Women and the Great Depression During the Great Depression, government mainly focused on getting men back into the workforce, and working women struggled to support their families. Women who tried to find paying jobs risked public scorn for taking away income from the …show more content…
Racial minorities were already struck with multiple types of discrimination, and hard times got only got worse. Nine out of ten African American women in 1930 worked in agriculture or domestic service, two areas that were hit hard by the Depression. Farmers in the Midwest struggled from a large drought that subsidized to the Dust Bowl passages of that decade, while farmers all over suffered from declining agricultural prices and foreclosures. In the meantime, housewives who had previously hired servants began to cut costs by doing their own housework, and white women began competing for undesirable jobs formerly abandoned by black women. Mexican American women, who were on the bottom of this long chain of oppression, faced these same circumstances, but with the added threat of deportation to Mexico, due to the long-running fears about job competition. Over the course of the Depression, about one-third of the Mexican American population returned to Mexico, creating even more financial adversity (Ware,