Analytic Model

Our analytic model is in Figure 1. Women’s life course circumstances partly reflected their embeddedness in historically-established institutional arrangements (Figure 1, Box 1). The American South, prior to the Civil War and just after, was primarily an agricultural region “short on towns, railroads, factories, schools, and universities” (Wright Reference Wright2006, p. 82). Yet the South was quite diverse, in that it contained different forms or modes of agricultural production. Modes were partly rooted in geography; topographic factors such as water, soil, and climate; and the commodities cultivated (Aiken Reference Aiken1998; Wright Reference Wright2006). Prior to the Civil War, large-scale agriculture (plantations) prevailed in geographic zones with rich (hence, more expensive) soils and crop-friendly climates. Postwar, old plantations were subdivided into tenant farms while new plantations were built as modern, multi-unit farms (Woodruff Reference Woodruff2003; see also Aiken Reference Aiken1998; Mandle Reference Mandle1992; Whayne Reference Whayne1992; Virts Reference Virts1991). U.S. Census enumerators in 1910 identified, in a geographic Belt extending from Virginia to Texas, 39,073 plantations holding 398,905 tenant farms in 325 counties of eleven states, including Arkansas (U.S. Department of Commerce 1916, p. 16). Other productive modes, both before and after the Civil War, involved basic subsistence or essentially living off the land, and mixed farming as subsistence with some commercialism. These modes prevailed on poorer quality, less valuable soils over different contiguous portions of the South, for example mountainous Appalachian and Ozark lands and the pine-forested Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, respectively. Productive modes cut across boundaries, bisecting or trisecting southern states (Harris Reference Harris2001; McKenzie Reference McKenzie1994; Woodruff Reference Woodruff2003).

Fig. 1.

A Model of Women’s Life Course Outcomes*

* Adapted from Moen and Chernack (Reference Moen and Chermack2005)

In Arkansas, as shown in Figure 2, “a diagonal line drawn from the northeast corner of the state to the southwest corner” separated mountainous upcountry from lowlands (McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000, pp. 1, 2). Lowlands are further divided into a Mississippi River alluvial plain (Delta) bordering Tennessee and Mississippi, and a sandy soil Coastal Plain bordering Louisiana and Texas. Different topographic environments supported different productive modes: subsistence (often no farming at all) in the mountainous Upcountry Ozarks; plantation farming in the rich Delta bottomlands; and mixed self-use/commercial small-holding on the pine-forested, sandy Coastal Plains. A first measure of women’s institutional embeddedness pertains to their residence with regard to subregional agricultural mode.

Fig. 2.

Arkansas Subregions

Note: Upcountry Counties in Blevins (2002:5), Plantation Counties in U.S. Census Bureau (1916)

However, productive modes were as much rooted in organizational factors, aligned with federal and state-local political-legal supports, as in topographical factors (Alston and Ferrie, Reference Alston and Ferrie1999; Jones Reference Jones2009; Woodman Reference Woodman1979; Wright Reference Wright2006). Variants of subsistence and plantation farming in Arkansas, as elsewhere in the South, historically differed in terms of farm organization, labor management, and the goals of production (Brannen Reference Brannen1924; U.S. Department of Commerce 1916; Virts Reference Virts1991). Prior to the Civil War, bondsmen on plantations primarily produced for external markets under planter direction. Their high levels of productivity for plantation-use, however, did not obviate their dependency on planter good-will for sustenance (Johnson Reference Johnson2013). In contrast, prewar White yeoman, tenants, and squatters in Upcountry and Coastal Plains subregions had more autonomy and could produce for home-use and/or markets (Blevins Reference Blevins2002; Bolton Reference Bolton1994; McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000).^{Footnote 5} After the Civil War, Black farm families aspired to land ownership and its associated high status and autonomy; freedom, for them, entailed exiting dependent labor relations imposed by planters under old racial state rules (Glenn Reference Glenn2002; Jaynes Reference Jaynes1986; Jones Reference Jones2009; Mandle Reference Mandle1992; Steedman Reference Steedman2008). But how could they get there? Under new postwar rules, economic mobility toward land ownership entailed movement on an “agricultural ladder” where the “first rung…is represented by the period during which the embryo farmer is learning the rudiments of his trade…The hired man stands on the second rung, the tenant on the third, while the farm owner has attained the fourth or final rung of the ladder” (Spillman Reference Spillman1919, p. 170; Woodman Reference Woodman1979; Wright Reference Wright1986). Thus, southern Black and White farmers after the Civil War—unless gifted a farm, or able to inherit, buy, or homestead a farm—moved toward ownership through assortments of contracted family labor arrangements (Alston and Higgs, Reference Alston and Higgs1982; Jaynes Reference Jaynes1986; Mann Reference Mann1989; Steedman Reference Steedman2008; Woodman Reference Woodman1979, Reference Woodman1995). Upward mobility on the agricultural ladder was also contingent on whether contracted work took place in plantation or in subsistence agriculture (Alston and Higgs, Reference Alston and Higgs1982; Woodman Reference Woodman1995). Moving to farm ownership was more difficult under the contracted terms of plantation production, especially for Black farmers (Alston and Kauffman, Reference Alston and Kauffman1998; Du Bois Reference Du Bois1912; Mandle Reference Mandle1992; Woodman Reference Woodman1995). A second measure of women’s embeddedness is their placement on the agricultural ladder, an institutional system of stratification, in subregional context.

