
          Women in the Rural South: Scraping a Living from Two-bit
Jobs
          By Smith, Barbara EllenBarbara Ellen Smith
          Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 5-8
          
          Southern working class women are survivors. No message emerges as
vividly from the stories in this booklet, Picking Up the Pieces. All
of these women scraped their livings out of rocky soil and two-bit
jobs; all got by on little but their own muscles and wits. Many bore
children at a young age, and struggled for the better part of their
lives to put food in their mouths and shoes on their feet. All endured
the personal insults, self-doubt and, in several cases, physical
violence that are the lot of women in this country; many faced the
additional barrier 

of racial abuse and discrimination. Their stories
are not romantic or pretty; poverty is neither. But they are stories
of great courage, humor and strength in the face of formidable
odds.
          These women are but one generation in a long succession of southern
women with similar stories to tell. The history of women's survival in
the South is bound up with the history of agriculture, which remained
the foundation of the region's economy until well into the present
century. The first women to eke their livings out of the southern
earth were of course Native American. Encroachment and enslavement by
European settlers shattered their traditional way of life, but members
of the Cherokee, Lumbee and other tribes have survived, especially in
North_Carolina and Oklahoma. Native Americans were the first of many
rural people in the region to be dispossessed of their most precious
economic resource--land. They were also among the first to be enslaved
in the labor system for which the South became known.
          The eighteenth century saw the flourishing of plantation
agriculture in the South, based on the labor of African women and
men. Although slavery was formally abolished in 1863, the
reorganization of agriculture into the sharecropping system ensured
the continued poverty of most black families. Concentration of land
ownership in the hands of a white upper-class minority denied economic
opportunity to successive generations of rural
Southerners. Women--both black and white--labored long and hard in
cotton fields and on tobacco farms, but remained for the most part
landless and in debt.
          Industrialization came to the South on a large scale during the
last quarter of the nineteenth century. Mines, mills and factories
proliferated amidst regional fanfare over the construction of a "New
South." Allocation of the new industrial jobs according to race and
gender established a pattern of occupational segregation that is
visible to this day. Hard pressed to secure an adequate labor force in
the rugged Appalachian mountains of the upper South, coal operators
sought workers of all races and nationalities--but hired no women. In
the more densely settled piedmont to the South, textile mill owners
preferred the low-wage labor of rural white_women and originally
children. They refused to hire black workers, save for a few menial
jobs, though certain other southern employers, such as tobacco
processors, relied heavily on black labor. All segregated their
workers by race and gender into distinct physical locations and job
categories. Coupled with enforced social separation under Jim Crow,
occupational segregation maintained a divisive hierarchy of
opportunity among Southerners who were increasingly members of the
same working class.
          Southern women's present economic status reflects the persistent,
detrimental impacts of their segregation into low-wage, often
labor-intensive jobs. In the coal-dependent economies of east
Kentucky, southern West_Virginia and areas further south, women are
largely excluded from the most important source of high-wage
employment industry, the mining industry. As a result, they have few
economic opportunities and extremely low labor force participation
rates: in 1984 in West_Virginia, 39.2 percent of adult women were in
the labor force, the lowest rate of any state in the nation. Over the
last ten years, women have fought successfully to gain access to
mining jobs; today, however, many coal miners--including most
women--are unemployed.
          In the piedmont counties of North_Carolina, South_Carolina and
Georgia, women remain concentrated in the low-wage manufacuring
industries where they were first employed one hundred years
ago. Nearly two-thirds of southern textile and apparel workers are
women, and the great majority are rural. Today, women of all races
find employment in the mills, but they receive some of the lowest
wages in the country for their efforts. In 1983, average earnings in
the apparel industry were $5.37/hour, about half the average in
manufacturing industries like chemicals and primary metals, where men
predominate.
          As is true throughout the United_States, the rapid growth of the
southern service sector has been based on the labor of women. For
black_women, dependence on service jobs is nothing new; they were long
consigned to domestic service, the lowest wage job in the nation. As
recently as 1960, nearly half of all employed black_women in the South
were domestic servants. Many now engage in a commercialized variation
of the same activity; they are cooks in restaurants, maids in hotels,
laundresses in hospitals. Over one-third of all employed black_women
in the South work in the service sector.
          Southern white_women, by contrast, are more heavily concentrated in
pink collar ghettos of retail sales and office work. In the urban
South, slightly more than half of employed white_women are cashiers,
secretaries, 

