User:Cjr100B/Bertha Steadman

Bertha Steadman was a woman in the mountains of western North Carolina during the Great Depression. She suffered from many of the stereotypical social prejudices of the period, including the perpetuation of the belief that a woman’s place is in absolute submission to her husband and that education for rural women was impractical due to their traditional role in the home and the fields. Much of the information about her life is found in a 1939 interview by the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal program intended to compile a personal and historically accurate recording of the social issues of the era.

Biography
Bertha Steadman was born around 1892 in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Growing up, she attended a small local school until sixth grade, at which point she began work on the family farm. The continuation of her education consisted of listening to sermons, during which she became friends with the old caretaker of the church. She went on to marry his son, Walter, with expectations of an improved life. However, Walter soon began working less and drinking more, and Bertha was forced to provide for both of them as a seamstress and “scraped together five or six dollars a week by virtue of her industry.” As time went on, her husband’s reliance on drink increased to the point that he was spending all of his wife’s profits on alcohol. For the sake of being a loyal wife, Bertha was forced to “remain a passive witness to the ruin of her husband and the exploitation and destruction of her own life.”

Education
In his essay on education during the Great Depression, Charles Biebel notes both the improvements and shortcomings of the educational system in the era, declaring that, “The public school is the most effective agency by which the individual can be adjusted even though schooling always lags behind rapidly changing social conditions.” Bertha Steadman mentions the improved status of education during her lifetime, which is made clear by the fact that she received any education whatsoever, but the shortcomings of education, especially for women, are displayed in her inability to pursue education beyond the sixth grade despite a clear and expressed desire to do so. At the time, education was becoming available to more people and its quality was improving. Jeffrey Mirel and David Angus’ journal article on education in the Great Depression states that, “By the 1920’s most high schools of respectable size were multi-purpose institutions offering dozens of courses in numerous departments and preparing youngsters for a broad range of occupational fields.” Despite these improvements, education was still not a priority for most people, and the majority of society believed education to be a helpful, if not somewhat superfluous, commodity for the rich and wealthy.

Feminism and gender equality
During the era of the Great Depression, women had recently gained the hard-fought right to suffrage and had achieved new levels of equality in many fields. In an article in The Atlantic, Albert J. Nock argued that, “Our women…have also managed to establish a roughly satisfactory relation of live and let live with their male entourage, mostly by way of concession.” However, they were still considered inferior to men in many ways and were socially and culturally discouraged from attempting independence from their husbands or fathers. Jane Humphries’ journal on the role of women in the era declared that, “In short, it was demonstrated in the 1920s that women were not equal in terms of economic power, privilege, and opportunity.” In Steadman’s case, she might have been able to achieve her hopes of higher education if it were not for her husband’s exploitation of her hard work in order to sustain his alcoholism. This was most likely the case for many other women in the era due to a culture that considered men as necessary protectors and providers for their women, even when large groups of women like Bertha Steadman both provided for and economically protected their irresponsible and neglectful husbands.

Federal Writers' Project
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the Federal Writers’ Project in 1935 by as part of his New Deal Program. “It provided jobs for unemployed writers, editors, and research workers [and]…produced ethnic studies, folklore collections, local histories, nature studies.” As part of the Federal Writers’ Project, Bertha Steadman was interviewed by Mrs. Luline Mabry, whose recordings were transcribed by Frank Massinimo. The interview of Steadman records her voice in a manner that clearly displays a desire for self-improvement through her reflections on the matter. However, it also makes the deficiencies in her education obvious through the use of local vernacular and grammatical errors. Steadman’s voice in her interview also gives evidence of her desperation as a member of the “desolate breed,” which adds to the urgency and importance of the social issue of gender equality. The Federal Writers' Project has come under scrutiny in the past for distorting the voice of its subjects in order to direct the readers' perception of a person, so the voice of Steadman may have been manipulated during the process of its recording. In her analysis of the veracity of the Federal Writers’ Project, Lynda Hill examines the “marked skepticism about the authenticity of many of these interviews on the part of the appraisers.” Although such doubts may lead to questions about the authenticity of the recorded accounts, it is unlikely that stories such as Bertha Steadman’s would have come to light without the Federal Writers’ Project.