Women’s lives reflected (re)emergence of new racial state rules of social control, a third domain of embeddedness. New rules leading to disenfranchisement, segregation, and labor control (Alston and Ferrie, Reference Alston and Ferrie1999; Jaynes Reference Jaynes1986; Woodman Reference Woodman1979) were also designed to re-introduce and reinforce social relations marked by dependency and subordination, countering Black aspirations for freedom and autonomy (Jones Reference Jones2010; Steedman Reference Steedman2008). For example, segregation policies created, then imposed, then reified, categories of racial distinctions that permeated daily life, from social interaction to the distribution of public resources (e.g. education). Yet, the new rules of social control that blanketed the South by 1910—reinforced by threat of violence—varied by context: they more explicitly limited interpersonal interracial contact and shared space in urban places and imposed behavioral etiquettes of social dependency in rural places (Jones Reference Jones1992; Schultz Reference Schultz2005; Steedman Reference Steedman2008). Rural patterns of daily life involved a series of long term, face-to-face encounters between small numbers of people, Black and White, who needed to sustain relations (e.g., tenants and landowners) (Schultz Reference Schultz2005). Rural norms sustained White social control in that etiquettes confirmed, at least outwardly, Black dependency and [feigned] acquiescence, not upward mobility (Steedman Reference Steedman2008). We examine, in still-rural Arkansas to 1910, women’s accounts of (non)dependence and mobility on the agricultural ladder, linked to forces of social control (Schultz Reference Schultz2005; Steedman Reference Steedman2008).

Continuing with our model in Figure 1, the construction/attribution of race, as legitimated by policy, lies at the core of the racial state (Box 2), thereby filtering the levels and types of natural and social resources available to residents (James Reference James1988). By 1910, Jim Crow laws in Arkansas, as elsewhere in the South, (re)constructed racial identities and regulated the allocation of land ownership, transportation, political action, markets, education, housing, and health care (Feagin and Elias, Reference Feagin and Elias2013; Omi and Winant, Reference Omi and Winant2015; Patterson Reference Patterson1982; Winant Reference Winant2000). We ask: On these late-settling Trans-Mississippi frontier-borderlands, to what degree did women’s early lives (Box 3a) and later life economic status (Box 3b) reflect attribution of race (Box 2), and institutional forces underlying productive mode and social control (Box 1)?

Superordinate Policies of Labor and Land

Federal policy, grandfathered in as part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, supported the territorial practice of holding slaves as property. Congressional debate on slavery in the newly established Arkansas Territory (1819) ended with refusal to limit slavery in the new territory; a motion to reject the practice was defeated, 68 to 80 (Cathey Reference Cathey1944). Defenders of slavery argued that Whites lacked the endurance to settle and farm south of 35° latitude and that ownership of slaves, already viewed as “property” in the territory, should not be restricted (Cathey Reference Cathey1944; see also Aron Reference Aron2006). National discussion at the time of statehood (1836) again proclaimed slavery necessary for settlement, land deforestation and development, and national wealth (Johnson Reference Johnson2013). Plantation owners, the most powerful elite^{Footnote 6} in Arkansas and across the South, exerted power at the federal level in 1850 to promote passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which further strengthened property rights in slavery (Glenn Reference Glenn2002; Johnson Reference Johnson2013). The translation of coercive labor policy from abstract federal law to everyday practice fueled an entrepreneurial and speculative regional market in slave labor (Baptist Reference Baptist2010; Beckert Reference Beckert, Follett, Beckert, Coclanis and Hahn2016; Johnson Reference Johnson2013), although most slave traders lived in earlier-settled plantation states of Louisiana, Missouri, and Virginia (Deyle Reference Deyle2005; McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000). In all, federal promulgation, legitimation, and enforcement of slavery alongside state policies (addressed in the next section), drove considerable deforestation and large-scale (plantation) cotton marketization across the Arkansas Delta and Coastal Plains riverbed sections by 1850 (McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000; Poe Reference Poe2011).

Public lands had originally been intended for small-holder farming but federal actors in state land offices and state elites—assuming future profitable plantation growth—fueled a land entrepreneurialism that resulted in vast tracts of acreage falling into speculative, often Outsider hands (Bolton Reference Bolton1994). Acquiring land and labor required financing. Until statehood in 1836, buyers made federal land payments directly to the Federal Bank via land offices. The first business of the newly-established Arkansas Congress was to establish two state banks, run by bank trustees and investors, to retain revenues from land sales in the state (Worley Reference Worley1950). The banks, from their inception, channeled loans to state and local elites and Outsider speculators who bought large parcels, sometimes the whole of future counties, of mostly federal lands. By 1840, speculative loans on the overvalued land had bankrupted both state banks. The state lacked enough capital to bail out its insolvent banks; to continue operations, bank trustees sold bonds and other instruments to state elites and Outsider northern and global capitalist agencies (Blair and Barth, Reference Blair and Barth2005; Worley Reference Worley1950). Arkansas commercial farmers, however, did not rely on banks to finance year-to year operations. Instead, they used Outsider regional or extra-regional/global merchants, known as factors, to advance “fictitious capital” or credit before planting season to support commodity production; farmers then settled accounts at harvest (Johnson Reference Johnson2013, p. 258; see also Jaynes Reference Jaynes1986). By 1850, inflated land prices had placed land ownership out of the reach of most poor Arkansas Whites (Bolton Reference Bolton1994; Brown Reference Brown2013; Johnson Reference Johnson2013; McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000). Indebtedness plagued the state throughout the century (Blair and Barth, Reference Blair and Barth2005).

