Julia Kirk Blackwelder

A carefully researched account of how Anglo, African American, and Mexican American women’s lives were affected by the Great Depression, they coped with sharply different options for themselves and their families.

During the Depression, San Antonio, Texas, was the poorest major city in the nation and the one with the lowest wages. It was a city divided by sharp ethnic lines and equally sharp differences in opportunity. Blackwelder uses statistical analysis to uncover the lives of women in the city, as well as some oral histories and other individual accounts to personalize her subjects. Statistics can be dull reading, but Blackwelder’s findings are dramatic. She reveals the differences in living conditions and various measures of life and death that marked the city’s rigidly segregated neighborhoods. While ethnic values and traditional practices affected women, the labor market’s sharp segregation by both gender and ethnicity was an even stronger determinate of their possibilities.

Read more at my blog, Me, You, and Books
http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/women-of-the-depression-by-julia-blackwe...… (més)