Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2022/Fall/Section093/Fleety Dodson

Biography

A map of Culpepper, VA and the surrounding area

Fleety Dodson was the wife of a tenant farm hand in Culpepper, VA. She was the mother of 13 kids who all had to help on the farm to make a living. For the last seven years at the time of the interview, the fourteen of them worked on Mr. Wilkins’ farm, and in return he allowed them a place to stay. Also included was their monthly keep; $22, 2 barrels of flour, 25 bushels of corn, and one cow’s worth of milk and cream.On such little, Dodson and her children were only able to get through by making their own garden for food and reselling their butter and eggs at a local market. The family has no formal education; Dodson tries to send the younger kids to school but they often get held back for missing so much time with sicknesses. Due to their low wages, the family also struggles heavily with debt. This leads to poor health as the family is unable to pay for medical care.

Social Context

Gender Roles in the South

As the Great Depression came into full effect, gender roles were forced to shift dramatically. Previously, men would provide most hard labor while the women in the family did mostly housework and took care of the children. As more families became impoverished, women were also forced to work in fields and gardens to earn more for their families. Even still, most families made too little to support themselves, leading to more strict rationing in order to survive. “We didn’t go hungry, but we lived lean.” That expression sums up the experiences of many American families during the 1930s: they avoided stark deprivation but still struggled to get by.”, as one journal spoke of the struggle to feed families during this time.

Sharecropping

After the emancipation of slavery in the United States following the Civil War, sharecropping became the most common labor agreement for plantation owners. The sharecropping system operated in which workers, primarily African Americans that were unable to find work due to discriminatory practices in the South, returned to farms and plantations as workers who received a portion of the crop as payment. The most common labor agreement for sharecroppers was stated as such, "When the planter provided the land, the seed, the agricultural equipment, the work animals, the feed for the work animals and other plantation expenses, the freedmen, supplying only their own labor, received one-third of the crop or one-quarter of the crop if rations were provided." The agreement for compensation only in the form of crops left many African Americans without any currency to buy basic goods with. Their options were either to sell the crops they were given, or to go without. This cycle of poverty and starvation forced African Americans to continue to work through poor conditions without any hope of advancement, perpetuating the ideals of pre-Civil War Slavery in America.

Tenant Farming

Tenant farming, similar to sharecropping, was a system that was established to incentivize hard labor on farms. The main form of compensation for tenant farming however, was shelter. Tenant farmers would work on farms and plantations in exchange for a place to stay and sometimes other forms of compensation as well.As such, changing jobs became nearly logistically impossible due to the need for new housing, as a journal stated, “[...] they relied on non-wage benefits provided by landowners […]Lastly, institutional constraints existed in the South which restricted occupational mobility of tenant farmers.”

Resources

“Fleety Dodson” Interview by Margaret Jeffries, date January 21, 1939, folder Federal Writers’ Project Papers #03709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/03709/id/1171/rec/1

Ware, Susan. "Women and the Great Depression." History Now 9 (2009): 2009-03 https://foobt.net/fall2015/hist10_6809/files/Women-and-the-Great-Depression.pdf.

Jung, Yeonha. 2020. “The Long Reach of Cotton in the US South: Tenant Farming, Mechanization, and Low-Skill Manufacturing.” ScienceDirect 143 (3): 1–29. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387819305152.

Shlomowitz, Ralph. 1979. “The Origins of Southern Sharecropping.” Agricultural History 53 (3): 557–75. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3742755.

Watson, Denise M. 2019. What exactly is sharecropping? Daily Press, May 05, 2019. http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/what-exactly-is-sharecropping/docview/2219904042/se-2.