State Policies and Initial Settlement

Different population streams, in terms of place of origin, settled the different Arkansas subregions prior to the Civil War, in the context of the land, labor, and finance policies above (Blair and Barth, Reference Blair and Barth2005; Hogan Reference Hogan1985; Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1994). White families entered the Upcountry after 1820 (Blevins Reference Blevins2002; Bolton Reference Bolton1998).^{Footnote 7} Some had been landowners in neighboring states, but most were poor, landless, and descendants of land-poor parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who had moved ever-southwestward across upcountry terrains of other states (Blevins Reference Blevins2002; Bolton Reference Bolton1994; Hanson and Moneyhon, Reference Hanson and Moneyhon1989; McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000). Much like the land-poor generations that had preceded them, they faced limited options: taking low-paid tenancies in settled states, traveling back-and-forth across states in nomadic family life, or re-locating to upcountry borderlands of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and later Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas where they could cheaply purchase or squat on land (Bolton Reference Bolton1994; Brown Reference Brown2013; Johnson Reference Johnson2013). Settlement on Upcountry Arkansas Ozark and Ouachita mountain ranges limited land quality, overland and waterway travel, and potential marketization. However, most settlers as “hill folk” were accustomed to relatively isolated life where they could live off the land (Larson Reference Larson2010; McDonald and McWhiney, Reference McDonald and Grady1980; McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000; Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1994). They rarely settled with bonded labor, other than in the eastern and western commercialized corners near river transportation (Blevins Reference Blevins2002).^{Footnote 8}

Lowland Whites who settled the Delta subregion had moved, in westward direction, from the commercial-oriented lowlands of adjacent southern states, intending to produce cotton for international markets (Beckert Reference Beckert, Follett, Beckert, Coclanis and Hahn2016; Holley Reference Holley, Whayne and Gatewood1993). Settling the Delta, however, required deforestation and land development under conditions where rivers flooded with enough force to wash away soils, crops, homes, roads, natural and man-made landmarks, and even whole towns. Large planters, holding twenty or more bondsmen, and small planters with nineteen or fewer bondsmen, used slave labor to clear land, plant and tend crops, and support home life (Deyle Reference Deyle2005; Johnson Reference Johnson2013; McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000). By 1850, the Plantation subregion supported large-scale cotton production (McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000). The lowland Coastal Plain riverbeds were rich enough for plantations, but most land was pine-forested with sandy soils that barely supported farming (McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000; Poe Reference Poe2011). Most White small-holders or yeoman settled here, to farm and forage, because they could not afford to purchase or feared settlement on the rich but “sickly” malarial Delta lands (McMillan Reference McMillan and Walls1990; Poe Reference Poe2011). Most did not own slaves but accepted the institution and aspired to ownership while poorer Whites survived as tenants and squatters (McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000; Poe Reference Poe2011).

Black settlement also followed intergenerational, southwestward movement (Johnson Reference Johnson2013; Hanson and Moneyhon, Reference Hanson and Moneyhon1989). Between 1820 and 1860 up to one million bondsmen were forcibly relocated from older southern states to the lower South (Johnson Reference Johnson2013). Between 1850 and 1860 the Black population of Arkansas grew by over 200%, more than twice the White growth rate (Holley Reference Holley, Whayne and Gatewood1993; McNeilly Reference McNeilly2000). While federal policies legitimated keeping bondsmen as property in states where slavery existed, states determined the terms of settlement within their borders. The Arkansas legislature in 1838 viewed free, non-dependent Black status as threatening (Gordon Reference Gordon, Whayne and Gatewood1993; Patterson Reference Patterson1982; for Missouri see Aron Reference Aron2006).^{Footnote 9} Lawmakers outlawed in-migration of free Blacks and Mulattos after March 1, 1843 except as bonded servants, punishable by fine, incarceration, and deportation (Gordon Reference Gordon, Whayne and Gatewood1993). After January 1860, free Blacks and Mulattos were denied residency in the state; those remaining faced arrest and forced hiring-out for twelve months to self-fund deportation or sale into slavery (Cathey Reference Cathey1944). Thus, at the start of the Civil War, only 144 free Blacks remained in Arkansas (Gordon Reference Gordon, Whayne and Gatewood1993). Under old racial state rules, social identity and the right to exist within state borders was defined by slave versus free, underpinned by attribution of race.

Settlement under Subsistence

Upcountry White women, prewar and postwar, had limited exposure to—or interest in—sociocultural and economic change, including commercialization of farming (Larson Reference Larson2010; Sellers Reference Sellers1991). Their households were largely self-sufficient, perhaps also providing local services or cultivating small amounts of tobacco or hemp to augment cash flow (Blevins Reference Blevins2002). For example, White Upcountry-born Mary Hamilton sold the animals and tools that her family needed for commercial cotton farming on their Mississippi Delta tenant farm to return to tenancy in Upcountry Randolph County. She wrote:

Further facilitating self-sufficiency were forests that provided timber for housing and fuel, and community pasturage norms that allowed families to send marked cattle and hogs into the wild to forage and fatten prior to slaughter. Mary Hamilton noted advantages of open pasturage:

