Altruistic mothers and sexual predators: Creating the poor-white woman in twentieth-century Southern literature

In "Altruistic Mothers and Sexual Predators: Creating the Poor-White Woman in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature," I examine how converging political and cultural movements helped to create dualistic images of southern poor-white female characters in Depression-era literature as either altruistic mother figures representative of a hopeful American future or sexually perverse feebleminded destroyers of American society. Although most studies of southern poor-white literature focus on familial and labor issues challenging southern poor-white female characters in literature during this era, I focus on how these issues were informed and altered in response to the evolving, socially conscious eugenics movement that became popular in American society in the 1920s and 1930s. As both American Communist Party members and New Deal Democrats began to include eugenic ideology in their political rhetoric, these dualistic images of poor-white women that had been a staple of eugenic family studies since the nineteenth century also began to become a staple in Depression-era literature, both fiction and nonfiction. Depression-era authors used these images as a way to explain how to stabilize America's changing economic and familial environment, and as a result, the dynamic lives of southern poor-white female characters were often overlooked in favor of these eugenically defined stereotypes. By examining a variety of works from the 1930s, I explain why these dualistic images became so prevalent during the Depression and how they helped to place southern poor-white female characters in subjective cultural roles.