Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2024/spring/Section13/Joe Matthews - "The Red, White, and Blue, Barber Shop"

Overview

Joe Matthews was born on September 9, 1875 in Georgia on the border of Gwinnett and Hall counties. He was interviewed on March 30, 1939 by Sadie B. Hornsby as part of the Federal Writers’ Project. At the time, he was working as a barber and lived in Athens, Georgia with his second wife, Libby Aderholt.

Biography

Childhood and Early Life

Matthews proclaimed that he had a humble childhood, as his father became a schoolteacher in Oxford, Georgia after he lost an arm in the Civil War. He recalled briefly being schooled at Nazareth Church in Jackson County (now Barrow County). He got his first job at the age of 15, sweeping the floor of a cotton mill while getting paid 25 cents a day. At age 16, he married his first wife (name not mentioned) who was 15 at the time, but died a year later, leaving him a widower for the next 6 years before marrying Libby Aderholt. Ever since his first marriage he had been learning the barber trade from his brother-in-law.

Adult Life

Matthews acknowledged that he had been worked ever since he was old enough to do so, mostly being employed in cotton mills while doing barber work on the side. He mentioned having a grown son who was trained as a barber, although the son decided not to enter the barber trade. It is implied that he had other grown children, although he did not go into detail about them.

Matthews continued to practice his barber skills, offering his services on nights and on Sundays while he worked at a cotton mill during the day. However, he never depended entirely on what he earned working at the mill. He claimed that he was grateful he never gave up barbering as he was able to eventually do it full-time after quitting his job at the cotton mill. Setting up his own barbershop proved to be challenging, as many places charged too high of a rent for him to stay and keep his business for very long. At some point, he had to give up barbering for a short period of time during the Great Depression and was employed in the police force before quitting that, too, as he claimed that it was not for him.

A barber shop in Richardson, TX circa 1920

Social Context

Male Cosmetics Consumption in the Early 20th Century

In an effort to sell hygiene and cosmetics products to men in the early 1900s, they were often marketed in a way that wasn’t as overly feminine. As such, cosmetics like colognes and shaving lotions were commonly labeled as toiletries and thus, they were separated into two different industries with toiletries being more commonly found in barbershops, soap shops, and razor manufacturers while cosmetics were sold by beauty shops, perfumeries, and pharmaceutical companies . Advertisers tried to sell these products as masculine mostly because, despite what was often assumed by scholars, the primary advertising and consuming audience during the early twentieth century were men. Men were usually the ones seen as productive and wage-earning while women were commonly domestic consumers, usually only purchasing goods intended for general household use. This meant that men often had more money for personal and recreational use, with historical records from the late-Victorian Era (around 1890s-1910s) showing that working class men “used everything from shaving soaps, aftershave lotions, pomade oils, and hair dyes, to cosmetics for training one’s mustache” .

Being well-dressed, fashionable, and hygienic was how a number of them chose to expressed their masculinity. However, the scent of their toiletries and even the containers they came in had to be appropriately masculine as well. According to a newspaper snippet by Eleanor Nangle in the Chicago Daily Tribune, clean and fresh scents were the ones mostly preferred by men and the talcum powder that they used had to be “neutral, which means that he can be free of the agonizing fear that his skin might LOOK powdered when he uses it.” Although it seemed like men generally enjoyed using cosmetics, they pursued it in a way that protected their masculinity.

Child Labor Laws in Georgia in the Early 20th Century

Often, children were employed in factories and cotton mills as an additional source of income for low-income families. They worked long hours, which often meant that they didn’t have time for attending school, leaving some of them uneducated. Most states in the early 20th century had compulsory attendance laws requiring children to attend school until the age of 16, but there were some exceptions, including getting a work permit. Getting a work permit allowed children to leave school at an age that was often lower than the age required by these compulsory attendance laws . This posed a problem for some people, as remaining uneducated often meant they were going to be stuck in factory-related jobs or other low-income positions. However, making the work permit age and the school dropout age the same was easier said than done. Public and political opinions at the time made it “difficult to pass legislation to increase the work permit age” . As a way around it, it was proposed that the entrance age (the age a child had to enter school) be lowered so that children could get more years of schooling in before obtaining a work permit.

In that era, Georgia passed a child labor law in 1915 where it would be illegal for factories to employ children under 14 and a half years of age. A newspaper article from the Nashville Tennessean and the Nashville American commented on the passing of this law, stating that while children are still developing, they shouldn’t be working in sweatshops “where their health would be impaired, their lives blighted, and the future made dark and hopeless.” It sheds light on some public opinions where child labor was looked down on.

The Culture of Georgia's Cotton Mill Towns

Cotton mills employed a lot of people and often a community was built around these cotton mills to draw people in. For many lower-income people, mill villages were appealing as they were “generally purchased or rented at reasonable rates, making them affordable […] especially in comparison with surrounding property values” . Therefore, these people had an affordable place to live while being employed. It’s important to note that almost everything in these mill towns were controlled by the mill owners. Many mill owners did strive to build a welcoming community in order to keep their workforce, adding commodities like running water, building churches and schools, as well as making goods accessible with competitive prices . They wanted a stable workforce while also wanting to decrease the threat of unionization as much as possible. As cotton mills and mill work grew less popular, these mill towns were able to keep surviving on the community they had built.

References

"Georgia’s Child Labor Law." Nashville Tennessean and the Nashville American (1910-1920), Jan 06, 1915. http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/georgias-child-labor-law/docview/906968020/se-2.

Lleras-Muney, Adriana. “Were Compulsory Attendance and Child Labor Laws Effective? An Analysis from 1915 to 1939.” The Journal of Law and Economics 45, no. 2 (October 2002): 401-435. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/340393.

Nangle, Eleanor. "Thru the Looking Glass." Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), Jun 12, 1940. http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/thru-looking-glass/docview/176391404/se-2.

Swiencicki, Mark A. “Consuming Brotherhood: Men’s Culture, Style and Recreation as Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” Journal of Social History 31, no. 4 (Summer, 1998): 773–808. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3789301

"The Red, White, and Blue Barber Shop." Interviewed by Hornsby, Sadie B., Edited by Hall, Sarah H. and John N. Booth, March 30, 1939, Folder 195, in the Federal Writers' Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Wickersham, Mary Eleanor, and Robert P. Yehl. “The Cotton Mill Village Turned City: A Retrospective Analysis of Three of Georgia’s Smallest Cities.” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 5 (September 2014): 917-932. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144214533080.