1. Document #1
“. . . Working women at first lost their jobs at a faster rate than men. In the early years of the Depression, many employers, including the federal government, tried to spread what employment they had to heads of households. That meant firing any married woman identified as a family’s “secondary” wage-earner...”
Source: David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, Oxford University Press
women lost their jobs first

2. Document #2
Migrant Mother
Migrant: a worker who moves from place to place to do seasonal work.
"I left Oklahoma in 1925 and went to Oroville [California]... And I was 28 years old [in 1931], and I had five kids and that one [the baby in this photo, Norma] was on the road. She never even saw her daddy. She was born after he died. It was very hard…”
Migrant Mother. California Feb photo Dorothea Lange, LOC.
Many americans became migrant workers

3. Document #3
“. . . Children were reported so famished they were chewing up their own hands… On her first trip to the mountains, Eleanor Roosevelt [the first lady—the wife of President Franklin Roosevelt] saw a little boy trying to hide his pet rabbit. “He thinks we are not going to eat it,” his sister told her, “but we are.” … Mountain people, with no means to leave their homes, sometimes had to burn their last chairs and tables to keep warm.
A teacher in a mountain school told a little girl who looked sick but said she was hungry to go home and eat something. “I can’t,” the youngster said. “It’s my sister’s turn to eat.”
Source: Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar, David McKay Company
children starved

4. Document #4
An African American Garment Worker in Harlem “… I knows every job on my finger tips an' I even shows others how t' do the job… We gotta do ev'ry thin' an' get paid least. We knows th' job as well as any an 'me but they don' give us a chance t' do th' same wuk”
Source: “American Life Stories” Manuscripts from the Federal Writer’s Project (Library of Congress)
african americans had it worse

5. Document #5
A breadline in Times Square, New York City
Americans wait in line in front of a soupkitchen.
breadlines and soupkitchens helped people
At the height of the Great Depression, half of all American families were living below poverty. Local charities churches organized many soup kitchens. Soup kitchens served mostly soup and bread. Soup was economical because water could be added to serve more people.

6. Document #6
suicides rose

7. Document #7
The Depression changed the family in dramatic ways. Many couples delayed marriage - the divorce rate dropped sharply (it was too expensive to pay the legal fees and support two households); and birth rates dropped for the first time in American history.
Traditional roles within the family changed during the 1930s… A 1940 survey revealed that 1.5 million married women had been abandoned by their husbands.
Allen, Frederick Lewis, Since Yesterday: The 1930's in America (1940); Leuchtenburg, William, Franklin D. Roosevelt and The New Deal (1963).
family life changed

8. Document #8
“I was not able to finish my education because of the problems. I was forced to live in various places with my older sisters.”
Source: Creola Steward, Denmark, S.C. The Times and Democrat: Reflections in Time. Hughes, Cathy C., ed. Orangeburg, SC. pg.34.
education declined

9. A house in a shantytown or Hoverville
Document #9
As the Depression worsened and millions of urban and rural families lost their jobs and depleted their savings, they also lost their homes. Desperate for shelter, homeless citizens built shantytowns in and around cities across the nation. These camps came to be called Hoovervilles, after the president.
President Herbert Hoover was blamed for the terrible economic and social conditions, and for the shantytowns that appeared across the nation.
Hooverville shanties were constructed of cardboard, tar paper, glass, lumber, tin and whatever other materials people could salvage.
shantytowns and hoovervilles
A house in a shantytown or Hoverville