senior who she calls “Pa.” Around 1920, Lolly and Pa moved with their children to Venus, Florida in the hopes of profiting from more arable farmland, but ultimately made less money than Pa and his family had in Texas. They repaired a shabby barn to live in, although they do not know who owns the land, making them squatters. At some time in the mid-1930s, the family relied on economic assistance and employment opportunities from the New Deal relief program FERA. By 1938, Lolly had 13 children. The tenth child, their daughter Edie, was born mostly unresponsive. Lolly spent most of her time taking care of Edie and helping her other children, and while she had little time to assist with the farm work, she greatly enjoyed making quilts and canning produce.¹

Social Context

Changing Economic and Social Role of Women in the United States

The 1930s marked a period of great change to American women's expected role in society. The growth of women in the workforce accelerated due to increased job loss among male breadwinners and a higher amount of single women; this growth was primarily from women-dominated industries relatively unaffected by the Great Depression, including teaching, domestic service, and clerical work.² This latter industry in particular grew due to the increased demand for secretarial work from the expansion of New Deal programs.

New Deal agency holds a typing class for women, 1937.

Reforms during the Progressive Era shifted the emphasis of education towards preparing students for the workforce through vocational training.³ Since women were assuming a more significant role in the workforce, schools developed programs specifically for female commercial and manual workers. Curricula also began to include home economics courses to encourage women to maintain their traditional ties to homemaking.⁴

The federal government pushed for housewives, particularly urban ones, to purchase new household technology designed to alleviate many of the burdens of homemaking, thus changing their role from producers to consumers. In spite of this shift, many rural women "were still concerned with their roles as farm producers and were not always favorable to the modernizing message sent by the federal government during the New Deal."⁵ Farm women played an indispensable role in maintaining a farm through domestic work, child rearing, and production of goods. Farms would often fail without the profits from women selling their goods or the labor provided by children taught by their mothers.⁶ However, due to increasing industrialization in the United States and more economic opportunities available for women, many women opted to pursue employment rather than sustain a large and costly family size. As a result, the average size of the American family continued to decline.⁷

The New Deal and Federal Relief in Florida

White tenant farmer in the South, 1936.

During the economic devastation of the Great Depression, the federal relief provided to American citizens by President Roosevelt's New Deal programs marked a watershed in American politics. While the previous Hoover administration focused on providing loans to state governments for their individual relief programs, the creation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1933 "gave the federal government a more centralized role in economic recovery by allocating (rather than loaning) funds for both direct relief (cash payments to individuals for immediate necessities such as food and shelter) and state-directed work relief (projects intended to get the unemployed back to work, even if only temporarily)."⁸ The agency also established national standards for relief and worked to inform citizens about relief systems available to them.

In Florida, which already was suffering from damaged tourism and citrus industries, the depression harmed the economic situations of over 90,000 families.⁹ After years of neglect by the state government, the federal government provided essential financial relief which a quarter of Floridians came to rely on. This relief and the construction of infrastructure from New Deal programs caused a revival in Florida's economy as industries began to recover and grow and paper mills opened throughout the state.¹⁰

References

1. ↑Darsey, "Lolly Bleu."
2. ↑History, "Underpaid, but Employed: How the Great Depression Affected Working Women."
3. ↑Rury, "Vocationalism for Home and Work: Women's Education in the United States, 1880-1930," 21.
4. ↑Ibid., 22.
5. ↑Kleinschmidt, "Rural Midwestern Women and the New Deal," 124.
6. ↑Ibid.
7. ↑Kopf and Livni, "The decline of the large US family, in charts."
8. ↑Deeben, “Family Experiences and New Deal Relief.”
9. ↑Florida Center for Instructional Technology, “Great Depression and the New Deal.”
10. ↑Ibid.

Bibliography

• Darsey, Barbara Berry. "Lolly Bleu." November 29, 1938, in the Federal Writers' Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Deeben, John P. “Family Experiences and New Deal Relief.” Prologue 44, no. 2 (2012). https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/fall/fera.html.
• Florida Center for Instructional Technology. “Great Depression and the New Deal.” Last modified 2002. https://fcit.usf.edu/florida/lessons/depress/depress1.htm.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. National Youth Administration: Vocational Guidance brush-up classes to improve typing ability group picture of women at typewriters (Illinois, 1937), photograph, 1937. Wikimedia Commons.
• History. “Underpaid, but Employed: How the Great Depression Affected Working Women.” Last modified March 11, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/working-women-great-depression.
• Kleinschmidt, Rachel L. "Rural Midwestern Women and the New Deal." Historia 17, (2008): 112-125. https://www.eiu.edu/historia/2008issue.php.
• Kopf, Dan and Ephrat Livni. "The decline of the large US family, in charts." Quartz, October 11, 2017. https://qz.com/1099800/average-size-of-a-us-family-from-1850-to-the-present.
• Lange, Dorothea. Great Depression Era White Tenant Farmer in North Carolina 1936, photograph, July 1936. Wikimedia Commons.
• Rury, John L. "Vocationalism for Home and Work: Women's Education in the United States, 1880-1930." History of Education Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1984): 21-44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/367991.