Full Citation
Title: WOMEN IN FRONTIER ARKANSAS
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2020
ISBN:
ISSN: 1742-058X
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X19000250
NSFID:
PMCID:
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Abstract: Arkansas was a demographic frontier after the U.S. Civil War. Despite marked agricultural land deforestation and development after the 1870s, it remained agrarian well into the twentieth century. We fuse life course and racial state frameworks to examine Black and White women’s settlement in Arkansas over the post-Civil War period (1880-1910). A racial state empowers residents and enacts policies based on race rather than equal citizenship rights. We highlight three institutional domains shaped by racial state policies: productive economies (subsistence, mixed commercialism, and plantation production); stratification on an agricultural ladder (from sharecropping to forms of tenancy to farm ownership); and rules of raced (and gendered) social control . We examine women’s settlement patterns and related outcomes in an institutional context at different life course stages using mixed methods: women’s oral histories and Census data analysis. We find that by 1880 White women and families, less attracted by forces of marketization, had largely migrated to subsistence and mixed commercial subregions. Black women and families, generally desiring to rise on the agricultural ladder to farm ownership, largely migrated to the rich lands found in plantation production counties. Black women in Arkansas could rise but, by 1910, new racial state (Jim Crow) policies more severely limited travel, material resources, and education for tenant farm families, predominantly Black, in the plantation subregion. Commensurate with this, Black women in the plantation subregion had experienced less status mobility on the agricultural ladder, with reduced living standards, by later life.
Url: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1742058X19000250/type/journal_article
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Elman, Cheryl; Wittman, Barbara; Feltey, Kathryn M.; Stevens, Corey; Hartsough, Molly
Periodical (Full): Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Issue: 2
Volume: 16
Pages: 575-612
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Other, Race and Ethnicity
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