THE PRESENT COTTON SYSTEM 201 



field in the South, that white women and children are no 

 longer to work against Negroes who are reduced to the mule 

 level for the benefit of non-resident plantation owners living 

 in New Orleans . . . Europe, and everywhere except where 

 they have to hold a plow handle. 40 



Family-size farms are "such as require from 12 to 24 

 months of man labor" over the period of a year. 47 If this 

 labor is relatively unskilled, of a manual rather than 

 machine tending type, and if the work comes in seasonal 

 peak loads, the farm will come to be tended to a greater 

 extent by women and children. These conditions, as we 

 have seen, are met in the culture of cotton. The economic 

 status of the family, the available supply of wage labor, 

 and the prevailing cultural attitudes are factors affect- 

 ing field work for women and children. While more ten- 

 ants than home owners, and more Negro than white 

 farmers work their women in the fields, the practice is 

 more a factor of income and standard of living than of 

 home ownership or race. A reporter to the 1880 Census, 48 

 from Conway County, Arkansas, "where four-fifths of the 

 cotton is produced by white people chiefly on small 

 farms," laid the increase in cotton culture in that region 

 to the fact that "it is a crop in which all the children and 

 women of the family can earn their own support at home 

 without undue exposure or hard labor." 



In the 1920 Census of Occupations, 1,084,128 women 

 in the United States were listed as engaged in agriculture 

 and kindred pursuits. Of these, 869,416, or 80 per cent, 

 were found in the ten chief cotton growing states. The 

 large majority were listed as working on the home farm, 



40 C. D. Rivers, The Empire of Cotton. Pamphlet. 

 47 H. W. Hawthorne, et al., op. cit., p. 24. 

 "Cotton Production," V, 618. 



