Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Summer II/Section 01/Mrs. Hargraves

Overview
Mrs. Hargraves was the third of twelve children in a household of poor economic status, meaning she began to work from a very young age. At 21, Mrs. Hargraves married Sam Hargraves, with whom she had four children, and suffered plenty of marital problems. Eventually, Mr. Hargraves abandoned his wife and children leaving them with no money, and Mrs. Hargraves began working in a sewing room. On July 4th, 1939 Mrs. Hargraves was interviewed by Bernice Harris, an author working for the Federal Writers Project.

Early Life
Mrs. Hargraves was born circa 1897 near Gumberry, North Carolina. She was the third of twelve children, and due to her parents’ poor economical status, she was forced to learn how to cook and sew from a very young age. At the age of six, Mrs. Hargraves was already working the land with her mother and milking cows. During her infancy, Mrs. Hargraves only moved once, something that gave her childhood a sense of stability. Regardless of her hardships, Hargraves recalled having a happy childhood.

Marriage
When Mr. Hargraves got married at the age of 21 to Sam Hargraves, a day laborer, the stability she had enjoyed living in the same house disappeared. During her marriage, Mrs. Hargraves was forced to move almost twice a year. After falling ill due to tuberculosis, Sam was rejected from his place of work and failed to provide a stable income to feed his wife and kids, which caused him to become frustrated and verbally abusive. Apart from cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children, Mrs. Hargraves also took up a job working fields to help with the income. But it still wasn’t enough to put food on the table or pay rent. Then one day, even though his wife was pregnant with his fourth child, Sam Hargraves deserted his family.

Work and Living Conditions
As a child and during her marriage, Mrs. Hargraves primarily worked in the fields. Nevertheless, after her husband left her and her family, she moved to Seaboard and began working in a sewing room.

Her work at the sewing room was the only income her family of five had to sustain themselves, but her salary wasn’t enough to cover basic living expenses such as food, clothes, or medicine, so she fell deep into debt. Without a father to teach them, her children had developed no work ethic or experience in any field, rendering them unemployable. Mrs. Hargraves could not teach them herself because of her busy work schedule.

Her four children suffered from intense nausea due to malnutrition. A lack of clean clothes and academic materials such as pencils meant they couldn’t afford to attend church or school. Mrs. Hargraves herself suffered from insomnia for which she was prescribed pills that she couldn’t afford, which made her drowsy during the day. This meant that she had to choose between not sleeping or working near dangerous machines while drowsy.

The majority of her village refused to lend her help or even acknowledge the majority of the problems from which she suffered. They called her sons lazy for not having a job or earning money. They implied she was a bad mother and deserved to starve because of it. Because of her poor economic status and her ‘disgraceful’ spousal situation, the inhabitants of Seaboard criticized and refused to socialize with her family, intensifying the suffering she already experienced.

Discrimination Of Women In The Workforce And Welfare Programs
During the Great Depression of 1929, millions of Americans lost their jobs and began to fall into poverty. Upon seeing many men’s inability to attain a job, women created jobs for themselves. Selling their ‘wifely’ abilities such as sewing or cleaning, they flooded the job market, causing their employment rates to rise 24 percent in the early stages of the depression.

However, though more women were suddenly earning money, that didn’t mean they earned more money than men. In fact, “over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration’s wage codes set lower wages for women” than anybody else. This discrimination meant that it was practically impossible for women who were the sole wage earners in their households to provide basic living necessities for their families without outside help. During the 1930s, the extra help some families needed to make ends meet came from the many state and federal welfare programs put in place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The issue for many wives was that these “programs assumed ... married women were supported by their husbands and thus provided them no aid,” even if their husbands had left them and their children behind without any money.

The Depression caused a great shift within the American workforce and family dynamics, but societal standards and expectations took a long time to catch up. Both men and women, including Francis Perkin – Secretary of Labour at the time – publicly denounced working women, “calling their behavior “selfish” since they could supposedly” rely on their husbands, but instead stole away jobs from other men.

Overall, working women faced severe discrimination in every area of their lives during the late 1920s and 1930s. However, for many of those women, the discrimination experienced in the workforce and welfare programs meant that they were unable to put a roof over their heads or feed those who depended on them.

The Depression’s Deteriorating Diets
After the stock market crash that initiated the Depression, many upper and middle–class families quickly found themselves living in miserable conditions. The inability Americans had finding well–paying jobs created a serious change in everyone's diet. Lack of accessibility to goods such as meat and fresh vegetables “contribut[ed] to rising incidence[s] of hunger and malnutrition among children and adolescents,” eventually becoming a deadly problem.

The public was profoundly distressed about the food crisis they were living in and wrote incessantly to the government for aid. The letters were forwarded to the Bureau of Home Economics (a specialized branch of the Department of Agriculture) who began creating the guide of “Adequate Diets for People of Limited Income” to help impoverished families plan their meals better. The Bureau created and shared recipes to those in need, explaining the science behind them, and introducing to the American public the concepts of calories, vitamins, and food groups.

As the Depression worsened, women at the Bureau of Home Economics kept adapting and creating new food guides that provided the most nutrients possible for the cheapest price. The Bureau even released a “Restricted Diet” for families who had close to nothing, warning alongside the recipes inside that following the diet for a prolonged period of time would be dangerous. “Depression-era food guides accepted ... that some Americans ate insufficiently” and were unable to keep a balanced diet, but they kept providing the public with useful knowledge that kept millions alive.