Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2013/Spring/Hazel Wicker

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Hazel Wicker

Overview

Hazel Wicker (born between 1903 and 1905) was a housewife in Durham, NC during the Great Depression (1930s). She was interviewed for the Federal Writers Project in 1938.

Biography

Hazel Wicker was born between 1903-1905 in Angier, NC where she grew up on a farm. Mrs. Wicker’s parents were farmers and she helped on the farm as a child. She had one known sister. Mrs. Wicker moved when she was 17 from Angier, NC to Durham, NC to find a job in a factory or mill. She lived with her sister who was already living in Durham.

Mrs. Wicker lived with her married sister in Durham while she searched for work, and married Ray Wicker, a taxi driver. Within one year Mr. and Mrs. Wicker had a daughter, Juanita. Mr. Wicker would not let Mrs. Wicker work because he wanted to provide for the family completely by himself so she stayed at home and cared for Juanita.

Mr. Wicker got in a fight with a man three years after he and Mrs. Wicker got married. Mrs. Wicker knew very little about what happened and she did not know the details of what exactly happened for the two men to fight. Seemingly unintentional, Mr. Wicker killed the other man in the fight. Mr. Wicker was put in jail, and Mrs. Wicker had to care for herself and Juanita, who was three years old. Mrs. Wicker did not have any skills to provide for herself due to lack of work experience.

Mrs. Wicker moved in with a man named Willie McBroom because he told her he would provide for her and Juanita. They lived in a house described as “standing on stilts”, “square”, and “bare” and Mrs. Wicker called the house a “dump”. Mrs. Wicker had plans to move out into her own place because Mr. McBroom’s place was dirty and poor. Mrs. Wicker and Juanita had been living with Mr. McBroom for two years at the time of the interview by Travis Jordan for the Federal Writers Project.

Social Issues

Job Availability for Women in Great Depression

In the economic downturn of the Great Depression, jobs were hard to come by. In the early 20th century, men were seen as the “breadwinners”, and they held most available jobs. It was thought that “…any job held by a woman was a job that was being taken away from a man.” During the Great Depression, wives tried to provide for the family where the husband could not, but often could not because they had never held a job before and had no work experience. Mrs. Wicker found herself in the same situation. She was unable to get a job because she had no prior work experience and was unable to provide for her and Juanita.

Women as Home-Makers

Until the end of the 20th century, men were the sole “breadwinner” of the home. “Home was still seen as the arena for women, and the crisis of the Great Depression merely reinforced the patriarchal vision of traditional family structure.” However with the Great Depression, women were forced into employment and, by culture, this was considered very forward. If a man couldn’t provide for the family, the responsibility of provision fell up on the wife most often times. During the early 1900s, “[a married woman’s employment] symbolized defeat, a failure of family survival strategy in an intensely competitive society.” Women holding jobs was considered pitiful as it stepped out of the traditional mold, and it reflected greatly upon the husband. Mrs. Wicker tried to provide or her and Juanita with various jobs, but couldn’t make ends meet.

Issues of Historical Production

The Federal Writers’ Project was one of many tools the federal government used to revive the economy of the Great Depression. The Federal Writers’ Project gave jobs to “6,600 writers, editors, and researchers” of the 1930‘s, and was created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Works Progress Administration. These writers were employed by the federal government to interview and produce government documents about the lives of individuals and their life stories. The interviewers that worked for the Federal Writers’ Project didn’t use tape recorders to record interviews, and so the interviews were written as the speaker spoke most often times. Some Federal Writers’ Project writers were very careful to put the conversation onto paper as accurately as possible. One writer, Leonard Rapport said, “One thing I am trying to be very careful about is accuracy…. I am using only direct quotations that I actually heard and wrote down and which are as close to the subject’s own words as I can get.” Mrs. Wickers’ own interview’ acuracy can be under speculation as the writer, Jordan Travis, incorporated dialect into the text. Travis used the spelling “hit’s” for the words “it is” and also “worse’n” for the words “worse than”. The reader does not know if Mrs. Wicker actually spoke this way, and the historical account of the real Mrs. Wicker may be skewed as we only the Federal Writers’ Project archive to rely on.