By 1880, newly freed Upcountry Black women had begun “the practical work” of building new lives and new households (Glymph Reference Glymph2008, p. 168). Some had spent time in refugee camps where they were subject to sickness and starvation (Downs Reference Downs2012). Interviewed at age eighty-six, Mittie Freeman (WPA 1936-38), described relocation at the end of the Civil War:

Some had remained with former owners in isolated Upcountry realms of White household economies. Remaining in the household or on the land of former owners for paid labor might have been the only viable option for older former slaves. Mahalia Shores (WPA 1936-38) recalled her master’s announcement of freedom:

The path to relative autonomy in very rural portions of the South—marked by cultures of personalism and localism—often required freedmen to maintain loyalty and White patronage “based on a personal equation” (Schultz Reference Schultz2005, p. 51). Millie Evans, age eighty-seven when interviewed in 1936, noted that her family “reached (Arkansas) safe but when we got here we foun’ freedom here too. Ol’ mistress begged us to stay wid her an we stayed till she died” (WPA 1936-38).^{Footnote 16} Other types of resource exchanges with Whites also reflected paternalistic rewards for service (Schultz Reference Schultz2005). Adeline Blakeley remembered:

Millie Evans and Adeline Blakely express views about freedom and ultimately going to one’s “own place,” describing social relations of relative autonomy or interdependence, if not independence, in the context of Upcountry isolation. Some freedwomen, however, claimed and sustained Upcountry autonomy by forming or joining communities. The all-Black Driftwood community, founded in 1875 in Lawrence County, maintained a post office, two groceries, a cotton gin, sawmill, sorghum mill, and a combined school (Gordon Reference Gordon1995). Black newcomers to Arkansas from neighboring Tennessee and South Carolina founded another community, Menifee, in the Ozark foothills of Conway County in 1878. A Menifee settler recalled the challenge of building in the Ozarks:

Once settled, the community thrived and maintained a sense of pride, as described in an 1896 publication, Freeman. “Menifee is inhabited by colored people. They own most all the business houses here…there are a great many wealthy families here” (Gatewood Reference Gatewood1974, p. 320).

IPUMS data also suggest that Black women in the 1880 Upcountry (Table 1 Column 1) had status advantage, compared to Black women in Plantation (Column 3) and Coastal Plain (Column 5) subregions. They were more likely to be literate (33.9% vs. 21.9%, 24.2% respectively). Laura Jackson Edwards of Yell County, born in Mississippi and brought to Arkansas by her White mistress months after her mother’s death, recalls attending the free school at the Jackson home and studying the “Blue Back[ed] Speller” (University of Arkansas Library). In contrast, Upcountry White women were least likely among White women in Arkansas to be literate: only about 72.6% could read and write, compared to 86.3% of Plantation and 77.4% of other lowland White women. A century of intergenerational upcountry migration westward, in response to land commodification booms in the “Old South” states that boosted land prices out-of-reach (Bolton Reference Bolton1998; Johnson Reference Johnson2013),^{Footnote 18} had limited Upcountry White women’s accumulation of human capital resources such as literacy (Bolton Reference Bolton1994; Brown Reference Brown2013).

Upcountry Black women were less likely to be married (spouse present) than Black women in lowland subregions (58.1% vs. 68.4%, 67.7%). This may be due to very limited Black settlement (sparse marriage markets), economic alternatives to marriage, or isolation (limiting travel). However, if married, they were less likely to engage in paid labor than Black women in other subregions (7.6% vs. 28.2%, 14.4%). Their husbands less likely worked as farm laborers (19.5% vs. 23.6, 21.3%) and more likely worked in higher-status trades and services. Also signaling relative advantage is their reporting an occupation of “housewife” more often than Black women elsewhere (63.5% vs. 44.7%, 58.2%).

If working, Upcountry Black women were nearly twice as likely to report a domestic versus a farm occupation compared to Black women in other subregions (10.7% vs. 5.7%, 5.2%). This suggests economic ties to, if not dependency on, White communities for domestic work. For example, Laura Jackson Edwards cooked and kept house for local families, and in later life, cooked for the first hotels in the community. Mahalia Shores, married at age twenty, described her domestic work for White families: “I have cooked three Sunday dinners on Saturday and Sunday together. I would make three dollars when I done that…(and) I washed and ironed” (WPA 1936-38).^{Footnote 19} Domestic work often entailed hire for tasks and was a hallmark of changing Black women’s labor relations: freedwomen who tasked or set limits on White employers’ work demands strategically created time for their own domestic production (Glymph Reference Glymph2008). They gained relative control over the terms of their employment.

Upcountry White women were almost universally married, at young ages. They did not commonly participate in economic activity outside the home, perhaps due to lack of local enterprise, sociocultural disinterest in market activity, stigma of women’s paid work in this era, or relative economic advantage. Fewer than 1% of married and fewer than 10% of unmarried White women were economically active compared to 7.6% and 44.3%, respectively, of Upcountry Black women. Lack of economic activity, exacerbated by mountain isolation, left White women a narrow range of life course roles, most family-oriented. Thus, Upcountry White women, “in an era that lacked modern conveniences…carried out onerous chores” or else hired, if available, Black women to do the work as domestic servants (Whayne et al., Reference Whayne, Deblack, George and Arnold2002, p. 255). White women’s marriages also reflected utility more than companionship (Allured Reference Allured1988). When Mary Hamilton was a teen and about to be left on her own as her mother and brother lay dying from pneumonia in 1886, she reluctantly agreed to marry thirty-year-old Frank Hamilton:

