Volume 9, Number 9 - Fall 1987
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Editor’s note: This letter was submitted for publication with the comment, "I hope that my letter will stimulate dialogue concerning the position of women in Ozark society and I invite readers’ comments and criticisms. I would also greatly appreciate any suggestions as to original sources which I might consult in pursuing my research on Ozark women."
Editor:
I am writing in response to Ruth J. Newman’s piece, "Ozarks Women: Ignorant, Barefoot, and Pregnant?" in the Summer issue of the Quarterly. This article contained some thoughtful comments about the history of Ozark women, but I find that it does more to affirm common stereotypes than to correct them, despite Ms. Newman’s admission that such stereotypes make her angry. As a graduate student currently writing a dissertalion on Ozark women (largely in Arkansas), I would like to offer some comments of my own.
A great deal of the stereotypical image of the Ozarker was perpetuated by local color writers such as Vance Randolph (whom Newman quotes frequently). As Randolph’s biographer, Robert Cochran, points out, Randolph was usually in dire need of money, and he wrote about the most unusual Ozarkers he could find because such material sold his books. His portrayal of the Ozarks is distorted and should be used with utmost caution. His writings spawned a whole series of like-minded authors, all determined to find the most "hillbil-~ lyish" of hillbillies. Theirportrayalswere usually grossly overdrawn, and applied, at most, to a few people living in the backwoods. To generalize from these few examples in characterizing all of Ozark society is a mistake of the first magnitude. Ms. Newman has tended to do this throughout her narrative.
Newman quite correctly points out that rural education was rudimentary, but to state that "Ozarks children learned about their homes and surrounding community through their experiences, but they were ignorant concerning anything else" is patently false. In fact, my research has found that newspapers and magazines were widely circulated (often hand to hand) in the hills. (Robert Gilmore, president of your society, also makes this point in his book Ozark Baptizings, Hangings, and Other Diversions, pp. 6-7.) Furthermore, hill farmers travelled back and forth to area towns quite
frequently. In other words, hillbillies were neither so isolated nor so ignorant as the stereotype would have it.
I would also suggest that the term "ignorant"be banned altogether in discussions of the hill folk. The term has derogatory connotations and implies a value judgement which is not very helpful in understanding the past. Perhaps Ozarkers were ignorant by our standards, but they were wise by the standards of the age, when wresting a living from these rocky hills often required a great deal of ingenuity and native intelligence. Folklore collections show Ozarkers, male and female, to have been highly creative in using the tools and information at their disposal in the struggle to conquer nature and its ills. Women, for example, had an amazing knowledge of wild plants, and devised medicines and cures from them which were often as effective as anything science had to offer at that time. Many other examples might be offered, and I suggest that, instead of pointing up what hill folk didn’t know, we might better concentrate on what they did know.
Newman also says that Ozarkers were "very poor." This is a relative term. At what point were they "very poor," and as compared to what? There is little indication of the time frame covered by this statement. Certainly the years after the Civil War were very hard, as were the 1930s. But those times were difficult for farmers everywhere in America. If anything, the largely self-sufficient Ozark economy aided hill farmers, who, unlike most Southern tenant farmers who were not even allowed garden plots, had a fairly decent and varied diet. Still, this was indeed an economy geared to production for use rather than exchange; hence, the income of these farmers would appear to be quite low because little cash was flowing into the household. ButNewman mightalso have noted that the traditional methods of tabulating farm income overlooked what was perhaps the most important contribution Ozark women made to the economy, and that was a great deal of barter and exchange. Women sold or bartered poultry and dairy products and in sodoing, contributed substantially to the family income, often times keeping the family afloat during years of hardship.
Finally, the statement that Ozark women "usually had at least eight children" is not borne out by the evidence. Certainly it is possible to find repeated examples of large families in the Ozarks, but families of thirteen of fourteen children were far and away the exception, not the rule. In a random sample of 500 Letter cont. on p. 5
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families from 1870 and 1910 manuscript censuses for Boone County, Arkansas, I found the average number of children per mother to be 6.7. This means of course, that though there were a good number of families with seven or more children in them, they were balanced out by those with fewer than five children. Families containing two or three children were not at all unusual, while ten or more children were extremely rare. It is a distortion, then, to generalize from those families with large numbers of children and conclude that this was the pattern all families exhibited. Likewise, it is true that some farm women married early, but again, this was rare. I found the average age of marriage for women to be about 19 or 20, slightly lower than the national average of 21, but not hovering around 13 or 14, as the stereotype suggests.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that the average number of children for Ozark women was indeed nearly double the national average (for white women) of 3.5 in 1900, and Newman quite appropriately raises the question as to why this was the case. The argument that large numbers of children were needed for labor on the farms does not bear up, however, since the fertility of white women in America had fallen significantly during the nineteenth century even though most people still lived on farms. Furthermore, labor could be hired as cheaply as raised. Neither can lack of birth control be cited as a reason for Ozarkers’ large families, for national fertility had dropped by half before any reliable mechanical
means of birth control was available. Scholars of women’s history have linked the decline in white fertility in Victorian America to the increase in women’s power in the home. Because birth control wasamale responsibility (abstinence was the only certain method of preventing pregnancy), the decline in fertility indicates greater male respect for women, who, after all, bore the brunt of child bearing and rearing. It might be more constructive then, to speculate about the degree of control Ozark women had in the home and in the family.
It is usually true that any stereotype contains a germ of truth, but it is time now to begin unravelling a stereotype that began with the travels of Schoolcraft in Arkansas and has been perpetuated into the twentieth century. Some Ozarkers fit the stereotype; most did not. More and better scholarship on Ozark women is need if we are ever to put to rest for good the belief that all hillbilly women were "ignorant, barefoot, and pregnant."
Address comments to: Janet Allured, Ozark Hall 12, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701
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