Hard Times & Heartaches

"Blind Emma" Dusenbury
Archives & Special Collection, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville

Rural women particularly led lives of hard work. A man mused about his mother, an Ozark woman, who died in 1936:

"She had so little of the world's pleasures and goods that she was almost as denied as a prisoner. She had family; she had love… But… she never got… to do the laundry without the old rub-board, never got to turn on an electric light, never had a refrigerator, never had ice, never had any of the modern conveniences. I've always thought about it with regret, but that's the way things were then."

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