Settlement Under Lowland Commercialism

Prior to the Civil War, White women and families settling the Plantation and mixed commercial Coastal Plains lowlands generally did so to prosper. However, they faced precarity, regardless of family wealth: the most privileged of women, settling on the best Delta lands, tended to do so at the expense of their health (McMillan Reference McMillan and Walls1990). Coastal Plains White women settling on poorer quality land, practicing subsistence and foraging, could experience poverty and hunger as well as sickness (Poe Reference Poe2011). Black bondswomen—as children, mothers, and grandmothers—traveled many paths to lowland Arkansas. Some, Arkansas-born near the time of the Civil War, had never left. Judy Parker from Coastal Plains Little River reported at age seventy-seven that she was six months old when her family’s owner, who sat out the war in Arkansas, decided to return to Florida.

Women might have initially been transported to Texas and beyond—a strategy planters used to resist the emancipation of slaves—and then settled in Arkansas after the war. Clara Walker, interviewed at age 111 in Garland County, explained:

Postwar, Clara Walker found her mother with twelve children in Arkansas and stayed to help her farm since she “could plow as good as a man in dem days.” After her mother died, she moved to Hot Springs where she did laundry for hotels.

After the Civil War, rising cotton prices produced a decades-long panic among state elites in frontier Arkansas to replace bonded farm labor: emancipation of slaves not only threatened cotton productivity but the southern planter class (Steedman Reference Steedman2008) and the very “well-being of European industry” (Beckert Reference Beckert, Follett, Beckert, Coclanis and Hahn2016, p. 55). Slaves had worked cotton fields, organized as gangs but freedmen refused such working conditions (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1998[1935]; Jaynes Reference Jaynes1986). Most Arkansas plantations had remained in the hands of planters or kin after the war (Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1994, Reference Moneyhon and Kirk2014), and the old planters, along with new planters including Outsider entrepreneurial Delta developers, sought to maintain prewar cotton productivity. But as Robert Preston Brooks (Reference Brooks1914) noted:

State elites wrote ads and distributed pamphlets to encourage general in-migration while planters sent out labor agents to comb the South and promise freedmen and poor Whites better tenancy terms and higher wages than offered in the low-wage Upper South states (Mandle Reference Mandle1992; Nash Reference Nash1989; Wright Reference Wright1986). The Republican politicians in power, aware of the great unmet labor demand, demurred in quickly implementing the racial codes that were being adopted in other southern states, with the exception of quick passage of an enticement law forbidding employers’ competitive hiring (Roback Reference Roback1984). Lawmakers also awarded citizens’ rights to Black males (Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1994; Rosen Reference Rosen2009), banished Ku Klux Klan activities by 1869 (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1998[1935]; Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon and Kirk2014) and enrolled 19,280 Black children in new, albeit segregated, public schools by 1870 (Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon and Kirk2014). Arkansas Freedman’s Bureau agents, after national passage of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, were among the most proactive in identifying and settling freedmen on higher quality federal lands (Lanza Reference Lanza, Cimbala and Miller1999). In addition, Freedman’s Bureau agents across much of the South were well-networked and referred freedmen to places, including in Arkansas, with high demand and remuneration for rural labor (Jaynes Reference Jaynes1986). Thus, citizens’ rights with the promise of political participation, comparatively limited racial code policies, better wage and tenancy terms, and the potential for owning fertile, if still “wild and sickly” land, encouraged Black migration to Arkansas, especially to the promising, rich soils of the Plantation lowlands (Jones Reference Jones2015; Matkin-Rawn Reference Matkin-Rawn2013, Reference Matkin-Rawn and Kirk2014; Nash Reference Nash1989). Cleo Jeffers (BTV 1995) born in 1912, said that:

The Arkansas frontier also provided refuge, even if only symbolically, to settlers determined to escape oppressive conditions in surrounding states. Dora Strong Dennis (BTV 1995), born in 1900, was sixteen when she and her mother relocated to Arkansas. She reported:

Dora Strong Dennis’s mother was able to access legal help, gather her belongings and family together, and move. Not everyone could do this. Rather, escaping bad or dangerous circumstances often required circumspection, perhaps moving in stages. Faced with an oppressive Louisiana landlord, Delores Twillie Wood’s (BTV 1995) grandmother:

Similar to Upcountry Black settlers, many formed or joined all-Black residential communities as farm owners and as long-term tenants. Oliver Williams (BTV 1995), born in 1926 and descendent of a founder, described Dark Corner, a community in Woodruff County:

Women and Work

Young Black women in plantation districts were the most economically active women in the state (Table 1). Table 2 more closely examines women’s economic activity by using logistic regression. We model a woman’s Economic Activity as a function of her settler vs. Arkansas-born status; race; early life course socioeconomic dis/advantage represented by literacy; health or ability to work; age; current life stage family/household structure (e.g., marital status and presence of children); whether her household is a farm vs. nonfarm; and her household’s subregional location. The 1880 IPUMS does not report household ownership of farms. We present findings as odds ratios (exponentiated coefficients), but highlight Figure 4 which summarizes the equation findings as the probability of being economically active, by race, settler status, and subregion of residence, calculated at the sample means of other variables.

Table 2.

Logistic Regression: Economic Activity of Arkansas Women, 1880 IPUMS

*p <.05 **p <.01 ***p <.001

Note: Upcountry counties as in Blevins (2002, p. 5). Plantation counties as in McNeilly (2000, p. 126)

FIG. 4.

