FIELD LABOR OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN Another factor so far inherent in cotton culture is the large amount of labor required. Not only is a large amount required but it is cheap labor. Cotton is a cheap labor crop, as has been suggested, largely because it can not be grown by machinery. Machinery does the work of many men and pays their labor returns to its owner. Machine agriculture enables the farmer to cultivate more acres and thus add to his increased labor returns, in creased returns on capital. The amount of cotton a farmer can grow is limited by the amount he can pick. Cotton has so far defied machine harvesting. This de fiance limits the development to any great extent of mechanized methods of planting and cultivating. It is useless to plant more cotton than can be picked.
The greater amount of labor required on cotton farms has been shown by comparative farm management studies." A group of cotton farms in Sumter County, Georgia, averaging 73 acres in crops were found to re quire on the average 38 months of man labor per year. Dairy farms in Dane County, Wisconsin, averaging 81 acres required 22 months of man labor, and grain and live stock farms of 93 acres in Clinton County, Indiana, required only 19 months per year. A cotton farm 85 per cent as large as a live stock farm thus requires twice as much man labor. The labor services required are also more intensive in that they are distributed in peak loads. As a result the average cotton farms have the smallest acreage of improved land of any farms except those devoted to truck growing. The average for the United States is 78 acres of improved land per farm, while all the cotton states except Texas and Oklahoma have less than 45 improved acres." If large farms make possible economies, cut down overhead, and pile up incomes, the cotton grower farms too meanly on too small a scale.
Another reason often given for cheap labor in cotton is that the cotton grower is inferior in that he is willing to accept a low standard of living. Although efficient, it is contended, they are numerous enough to overproduce cotton. After they have depressed the price of cotton be low a decent standard of living they continue producing it, since it is impossible to depress their standard of living low enough to cause their withdrawal. The form this argu ment takes is interracial competition with Negroes on the plantation. The view has been well expressed by a cotton farmer himself writing from Georgia in 1914: One great reason, why cotton is so plentiful and cheap, is that on the great plantations of middle Georgia, middle Alabama, Mississippi and others of the richest regions of the South, is it is grown by Negroes who get for their labor, only enough to maintain a bare, brute subsistence. . . .
They are also intimidated by the sentiment which is kept alive among you against them, and which costs you and your children more than it does them. The few, rich non-resident
plantation aristocrats who get the benefit of this cheap, this mule cheap labor, against which you are putting your wives and children in the fields, are not, and never would be, able to intimidate these Negroes by themselves. The Negroes work year after year making cotton to make yours cheaper, and never daring to ask for a settlement in many cases because you make them afraid. Let a voice go up from every cotton field in the South, that white women and children are no longer to work against Negroes who are reduced to the mule level for the benefit of non-resident plantation owners living in New Orleans . . . Europe, and everywhere except where they have to hold a plow handle." Family-size farms are "such as require from 12 to 24 months of man labor" over the period of a year.' If this labor is relatively unskilled, of a manual rather than machine tending type, and if the work comes in seasonal peak loads, the farm will come to be tended to a greater extent by women and children. These conditions, as we have seen, are met in the culture of cotton. The economic status of the family, the available supply of wage labor, and the prevailing cultural attitudes are factors affect ing field work for women and children. While more ten ants than home owners, and more Negro than white farmers work their women in the fields, the practice is more a factor of income and standard of living than of home ownership or race. A reporter to the 1880 Census,' from Conway County, Arkansas, "where four-fifths of the cotton is produced by white people chiefly on small farms," laid the increase in cotton culture in that region to the fact that "it is a crop in which all the children and women of the family can earn their own support at home without undue exposure or hard labor." In the 1920 Census of Occupations, 1,084,128 women in the United States were listed as engaged in agriculture and kindred pursuits. Of these, 869,416, or 80 per cent, were found in the ten chief cotton growing states. The large majority were listed as working on the home farm, while the next largest group was composed of wage hands." That the number of women farm workers is seri ously underestimated is suggested by the nature of the questions asked as to occupation. With a smaller farm population in 1910 there were found 1,807,506 females over ten years of age engaged in "agriculture, forestry and animal husbandry," 83 per cent of which were in the ten chief cotton states.' According to the 1920 figures, however, 19.8 per cent of all females on the farm over ten years of age in the ten cotton states served as field laborers. Of every hundred women field laborers 68 were Negroes and 32 white in 1920. In 1910, 60 were Negroes and 40 whites.