Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2023/Fall/Section18/Roberta Park

Overview

Roberta Park lived in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s. The 1930s were tough on middle-class Americans, but members of all socio-economic classes suffered the wrath of the Great Depression. Through the lens of certain individuals, a look into the Great Depression and its social implications can be discovered.

Biography

Park was from Birmingham, Alabama where she attended Ramsey High School in Five Points as an eighteen year old. Park was a school girl at the time, but not the brightest or worst of students. Park had a hard time with the high school dating scene. Park was a consistent liar, and she often got tired of boys taking her on the same dates over and over. Park believed that lying was the only way to make it in the world as a woman at the time. If you do not lie, then people would not be entertained by you, and you would not be interesting enough. Park would turn boys down, and when she did so, she would tell them her mother said she could not go out. Park seems to be a self-conscious product of social gender inequality, and a Christian out of fear. Park claims that she would be afraid to not believe, but there is no further elaboration on the topic. Finally, Park was a casual and comfortable drinker. This was common at the time.

Social Issues

Popular Retaliation Against Female Independence

In the 1930s, female independence saw a rise in society due to the need for work and the lull in marriage rates. These two trends were caused by the great depression and led to female empowerment, which was not reacted to lightly by the male-dominated American society. This rise in independence among women was met with a harder push from entertainment media and popular culture to re-establish gender roles with men being depended upon by women. This is seen clearly in the Snow White film. The heroine in the film is domestic, naïve, and completely helpless. This sort of media would make women at the time feel hopeless in the field of relationship building with men, and like many things, this feeling would be experienced the most by those in their developmental years of adolescence. The fallout of this retaliation in popular media led to a rise in the establishment of gender roles within the household. These gender roles established women as the homemakers and men as workers. Even rhetoric in cookbooks would suggest that a woman's role in the household is to keep her husband happy with a nice meal and a clean home. This trend proved the success of the retaliation against the rise in female empowerment and independence seen in the Great Depression era.

Formal and Religious Education in the 1930s

Another social trend from the time period was in education. At the time, and still today in some senses, sophisticated fields were reserved for men in the classroom. This educational pattern weighed on female students as a reason they should appear as dumb or be less invested in school. This trend bound some women to lives of working in the home as education was not necessarily encouraged. Due to this societal power dynamic in the classroom, gender roles for women were reinforced and dreams of intellectual careers were not popular or encouraged. This breakdown was seen most profoundly in high school as women realized the power of societal trends and felt the uphill battle of lack of encouragement and guidance in education. Religious education was also prominent. While this education occurred more commonly in the household rather than the classroom, religion became an especially intimidating topic in the south. Religion was taught as a dutiful and heavy commitment. Rather than having a relationship with God that was loving, sins were seen in the American south as heavily punishable and grave. This trend toward a more serious religious experience stemmed from the southern politicization of religion at the time. Rural political organizers weaponized religion to control communities and sway votes. This practice infused religion with real life consequences.

Drinking Among Teens and Females

Finally, the trend of drinking, specifically in young women, was witnessed in the 1930s. This trend, especially being in close proximity to prohibition, made drinking a more common part of social and casual life as a teenager in America in the 1930s. In the time period, alcohol consumption by young women was especially frowned upon by adults at the time. This was likely due to the larger re-establishment of gender roles and pressure on young women that came with them. When prohibition concluded, many states even set their drinking age to 18, which would have had an even stronger impact on the teen drinking scene. This would additionally describe the climate of teens in the 1930s.

References

"Roberta Park" Interview by R.V. Waldrep, date July 20, 1939, Folder 80, Federal Writers' Project Papers #03709, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Gender Roles and Sexual Relations, Impact of the Great Depression on ." Encyclopedia of the Great Depression. . Encyclopedia.com. (September 18, 2023).

Neuhaus, Jessamyn. “The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s.” Journal of Social History 32, no. 3 (1999): 529–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3789341.

Andrei Boutyline, Alina Arseniev-Koehler, Devin J Cornell, School, Studying, and Smarts: Gender Stereotypes and Education Across 80 Years of American Print Media, 1930–2009, Social Forces, Volume 102, Issue 1, September 2023, Pages 263–286, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac148

Flynt, Wayne. “Religion for the Blues: Evangelicalism, Poor Whites, and the Great Depression.” The Journal of Southern History 71, no. 1 (2005): 3–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27648650.

"Teen Drinking ." Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society. . Encyclopedia.com. (September 18, 2023). https://www.encyclopedia.com/children/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/teen-drinking