Probability of Women’s Economic Activity by Race, Subregion and Settler Status, 1880 IPUMS

Figure 4 shows that White Arkansas-born (G1) and White settler (G3) women had relatively low probabilities of economic activity, although White women in both groups more likely worked if residing in the Plantation subregion (Coastal Plains is the reference category). Black Arkansas–born (G2) and Black settler (G4) women had relatively high probabilities of economic activity, again especially in the Plantation subregion. In addition, chronic illness and literacy reduced all women’s odds of working by 57% and 33%, respectively (Table 2) while age was not associated with economic activity.^{Footnote 26} Married women without children, single women with children, and women in households of others had increased odds of working, relative to married women with children (nuclear family form as reference) (Table 2). In sum, women with greater economic need or fewer household kin worked if healthy enough to do so. Plantation subregion residence raised (for all women) and Upcountry residence lowered (especially for Black women) the odds of work, relative to Coastal Plains residence.

Consistent with our analytic model, women’s young adult work roles, partly determined by family roles (Figure 1, Box 3a), was correlated with race (Box 2) and institutional forces associated with productive mode (Box 1). We initially asked: How did postwar settlers fare? We do not yet know. For, young working or non-working women in a given subregion, Black or White, might or might not have attained relative autonomy by later life. Upward mobility to farm ownership on the agricultural ladder was age-graded: it took time to inherit, buy, or claim homesteaded land (Alston and Kauffman 1997, Reference Alston and Kauffman1998; Lanza Reference Lanza, Cimbala and Miller1999; Spillman Reference Spillman1919). We next explore older women’s placement on the agricultural ladder around 1910, in the context of new racial state and related institutional forces.

Institutional Mobility Constraints

Yet, many Black Arkansas farmers did reach the top of the agricultural ladder. As early as the 1870s, one in twenty Black Arkansan head of households owned land, double or triple the rate of other Deep South States.^{Footnote 28} This section examines women’s placement on the agricultural ladder in a process of agrarian stratification, differentially constrained by productive mode. The 1910 IPUMS only reports women’s placement on two broad rungs of the ladder: living in a tenant farm household (collapsing all forms of tenancy including sharecropping) and living in an owned farm household, the top rung of the ladder (Table 3, bottom two rows). An examination of statuses by race and productive mode of Plantation (left two columns) versus combined subsistence-oriented Upcountry/Coastal Plains subregions (right two columns), finds that White women in Plantation (Column 2) versus other counties (Column 4) were less likely to reach the top of the ladder (34.7% vs. 53%). A similar pattern existed for Black women (Columns 1 and 3, 17.2% vs. 40.2%).

Table 3.

Descriptive Statistics by Subregion and Race, 1910 IPUMS

Ownership/non-ownership in 1910 partly reflected subregional productive mode. Upcountry cotton marketization faded by the 1890s as cotton prices fell, but less-commercial, less-indebted farm families retained farm ownership by returning to subsistence or selling timber, hemp, or free-roaming livestock (Allured Reference Allured1988; Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1997). On the Coastal Plains, mixed subsistence/commercial cultivation continued, now by Black as well as White small-holders and tenants, who increasingly produced cotton for markets. The small-holder and more-resourced tenant families who retained a “safety-first” way of life had more financial control over what they produced, how they produced it, and gains, if any. They could pay off debt or invest in tools, animals, or land (Schweninger Reference Schweninger1997). In contrast, Plantation subregion farmers, primarily sharecroppers after 1880, signed contracts that often limited or precluded their choice of growing for market or home-use (Brannen Reference Brannen1924; Woofter (Reference Woofter1969[1936]). Landowners owned the season’s crop and paid a sharecropper’s wage of housing, perhaps a small food allowance, as a share of production, settled at harvest (Jaynes Reference Jaynes1986; Woodman Reference Woodman1979). Owners of rich soils rarely sold their land to Black farmers (Schultz Reference Schultz2005; Schweninger Reference Schweninger1997). Sharecroppers rarely had the cash to purchase tools, animals, or land after settlement and struggled to even sustain living standards to the next season (Dirks and Duran, Reference Dirks and Duran2001; Jones Reference Jones2010).

Ownership and non-ownership also reflected institutional realignment. Newly passed racial state laws were designed to promote social control, including for servicing the labor productivity of large-scale agriculture (Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1994; Wacquant Reference Wacquant2002; Woodman Reference Woodman1979). For, by the 1890s, the same Arkansan “leaders of the Old South… [who] took the state into Reconstruction, the New South, and beyond” (Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1994, p.189) reversed their relatively benign 1870s and 1880s course. Although these new laws, or “rules of the game” (Alston and Ferrie, Reference Alston and Ferrie1999, p. 3; James Reference James1988, p. 194) and their timing varied across the South (James Reference James1988; Roback 1980; Werum Reference Werum1999), they shared goals of imposing landlord supremacy, disenfranchisement, and segregation (Alston and Ferrie, Reference Alston and Ferrie1999; James Reference James1988; Mandle Reference Mandle1992; Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon and Kirk2014). New crop lien laws provided landlords with the first slice of sharecroppers’ shares to repay credit, raising sharecroppers’ risk of debt (James Reference James1988; Roback Reference Roback1984; Whayne Reference Whayne1992; Woodman Reference Woodman1995). Vagrancy laws passed around 1900 limited Black farmers’ off-plantation travels to search for jobs or better tenancy terms (Naidu Reference Naidu2010; Woodruff Reference Woodruff2003). In addition, the new racial states blocked federal power and shifted state power downward, closer to planter control, toward local government and county executives (James Reference James1988; Werum Reference Werum1999). Planters produced, with county magistrates and judges—in the context of vagrancy arrests and inability to pay fines—a new form of coerced Black labor: prisoners consigned to work in prisons, factories, on chain gangs, and on local elites’ plantations (Blackmon Reference Blackmon2008; Wacquant Reference Wacquant2002).

