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FORGOTTEN FOREMOTHERS
Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women's rights
Dorothea Lange and Florence Owens Thompson
In 1960, Dorothea Lange would share her story of meeting this nameless mother on the side of the road in Nipomo, Calif. “I did not ask her name or her history,” she said. “She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.”
The widespread fame of the image is hard to overstate. As a 1998 article inThe Fresno Beereported, “It has hung in the Louvre and decorated a Merle Haggard album. It has been reproduced in countless calendars, postcards, and just this fall, a postage stamp—the image selected to represent the Depression.”
The reaction to the photo, which appeared inTheSan Francisco Newson March 10, 1936, was swift and intense. Almost overnight, $200,000 worth of contributions flooded into the Nipomo area to care for the farmworkers.
“We were already long gone from Nipomo by the time any food was sent there,” Florence Owens Thompson’s son said in 2002. “That photo may well have saved some peoples’ lives, but I can tell you for certain, it didn’t save ours.” The family had left the roadside just hours after Dorothea and traveled on to California.
You can read this entire article HERE.
Kathryn S Gardiner
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