Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965 by Cherisse Jones-Branch has been reviewed in H-Net Reviews.
“In Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965, Cherisse Jones-Branch examines Black women’s activism in the rural South. Focusing specifically on rural Arkansas, she shows how women created safe spaces to tackle the most significant problems within their communities, related to health, education, and the family. Comprising largely chronological chapters, spanning the years 1914 to 1965, this work moves the scholarship of rural life in Arkansas forward by looking beyond the perspective of white men to see what forms of activism and institutions Black women used. It is an important addition to our historical understanding of rural, southern Black women. … Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps is a strong addition to the historiography. The book will appeal to multiple audiences, including Arkansas natives and residents, and those interested in the state’s history. While this type of case study will certainly be popular among these local audiences, the book will also appeal to those interested in diverse topics, including the study of rural Black women during the twentieth century, rural history, and the politicization of women in the years before the civil rights movement.”
—Lindsey Bestebreurtje, H-Net Reviews
The first major study to consider Black women’s activism in rural Arkansas, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps foregrounds activists’ quest to improve Black communities through language and foodways as well as politics and community organizing. In reexamining these efforts, Cherisse Jones-Branch lifts many important figures out of obscurity, positioning them squarely within Arkansas’s agrarian history.
The Black women activists highlighted here include home demonstration agents employed by the Arkansas Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service and Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers, all of whom possessed an acute understanding of the difficulties that African Americans faced in rural spaces. Examining these activists through a historical lens, Jones-Branch reveals how educated, middle-class Black women worked with their less-educated rural sisters to create all-female spaces where they confronted economic, educational, public health, political, and theological concerns free from white regulation and interference.
Centered on the period between 1914 and 1965, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps brings long-overdue attention to an important chapter in Arkansas history, spotlighting a group of Black women activists who uplifted their communities while subverting the formidable structures of white supremacy.
Cherisse Jones-Branch is the James and Wanda Lee Vaughn Endowed Professor of History at Arkansas State University, where she is dean of the graduate school. She is the author of Crossing the Line: Women and Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II and the coeditor of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times.