Table 3 illustrates that the Plantation subregion sharecropping system, compared to subsistence/commercializing modes in other subregions, had by 1910 multiplied (statistically moderated) unequal life chances for Black women's upward mobility. In the Plantation subregion, White women were twice as likely as Black women to live in owned farm households (Table 3, 34.7% vs. 17.2%) whereas the percent difference was about 13% in the other subregions (53% vs. 40%). Also, 51% of Black women versus 13.8% of White women lived in tenant farm households in the Plantation subregion, a nearly four-fold difference, while 21.7% of Black women versus 15% of White women, a much narrower difference, lived in tenant farm households in the other subregions. There was also an economic activity race gap across modes: in the Plantation subregion 56.4% of Black women versus 10.8% of White women were economically active, a more than five-fold difference, whereas in other counties, 48.8% of Black versus 14.8% of White women were economically active, a three-fold difference. Intra-racial disparities existed across subregions: for example, married Black women in Plantation versus the other subregions were more likely to work (50.9% vs. 33.7%).

We take a closer look at the correlates of farm ownership, the top rung of the agricultural ladder, by using logistic regression to model older women’s odds of Residing in an owned farm household (Table 4). Our analytic sample is a subsample of 1910 IPUMS women who lived in kin-based farm households (they or kin were household heads). In Model 1, women’s odds of living in an owned farm household is a function of their settler vs. Arkansas-born status, race, literacy, age, and current life stage family/household structure. Black women had 78% reduced odds of ownership compared to White women. Settlers vs. Arkansas-born women, and women raising children without spouses (married couples with children being the reference) also had lower odds of farm ownership. Black and White women who had reached the top rung were more likely native to the state and literate. Settlers might have had fewer accumulated resources, different household/family economy strategies, lacked White paternal sponsorship for land purchase (Schultz Reference Schultz2005) and/or lost properties once owned (Jones Reference Jones2010). Women’s literacy in 1910 reflected early life course dis/advantage (access to school) under old racial state policies prohibiting Black literacy.

Table 4.

Logistic Regressions: Lives in Owned Farm Household, Arkansas Farm Household Women, 1910 IPUMS

*p <.05 **p <.01 ***p <.001

Model 2 adds Plantation subregion (Upcountry/Coastal Plains as reference), also adjusting for county urbanization and county proportion of improved land, where the latter indicates local land competition and value. Women with higher odds of reaching the top rung lived in the non-Plantation subregions and in counties with less improved (hence, less valuable, and less costly) land. Settler status in this model becomes non-significant; perhaps resources and paternalistic ties mattered less adjusting for productive mode. The final model adds interactions of race*settler status and race*Plantation subregion residence, finding a joint effect of race and subregion. This finding differs from our analytic model which expected race and institutional factors to independently contribute to economic mobility. Rather, Black women’s households in the Plantation subregion were least likely to reach/retain the top rung of the agricultural ladder.

Life on the Ladder

Unfortunately, the 1910 IPUMS only distinguishes owner vs. tenant (all types) farm household status. Census data are also limited for exploring how and why some women faced mobility barriers. Therefore, we turn to women’s oral descriptions of work, living standards, and social mobility on different rungs of the agricultural ladder. Black landowners could accumulate extensive landholdings and contract with tenant and sharecropping families as well as wage laborers to work their land. Ella Clemons (BTV 1995), born in 1907 in Delta Monroe County, had parents that came from Savannah to Arkansas:

Women who became landowners, even if on a small scale, expressed a sense of achievement as well as residential autonomy. Lizzie Barnett (WPA 1936-38), a former slave who settled in Coastal Plains Faulkner County in 1867, stated:

Ann May (WPA 1936-38) of Upcountry Jackson County, sold as a child with her mother, implies that both White patronage and her family’s decision-making led to farm ownership:

Women who did not own farms also found paths toward residential autonomy. Former slave Molly Brown (WPA 1936-38), estimated age between ninety and 100 when interviewed, described buying her house in Delta Monroe County—the house she still lived in:

Cash tenancy, a step down from ownership, was also desirable: tenants owned tools, livestock, and like farm owners, had considerable autonomy. Mattie Chandler (BTV 1995), born into a cash tenant family in Delta Monroe county, recalled:

My dad was a big cotton farmer, and he was a renter, he worked a lot of land….^{Footnote 33}

Tenant (share) families owned the potential harvest and would pay a share of it to landlords at the season’s end. Having fewer assets and less economic security than cash tenants, share tenants often depended on landlords, who acted as local bankers, to extend credit to purchase farm and household necessities (Schultz Reference Schultz2005). Nanny Jackson (b. 1854), a White tenant who had moved to Delta Desha county from Tennessee, was distraught when Frank Nady, a planter, turned down her husband’s request to borrow money to buy seeds and equipment. She wrote, “Mr. Nady can’t help us this year and I don’t know who we will get” (Bolsterli Reference Bolsterli1982, p. 97).