and related workers. In the rural areas of the region,
the larger role of manufacturing somewhat offsets dependence on these
sectors, though nearly 40 percent of employed rural white_women are
secretaries and sales clerks. The higher status of this pink collar
work does not necessarily bring a higher wage or greater job
satisfaction. Southern women of all races often earn scarcely more
than the minimum wage: in 1984, half of those with any income at all
received less than $6,700 a year; among those who worked full-time the
entire year, half earned less than $14,312. Median earnings of black
and Hispanic women were over $2,000 a year lower than those of white
women.
          As the lowest paid workers in the lowest wage region of the
country, southern working class women bear a heavy burden of
poverty. Their role as caretakers of children magnifies their economic
needs and spreads the implications of their poverty to the next
generation. Poverty is most severe among those who experience the
intersecting discrimination of class, race and gender: working class
black_women who are single mothers with young children. Over sixty
percent are poor. Other southern women of all races live constantly on
the margin between destitution and survival--one month unemployed and
down to the last dollar, another month with a small paycheck and an
uncertain job, yet always without genuine opportunity.
          Women survive despite their lack of economic resources by using
skills passed down for generations. This is true not only of those who
live in remote areas on the margins of the wage economy, but also of
women in "developed" locations who work hard for wages yet always
remain poor. Both produce and circulate with their neighbors the goods
and services necessary for their families' survival: they patch and
sew, swap child care, watch for sales and clip coupons; in rural
areas, they also garden, raise chickens and perform other agricultural
tasks. In general, women have learned to substitute their own hard
work for the commodities that they cannot afford to buy.
          Women who have made much out of little may have to do with even
less in the future. Current economic trends do not bode well for
southern women, especially those in rural locations. Fueled by
international competition and the loss of markets, US corporations are
engaged in a global search for reduced production costs; their
strategies include technological innovation, relocation to lower wage
areas, and sometimes a combination of both. For workers, the domestic
impacts of this economic transformation include unemployment,
irregular work and lowered wages. Labor-intensive manufacturing has
been especially hard hit; this is precisely the industrial sector that
once favored the rural South and the labor of southern women.
          These trends are apparent in mining and manufacturing industries
throughout the South. In West_Virginia, for example, the unemployment
rate has topped all other states' for over two years. Technological
innovations in underground mining, coupled with declining markets for
certain grades of coal, have drastically diminished employment in the
coalfields. Women who once worked in the mines now stand in
unemployment lines with former waitresses and secretaries from the
boarded-up businesses of rural county seats. Further south, women who
worked in the textile and apparel industries also find that jobs are
scarce. Bankruptcies, plant closings and layoffs have swept through
the piedmont during the past ten years. Between 1973 and 1983, the
work force in textiles and apparel dropped nationwide by over
500,000. Although advocates for protectionist trade policies assert
that "unfair competition from producers in Southeast Asia" is the
source of declining employment, the situation is far more complex.
          Large corporations in the textile industry have transformed the
production of cloth from fiber. Since the mid-1970s, they have brought
robots, electronic knitting machines and other technological
innovations into the mills; the result has been rapidly rising
productivity and wide-spread displacement of workers. Although it is
true that textile imports have boomed in recent years, they are by no
means the sole cause of unemployment. The US textile industry is
undergoing a massive shakeout: less productive mills are closing; less
well-capitalized companies are going bankrupt. Meanwhile, the larger
producers are concentrating production in modern, relatively automated
plants. Manufacturers of apparel have taken a different approach to
the pressures on international competition. Although some have
invested in new, highly productive technologies, many have roamed the
globe in search of cheap labor, and have found it among poor women in
Hong Kong, Mexico, Taiwan and elsewhere.
          Some producers have even found they no longer need to leave the
United_States to take advantage of Asian and Hispanic women's cheap
labor; there is evidence that rising immigration and high unemployment
rates have enabled a return of the sweatshop to cities like New_York,
Chicago, and Los Angeles.
          Women laid off from textile mills and garment factories rarely find
a job in the new manufacturing industries that have recently located
in the South. Since 

World_War_II, businessmen in heavy industries have
been drawn by the region's low wages, nonunion work force and
accomodating political tradition, which equates "economic_development"
and the "right to work." Particularly for capital-intensive
operations, in which long-term security of expensive plants and
equipment is a serious concern, the political conservatism and
stability of the South give it an edge over alternative locations in
the Third World. Manufacturers of chemicals, machinery, rubber and
other products have all constructed plants in the South. Location of
the Saturn automobile plant in rural Tennessee is only a recent and
relatively well-publicized example of this larger trend, which has
generated considerable regional rivalry, especially during periods of
recession in the North. These so-called "emerging" or
"non-traditional" industries bring opportunities for some of the
highest wages paid to southern workers. But for women, they bring very
little: employers in these industries rarely turn to women for their
production work force, which is over seventy percent male.
          The growth industries in which southern working class women find
employment are primarily in the ubiquitous sectors of services and
retail trade. The more fortunate land a relatively secure job with the
government, which in the postwar era has been an important source of
service sector expansion and increased job opportunities for
women. Nearly one-fourth of all employed women in the South now work
for the government; among black_women, public employment is even more
significant, accounting for nearly one-third of all jobs. In much of
the service sector, however, jobs for women may be plentiful but
genuine opportunities are few. Pay in the lower ranks of service
employment rarely matches even the $5 an hour that women received in
manufacturing. In rural areas where tourism has generated a boom in
shops, motels and restaurants, earning a living wage is yet more
difficult. Jobs for women in tourist-dependent businesses are
frequently seasonal, the hours are often part-time, and the wages are
almost invariably low.
          Most southern women will no doubt survive the present economic
crisis, as they have done for generations back. That does not diminish
the injustice of their situation, however. There is a shameful gap
between the economic contributions of southern working class women and
the economic resources that they actually control. The southern
economy has long been dependent on the labor of women. Black women
were essential to southern agriculture, white_women were central to
southern industrialization; and now, women of all races are primary
workers in the key growth sector of the economy--services. Moreover,
as the unpaid laborers in families and households, women have long
maintained the southern work force, and made possible survival in a
regional economy premised on subsistence-level wages. Women's poverty
is no indication of their contribution to the southern economy;
indeed, it is a terrible indictment of the southern economy. Working
class women must share in the benefits of southern growth and
prosperity. Justice decrees it, equity requires it and, increasingly,
southern women demand it.
          
            Barbara Ellen Smith is director of research and education
of the Southeast Women's Employment Coalition, Lexington,
Kentucky. Her essay is the introduction to Picking Up the Pieces, a
new booklet by the Highlander Research and Education Center, in which
thirty women from ten communities throughout the South talk about
their lives--their growth as community leaders, their struggles for
integrity and economic survival. Picking Up the Pieces is $5 per copy
plus $1 postage from Highlander Center, Route 3, Box 370, New Market,
TN 37820.
          
        
