ABSTRACT

Two or three of the most haunting photographs from the era of the Great Depression are portraits of women pictured on their desolate Dust Bowl farms. But the great majority of familiar Depression images are of men—men lining up at urban soup kitchens, building bridges for the WPA, crossing the country in boxcars looking for work, battling police on the picket line. Even at the time, observers commented on how rarely one saw women in the places where the needy congregated. "Yet," as one reporter commented, "there must be as many women out of jobs in cities and suffering extreme poverty as there are men. What happens to them? Where do they go?"