Thomas, James P.

Schweninger, Loren

doi:10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.43607

Cited by 1 publication

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“…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. 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).…”

Section: Institutional Mobility Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women in Frontier Arkansas

et al. 2019

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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.

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Section: Institutional Mobility Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%