What happened to women during the Dust Bowl?

What happened to women during the Dust Bowl?

Other women and their families lost their love for the land or the resources required to live on it and resettled by choice or necessity. Falling farm prices and increasing debts prevented Dust Bowl farmers from paying their mortgages, often resulting in foreclosure and resettlement.

What was family life like during the Dust Bowl?

Bob Burke: Children had to stay inside if a dust storm was coming. If they went outside to do chores, they had to hold a cloth over their nose. It was commonplace for adults and children to wear homemade masks. There were stories of animals and humans suffocating to death when they were caught in a thick dust storm.

How did people suffer in the Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region.

What happened to women in 1940s?

Five million women entered the workforce between 1940-1945. The gap in the labor force created by departing soldiers meant opportunities for women. In particular, World War II led many women to take jobs in defense plants and factories around the country.

How did some dust Bowlers treat dust pneumonia?

One such method was placing Vaseline around the nose to capture dust before it could enter the nose. Another was a dust mask. The Red Cross distributed 17,000 masks in the Dust Bowl region, but they would fill up with dirt in only hours and become uncomfortable and unusable.

Why was the Dust Bowl called the Dirty Thirties?

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s sometimes referred to as the “Dirty Thirties”, lasted about a decade. It was caused by severe drought and decades of extensive farming without crop rotation. The main area of impact was on the southern plains, though northern areas were also affected, but not nearly with as much devastation.

Was Oklahoma a part of the Dust Bowl?

Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Kansas were all a part of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In Oklahoma, the panhandle cities and towns suffered the worst droughts and dust storms (map courtesy of PBS).

Where did the Dust Bowl hit in the 1930s?

In the 1930s, a series of severe dust storms swept across the mid-west states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Texas. The storms, years of drought, and the Great Depression devastated the lives of residents living in those Dust Bowl states. Three hundred thousand of the stricken people packed up their belongings and drove to California.

What was the soil like in the Dust Bowl?

Soil rises and falls in drifts on a farm near Liberal, Kansas, in March 1936. Semiarid, constantly windy, and prone to droughts—with long dry spells coming along every twenty years or so—the grasses were what kept the land together, what kept it from deteriorating into outright desert.

How many people left the Dust Bowl States?

Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states— Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma—during the 1930s. It was one of the largest migrations in American history.

Where was the heart of the Dust Bowl?

The heart of the Dust Bowl was the Texas panhandle and western Oklahoma, but atmospheric winds carried the dust so far that East Coast cities sometimes found a powdery layer of dirt on windows, streets, sidewalks and automobiles.