Women’s work and family roles reflected both placement on the agricultural ladder and agrarian mode. Upcountry women in tenancy faced work burdens but had some discretion in arranging activities because they were less often bound by rigid contracts. Mary Hamilton, a White tenant, described her routine in summer:

Sharecropping in the Plantation subregion was more akin to wage work than true tenancy (Alston and Kaufmann, Reference Alston and Kauffman1998) and a status near the bottom of the ladder. Women in sharecropping households were subject to unpredictability in daily work schedules. They were often pulled to work on other sharecroppers’ lands, often in teams. Dora Strong Dennis (BTV 1995) recalled:

Plantation sharecropping also limited women’s discretion in the timing and sequencing of family and work activities, compared to true tenancy or negotiated task work with employers (Glymph Reference Glymph2008). Sharecropping contracts, between White landowners and male heads of sharecropping families, ensured the field labor of women and children (Mann Reference Mann1989). In sharecropping, like slavery, women worked alongside men in the field, and took care of the domestic work of home and family (Frankel Reference Frankel1999). Field work after Emancipation meant less autonomy in how women, now in individualized farm households, carried out the (unpaid) “production for use” work for their family (Mann Reference Mann1989, p. 797). For example, women sharecroppers had limited control over child care. Le Ester Jones (BTV 1995) from Delta Lee County recalled:

Living standards also reflected both placement on the agricultural ladder and agrarian mode. Mattie Chandler, born into a Delta cash tenant family, had high living standards when a child:

Upcountry and Coastal Plains tenant families could also hunt and forage, perhaps without growing crops, and get meat, butter, and milk from free-roaming livestock (McDonald and McWhiney, Reference McDonald and Grady1980; Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1997; Poe Reference Poe2011). In contrast, sharecropping contracts could forbid raising of food or livestock. Over 90% of 1910 plantation households across the South bought food on credit throughout the year, at high prices and interest rates, from plantation stores run by employers or merchants (Brannen Reference Brannen1924). Sharecroppers then needed to settle store credit accounts at harvest. Thelma Nash (BTV 1995) described:

Annie Floyd (BTV 1995) recalled:

Classical frontier and settler colonial studies assume stable settler (White) independence on borderlands once hegemonic White control is achieved. But White rural mobility in Arkansas fell by 1910, much as elsewhere in the South, due to falling cotton prices, rising production costs, and other related problems (Fite 1980; Jones Reference Jones2010; McDonald and McWhiney, Reference McDonald and Grady1980; Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1994, Reference Moneyhon1997). Arkansas White farm ownership fell from over 80% to about 37% of farms between 1865 and 1930 (Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1997). Moreover, by 1910, White indebted small-holders not only fell into tenancy, but increasingly into sharecropping (Moneyhon Reference Moneyhon1997). Plantation sharecropping exposed White women to a plantation-style labor system where they were subject to systemic poverty, contractual control of work/family roles, and status dependency (Mann Reference Mann1989; Steedman Reference Steedman2008). Cleaster Mitchell (BTV 1995), having grown up in a Black sharecropping community, noted:

Black farm families sustained community and family networks to provide material and social supports whenever possible, sharing food and caregiving for children and the sick, despite differences in relative position on the rungs of the agricultural ladder (Chafe et al., Reference Chafe, Gavins and Korstad2001; Jones Reference Jones2010). White farmers’ support networks were conditional, often contingent on the acceptance of others in the White community (Schultz Reference Schultz2005). Upcountry tenant Mary Hamilton noted:

It is unclear if poor White plantation sharecroppers could marshal significant “safety net” support from more-advantaged Whites. Poor Whites sharing the same labor status as poor Blacks shared a status of dependence and inferiority, despite race (Steedman Reference Steedman2008). As Jaynes (Reference Jaynes1986) noted, “In the South, white laborers had few friends outside their class” (p. 253). Community support might occur across race-related lines, especially among the poor (Schultz Reference Schultz2005), but as segregation spread, “a racial caste system pervaded the southern countryside” (Jones Reference Jones1992, p. 337). Moreover, the sharing of food, one of the strongest safety nets in the Black community, was the most severe rule violation under rural segregationist etiquette (Schultz Reference Schultz2005). Lucinda Baltimore’s (BTV 1995) parents owned land and had more than adequate provisions. She discovered as a child that racial norms for Whites outweighed hunger:

Yet Whites faced, in general, fewer headwinds to mobility in the new racial state. Poor as they were, White sharecroppers more likely exited the sharecropping system, moving into higher forms of tenancy or, if tenants, “aging” into land ownership via inheritance or purchase (Alston and Kauffman, Reference Alston and Kauffman1998). Black elder sharecropping women, recalling lifetimes of effort to exit their status, understood that their lack of mobility on the agricultural ladder was at least partly due to their embeddedness in a system designed to foster dependency. Molly Hardy Scott (WPA 1936-38), interviewed at age ninety in Prairie County, looked back on life as a sharecropper:

For some, sharecropping life was not significantly different from slavery, as Cora Gillam (WPA 1936-38), interviewed at age eighty-six in Little Rock, described:

The sharecropping system may have entrapped White women for a while but they were not as bound by new racial state laws and norms of social control, constructing race, should they exit. Cleaster Mitchell’s mother took a young White sharecropping woman under her wing: