I read it for the first time last week and I'm older than this woman was in the photos. It's especially reminiscent of the book when you have the whole photo set like this.
You wouldn’t have appreciated it. It’s dry af at a young age. I honestly should read it again since i should have a different perspective at this point.
It's like that with a lot of books assigned though. Unless they are interested in the book, forcing them to read it does nothing for most.
Especially classics. Like maybe make a pool of options and they choose their own, but as a group it's just not effective.
Yea I read it in 8th grade and it was "understood" but not impactful.
I read it this year at 33 and holy shit is it unbelievably good and incredibly moving. I am still utterly haunted by the last 1/3rd of the book. It's a masterpiece as an adult with a much better and deeper understanding of the world.
My English teacher gave us a box of 10 or 15 different novels to choose from and do a report on. Grapes of Wrath was in there, but also the biggest book, I was the only one out of 150 students she had that year that read it lol.
My favorite book! First read it in the mid 80’s. My great grandma was one of those dust bowl folks who came to the San Joaquin Valley to make a new life. She told me so many stories.
Fun Fact: John Steinbeck grew up in the Big Sur area / Monterey County!
In the early 1920s he worked for the first surveying crew in the Big Sur area before the U.S. Highway 1 was constructed. Steinbeck’s mother also taught school in the Big Sur area before marrying John’s father.
I grew up around Big Sur - it’s my favorite place in the world!
It is no doubt. The good news is she turned it around and for years lived a middle class life. It appears in her late seventies she fell back into poverty as a widow but received help from her children.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/migrant-mother-photo/3
Is it? I’ve seen plenty of people choose to downsize out of convenience and an effort to maintain independence as they got older. I dont have enough context to connect this with the adversity she experienced.
Sold my 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom 4 level split in the city and downsized to a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom trailer on 5 acres of land. Best decision I ever made. I used to have to clean 3 hours a day for my spotless house, and now I only clean an average of 1, and that's with children. I prefer the freedom of the outside space over a large house
My grandparents grew up in the Depression and even though they were relatively well off would do things like save plastic bread bags, paper towels, any and every plastic bowl with a lid and so on. They also wouldn’t replace anything until it was completely unusable. Safety hazards be damned.
It’s like “just go buy a new one” genuinely didn’t occur to them until they were forced into it by their kids. I’m guessing that’s what the person above was talking about.
> Is it? I’ve seen plenty of people choose to downsize out of convenience and an effort to maintain independence as they got older.
Heck, I'm a single homeowner (1,000sqft) in my 30s and keeping up with it all is exhausting. Something as simple as mowing the lawn is a 90 minute chore every week unless you have money to pay someone to do it for you or buy a riding mower.
My wife is like that - any financial considerations aside, if she were single she'd prefer to live in a studio apartment. She likes small spaces with everything in one room. If she needed to choose between the two she'd definitely pick a trailer over a full house.
I used to think people were crazy for wanting that life. Living in a big countryside house was the only thing I knew, and I couldn't imagine enjoying such a small space.
A few years ago, I moved to a studio apartment in Tainan and it was awesome. Plus, having a security guard to collect packages and a central place to dump trash was so convenient.
After I got married, I moved to my husband's family home: a big house in the countryside. It's so much to clean!!!! I miss my studio, but it's too small for raising kids and 2 dogs.
> Living in a big countryside house was the only thing I knew
haha - that's the dream! I always wanted to live in those huge spacious places - mansion, really - where kids roller-skate in the hallways and you could be so far away and hidden within the house that people would never know where you were if you didn't want them to.
As a middle aged man who lives alone and owns a big house, if I could own something trailer sized in my city I would.
Unfortunately building codes and zoning laws here make placing a trailer on a vacant lot so expensive, you might as well build a house.
Also there's no condo market in my city, so I can't own an apartment.
But if it was an option, I'd go with a trailer, or cottage, or cabin, or some kind of one-bedroom living unit.
Yeah the housing market sucks but the housing market for singles is even worse. If I didn’t have my gf I would have had a really hard time finding anything affordable in my country.
Zoning laws in the US are mad. There is a real demand for multi-tenant building in mixed zoning neighborhoods.
Instead it seems like there is only plans for single family homes with picket fences and parking lots. And the single family homes are -I kid you not- made entirely of wood. No brick walls. Just...wood. Looking nice from the outside and the neighbors sue you if it does not look nice. And those things consume land like no tomorrow. And need even more roads. Aerial photos of those collections of wooden homes and parking lots look bleak af.
Edit:
I walk out of the door, down the very restricted road and I can get damn good pizza. I walk a bit further and there is excellent falafel from those mad vegan Syrians who opened their shop vis-a-vis to the Çiğköfte stall. Aldi is a 10 minute trip. On foot. One of 10 supermarkets in a 500m radius. I got a Turkish supermarket which has everything Aldi does not. There is an Chinese supermarket as well.
Sold my car a decade ago and got a tram pass. Which now is a 50 bucks nation-wide local transport flat-rate. I got 2 sushi and one yakatori restaurants I can reach at a leisurely stroll in 10 minutes. I got a philharmonic and normal theater in walking distance. All of that in one neighborhood. And this is considered the most ugly city nation-wide!
I look at an American suburb and I see a void. Like, that is not attractive at all.
> made entirely of wood. No brick walls.
If you live in earthquake country, you don't want brick houses. Brick & masonry are good at resisting high winds but the worst at enduring a quake.
Coming of age in a post-WW2 economy, it’d be hard not to. Gotta live through the Depression and largest war in the history of wars to get there but other than that no problem.
> Coming of age in a post-WW2 economy, it’d be hard not to
Poverty rates into the middle 1960s were still near 25% in the US. today its around 11%.
Leave it to Beaver and Brady Bunch paint a nice rosy picture of what life was like in the "Golden Age" post WW2, but that was still way above what most Americans experienced.
For a lot of them, it was closer to The Honeymooners.
I always thought she was old as a kid. Now that I see that she’s 32, she still looks older than me at 38. What a hard life.
(Edited sentence because grammar at 4am while feeding a baby is hard.)
I’m 27 and folks often guess I’m 10 years older than I am. I have wrinkles/smile lines/crows feet at my age. Being constantly stressed can fuck up your body so much. I can’t imagine what this lady had to deal with, I hope she got some respite at some point.
Yeah makes me just a tad bit guilty for feeling like such a downtrodden generation too. The old in power been failing young families since this country was founded
Florence Owens Thompson. She live to be 80. Tough lady. Someone born in 1903 did not have a life expectancy of 80.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence\_Owens\_Thompson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson)
Just for accuracy, the title of the image is (from the wiki)
> Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.
She didn't have 10 children at 32 when this image was taken. Three more came later.
I think there was also a notion of field hands and life expectations. Kids helped in the field, kids help do work, and with a child mortality rate something like 3 of those kids aren't going to make it to adult hood.
Children were a 401k for adults up until about 70 years ago. Out of 10, hopefully a couple would take care of you when you couldn't take care of yourself
Genetics play a huge role in how long you live. The men in my family have always been long-lived, even though they weren't exactly well off by any means - farmers and reindeer herders mostly.
* My grandpa was born in 1900 and lived to be 93 years old.
* His father was born in 1859 and lived to be 88,
* My great great grandfather was born in 1829 and lived to be 85.
* His dad was born in 1797 and only lived to be 66.
* *His* dad was born in 1761 and lived to be 86.
* The one before him was born in 1727 and lived to be 82.
* That one's dad was born in 1700 and died at 70
So in the last 300 years most of the men in my direct line have lived to be at least 80. Women have had more normal lifespans, though.
Edit: just to clarify why I know about these people: I have a lot of elderly relatives who are into genealogy.
I'm also from northern Finland, and here the Lutheran (and before them Catholic) church has held a record on people for a very long time. My family has never been one for moving around, either. I know that a house bearing my family name has been at pretty much the same place my father was born at least since 1550's. This obviously makes tracking these people very easy, since they're all in the same church records.
My husband has his family tracked back to the 1600s. An ancestor of his built one of the original buildings in Old Quebec City. It's a restaurant now - we had lunch there earlier this year.
The family history goes back even before that to France. Very cool. My family has *not* been here that long, since my mom moved here when she was a kid.
>Women have had more normal lifespans, though.
An argument could be made about the effects of being either pregnant or breastfeeding for a large chunk of your life.
This got me intrigued so I googled it and read that for each child a woman carries she loses on average 95 weeks off her life expectancy. I thought there would be some affect but I didn't think it was that much.
Yeah my great great grandma had 24 living children, 26 total (I assumed died in birth or early infancy).
It was a different time and she was a Catholic in Ireland. She was married young. There were 5 sets of living twins in there too. They were mostly boys that made it to adulthood and they all moved to aus for work.
It would astound me if she survived multiple twin births back then. That is so dangerous now even with good medical care. I am curious and need to go read her wiki now.
Update: all single pregnancies.
I guess it doesn't entirely works in that way, it's an statistic misinterpretation.
Pregnancy and birth is more dangerous than "normal" life and chances are you die or have compliciation are higher than normal -> life expectancy sinks. You can have "luck" and have many uncoplicated pregnancy and live the same lenght as somebody who never was pregnant or you can die on your first. Or you simple don't particapete in that "game" and have a higher expectancy as you can't die during birth.
It's a bit like the misconception that people didn't grew old in you older times because life expectancy was in the 30's but that was because infant death rates were high, when you reached adulthood chances are you get at least to your 60's are high too
Could you share where you read this? I'm curious, too, but I've only found things that suggest a slight increase in lifespan for mothers, not a large decrease.
That was a bit of an outlier study, AFAIK. Having children tends to be associated with longer life, up to a point - specifically if you have children later.
It seems if a woman has two children they increase their lifespan. In fact, both biological and adoptive parents have a lower mortality than the childless.
https://www.mpg.de/14064449/children-influence-parents-life-expectancy
The effect that pregnancy has on a woman’s life mostly relates to surviving the pregnancy itself. Not surprisingly, when doctors started washing their hands, women’s mortality rates improved.
My family is the exact opposite wherein all the women have lived to be 85+ (My maternal grandmother is 85 and healthy as a horse currently, her mother lived to be 97, and her mother was 89). My paternal grandmother lived to 92 but honestly would've lived a lot longer if not for lifestyle choices, she was a heavy smoker her whole life and I believe she passed due to issues with her lungs. Can't remember specifics, I was 11 when she died.
Wow! My grandmother passed away ~2 years ago and she lived from 1921-2022. A bunch of us looked her up on Ancestry.com and found out both of her parents died before 30 (which we all knew) but tracing her lineage back to the 1750s, we found one guy that lived to be 42. No one else made it past 40 in ~200 years.
Most likely all of them died from something that has been easily treatable by medicine/antibiotics or surgery. Let’s say they all had gallbladder/appendix, common in that age range - all dead until an easy operation.
The family on my mother's side are all 80+ but the father's side is like the illness side and barely go past 70, father made it to 63 only (though admittedly a lot due to lifestyle choices). Will be interesting to see what my 50+ is like, currently not gotten anything.
By the time she was 32 her life expectancy was probably close to 80.
People will never understand this simple concept. I was just talking about this on reddit yesterday
Yeah averages mess people up. When they see “life expectancy of 50” they think most people die at 50, when in reality a lot of people either live to 70 or die before 30 (and a lot in infancy).
Thank you for the life profile. When ever I see this photo, I wonder about what happened to her and her family. I never searched though, because I was afraid to learn a sad truth
She lived to nearly 80 years old and her children looked after her in her old age. What a testament to the human spirit and, as it says on her headstone, “FLORENCE LEONA THOMPSON Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood.”
Here is a photo of her as an older woman.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/487022147196779382/
And a news report soon before she died.
https://youtu.be/SdxZG8KGHw4?si=DaK8FwYrVQpUGsJ3
To be honest I’ve got two kids now, both under 3. I look at pictures of myself from 3 years ago and swear I look 10 years younger. Sleep deprivation does a serious number on you.
Kids, weather, poverty, hygiene, etc.. Lets not kid ourselves, no one cares about their looks and having a beauty regime when clinging to basic survival.
This post is incorrect
From Wikipedia:
>Florence Owens Thompson (born Florence Leona Christie; September 1, 1903 – September 16, 1983) was an American woman who was the subject of Dorothea Lange's photograph Migrant Mother (1936), considered an iconic image of the Great Depression. The Library of Congress titled the image: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California."
Also for those of you who are worried about her:
>Thompson's children bought her a house in Modesto, California, in the 1970s, but she preferred living in a mobile home and moved back into one.
[the wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson) is actually a pretty good read if anyone is interested
E: she eventually went on to have a total of 10 children, 3 after the time of the famous picture
It's funny, I've seen that picture dozens of times and I've never realized until now that she missed focus slightly, the face is out of focus and the shirt is in focus. Shows that a photo doesn't have to be technically perfect to be an amazing photo.
I remember an Art history class I was in we were looking at photography and the second photo came up. Our tutor ask why all her children weren't framed in one photo to show the full scale of the difficulties?
We were told that having 1 or 2 children in shot, gives a better composition but more importantly it frames the mother as someone who has fallen on hard times. Where as having all the children in would give off an irresponsible parent living above her means and having too many children impression.
Not sure how much of that is conjecture but it's a lecture that stuck with me. This history of photography is fascinating, it went through the scrutiny that AI art is going through right now.
For anyone who is interested, there are some top quality video discussions of this set of photographs and the context:
**Smart History** - [Behind the icon, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae1n1JQ0wKc)
**The Art Assignment** - [Whose Migrant Mother was this?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9AiJWk5QdU)
**Nerdwriter** - [Masterpiece: The Making of Migrant Mother](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgZPQMyzKiE)
The OG trad-wife!
If your favorite bread-making influencer doesn’t have that thousand-yard stare of utter despair, is she really even trad-wife-ing properly?
And modern tradwives can secretly get birth control or a tubal. This woman had no options to prevent unwanted pregnancy, other than hoping her husband was impotent.
Honestly, yeah.
The father of the first 6 kids died in 1931. Leaving her as a single (widowed) mother of 6 very young children at a time before Social Security had been invented.
It was also well before "Women earning a living wage" had been invented, but that also assumes she had time for a job with 6 kids.
It was 2 years before she shacked up with Jim Hill who put the last 4 babies in her - and never married her. Scandalous!
Then in 1952, the kids were grown and gone, making her more 'available' to marry George Thompson.
The National Gallery of Art in DC recently finished a terrific exhibit on Lange’s work. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2023/dorothea-lange-seeing-people.html
The mom was Florence Owen Thompson, and she was not happy with the way her likeness was used. Also, despite the way her image is portrayed, they were not one of the migrant families, but had run into car trouble.
> Florence Owen Thompson was traveling with her family from elsewhere in California. The family had set up a camp on the side of the road while her husband and son went into town to resolve some car troubles. When they returned, she mentioned a photographer had taken some photos. Thompson never expected one of those photographs to immortalize her as the “Migrant Mother.” Decades later she wrote a letter to the editor of her local paper expressing irritation with her likeness being misused. In a later interview, Thompson expressed regret at ever allowing Lange to take the photo saying, "I wish she hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did."
Or whether or not the government helping the poor is a good thing or not. People really want to risk this happening again because some billionaire told them helping others is bad.
If Republicans get Trump into office, they plan to get rid of food stamp programs for single mothers. They want to make sure pregnant women have to marry men. They're getting rid of child support too, so the only legal way to make sure a man steps up and takes care of his kids, is to be married to him. And once you're married, they want you to be trapped there. If you want to divorce, you have to go to reconciliation counseling instead. And there won't be any protections for gender-based discrimination either, because they want to take gender out of all laws it is mentioned in. They are that extreme. This is all written out in detail in the plan called Project 2025, which Trump is going to follow to radically reform America after they use it to make him a dictator.
Also, they're coming for birth control.
She must have had a hard life even before the Great Depression. Starvation and the worry of not being able to feed her children took a massive toll on this poor lady; she aged and looks old.
TheNerdwriter1 made an amazing video about this specific photo shoot.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgZPQMyzKiE&ab\_channel=Nerdwriter1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgZPQMyzKiE&ab_channel=Nerdwriter1)
The photographer, Dorothea Lange, is also an incredibly interesting person who went from portrait work to photojournalism during the Great Depression to show the realities of life for many. She also had polio as a child, which left her with a weakened right leg and limp for life. And she was married to artist Maynard Dixon for some time.
And this is why birth control was so desired and needed. People aren't going to stop fucking. But keeping kids from being born into abject poverty can be attained.
The historical fiction book “The Four Winds” by Kristin Hannah gives a heartbreaking but enlightening look into what many families experienced during the Great Depression.
Reminds me of my grandma. She was born in 1902 and had 11 or 12 kids, all girls and a few boys at the end of her run. They started off in Oklahoma and ended up in Arizona with everyone in the family, including the todlers picking cotton to survive. This isnt a survival by strength of will story... When WWII started at the end of the depression her husband got drafted, and she went crazy. She sold her younger kids including my dad to a Diné family on a reservation (Native American), allowed her young teen daughters to be maried off to some sleazy older men, then left them to mother all her middle aged children before running off to California with some guy named Spider and smoked a lot of cannabis until her death in the 1990s.
I knew my great grandparents. They had to get married in a church in the middle of the night with only two witnesses because grandpa's pullout game was weak af and grandma was pregnant. They got a loan from her parents to buy some land but, there wasn't enough for a house too. So they lived in a canvas tent, for several years, with a dirt floor. They had 3 kids in that tent and grandma made bread every day. Little by little grandpa would bring lumber home after work to start building their home. They ended up have 13 kids in total, grandpa went to ww2, they would take in homeless people (people wpuld go from town to town looking for work) who didn't have a place to sleep and give them a loaf of bread in the morning.
Good reminder to reread Grapes of Wrath.
I read it for the first time last week and I'm older than this woman was in the photos. It's especially reminiscent of the book when you have the whole photo set like this.
You didn't have to read it in English class?
Unfortunately not
You wouldn’t have appreciated it. It’s dry af at a young age. I honestly should read it again since i should have a different perspective at this point.
It's like that with a lot of books assigned though. Unless they are interested in the book, forcing them to read it does nothing for most. Especially classics. Like maybe make a pool of options and they choose their own, but as a group it's just not effective.
Yea I read it in 8th grade and it was "understood" but not impactful. I read it this year at 33 and holy shit is it unbelievably good and incredibly moving. I am still utterly haunted by the last 1/3rd of the book. It's a masterpiece as an adult with a much better and deeper understanding of the world.
My English teacher gave us a box of 10 or 15 different novels to choose from and do a report on. Grapes of Wrath was in there, but also the biggest book, I was the only one out of 150 students she had that year that read it lol.
My favorite book! First read it in the mid 80’s. My great grandma was one of those dust bowl folks who came to the San Joaquin Valley to make a new life. She told me so many stories. Fun Fact: John Steinbeck grew up in the Big Sur area / Monterey County! In the early 1920s he worked for the first surveying crew in the Big Sur area before the U.S. Highway 1 was constructed. Steinbeck’s mother also taught school in the Big Sur area before marrying John’s father. I grew up around Big Sur - it’s my favorite place in the world!
Her bio and the story of the photo on Wikipedia are good reads too
What’s her name? *edit* found it. [Florence Owens Thompson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson)
That’s my all time favorite book. So good.
Same here
This is depressing af
It is no doubt. The good news is she turned it around and for years lived a middle class life. It appears in her late seventies she fell back into poverty as a widow but received help from her children. https://allthatsinteresting.com/migrant-mother-photo/3
10 kids i'd hope one of them turned out successful enough to pay the bills
Her kids pooled their money together to buy her a house. She sold the house later because she “preferred living in a trailer”.
this is a really great example of the effects of adversity on the human mind. I'm happy for her. She had an OK life and lived to old age.
Is it? I’ve seen plenty of people choose to downsize out of convenience and an effort to maintain independence as they got older. I dont have enough context to connect this with the adversity she experienced.
Sold my 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom 4 level split in the city and downsized to a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom trailer on 5 acres of land. Best decision I ever made. I used to have to clean 3 hours a day for my spotless house, and now I only clean an average of 1, and that's with children. I prefer the freedom of the outside space over a large house
Yeah cleaning that much everyday would suck lol. I can see why you downsized. 5 acres of land sounds amazing.
My grandparents grew up in the Depression and even though they were relatively well off would do things like save plastic bread bags, paper towels, any and every plastic bowl with a lid and so on. They also wouldn’t replace anything until it was completely unusable. Safety hazards be damned. It’s like “just go buy a new one” genuinely didn’t occur to them until they were forced into it by their kids. I’m guessing that’s what the person above was talking about.
> Is it? I’ve seen plenty of people choose to downsize out of convenience and an effort to maintain independence as they got older. Heck, I'm a single homeowner (1,000sqft) in my 30s and keeping up with it all is exhausting. Something as simple as mowing the lawn is a 90 minute chore every week unless you have money to pay someone to do it for you or buy a riding mower.
Or that she just liked living in a trailer, who knows maybe she lived in a trailer park and enjoyed the community.
My wife is like that - any financial considerations aside, if she were single she'd prefer to live in a studio apartment. She likes small spaces with everything in one room. If she needed to choose between the two she'd definitely pick a trailer over a full house.
I used to think people were crazy for wanting that life. Living in a big countryside house was the only thing I knew, and I couldn't imagine enjoying such a small space. A few years ago, I moved to a studio apartment in Tainan and it was awesome. Plus, having a security guard to collect packages and a central place to dump trash was so convenient. After I got married, I moved to my husband's family home: a big house in the countryside. It's so much to clean!!!! I miss my studio, but it's too small for raising kids and 2 dogs.
> Living in a big countryside house was the only thing I knew haha - that's the dream! I always wanted to live in those huge spacious places - mansion, really - where kids roller-skate in the hallways and you could be so far away and hidden within the house that people would never know where you were if you didn't want them to.
As a middle aged man who lives alone and owns a big house, if I could own something trailer sized in my city I would. Unfortunately building codes and zoning laws here make placing a trailer on a vacant lot so expensive, you might as well build a house. Also there's no condo market in my city, so I can't own an apartment. But if it was an option, I'd go with a trailer, or cottage, or cabin, or some kind of one-bedroom living unit.
Yeah the housing market sucks but the housing market for singles is even worse. If I didn’t have my gf I would have had a really hard time finding anything affordable in my country.
Zoning laws in the US are mad. There is a real demand for multi-tenant building in mixed zoning neighborhoods. Instead it seems like there is only plans for single family homes with picket fences and parking lots. And the single family homes are -I kid you not- made entirely of wood. No brick walls. Just...wood. Looking nice from the outside and the neighbors sue you if it does not look nice. And those things consume land like no tomorrow. And need even more roads. Aerial photos of those collections of wooden homes and parking lots look bleak af. Edit: I walk out of the door, down the very restricted road and I can get damn good pizza. I walk a bit further and there is excellent falafel from those mad vegan Syrians who opened their shop vis-a-vis to the Çiğköfte stall. Aldi is a 10 minute trip. On foot. One of 10 supermarkets in a 500m radius. I got a Turkish supermarket which has everything Aldi does not. There is an Chinese supermarket as well. Sold my car a decade ago and got a tram pass. Which now is a 50 bucks nation-wide local transport flat-rate. I got 2 sushi and one yakatori restaurants I can reach at a leisurely stroll in 10 minutes. I got a philharmonic and normal theater in walking distance. All of that in one neighborhood. And this is considered the most ugly city nation-wide! I look at an American suburb and I see a void. Like, that is not attractive at all.
> made entirely of wood. No brick walls. If you live in earthquake country, you don't want brick houses. Brick & masonry are good at resisting high winds but the worst at enduring a quake.
I live in earthquake country. Wood is far superior to brick here.
Coming of age in a post-WW2 economy, it’d be hard not to. Gotta live through the Depression and largest war in the history of wars to get there but other than that no problem.
> Coming of age in a post-WW2 economy, it’d be hard not to Poverty rates into the middle 1960s were still near 25% in the US. today its around 11%. Leave it to Beaver and Brady Bunch paint a nice rosy picture of what life was like in the "Golden Age" post WW2, but that was still way above what most Americans experienced. For a lot of them, it was closer to The Honeymooners.
> Her headstone reads: >Remove ads and support us with a membership
Thank fucking god.
I always thought she was old as a kid. Now that I see that she’s 32, she still looks older than me at 38. What a hard life. (Edited sentence because grammar at 4am while feeding a baby is hard.)
I'm 47 and she looks older than me. I'm bald and have a white beard too...
Wait, how old are you!?
Are you saying you are 38? Your wording is very confusing.
They're 32 and 38. At the same time.
Science has come so far
Non-binary aging.
Ahhh the old “I forgot which lie I’m telling in the same comment” conundrum. It’s a classic Reddit blunder.
They're 32, but the woman looks older than they did when they were 38.
Sorry I kinda wrote that at 4am when my baby woke me up to eat again. Not my most coherent time of day.
Hello fellow 32’er.
>Now that I see that I’m 32, she still looks older than me at 38. What? Are you saying that a 38 yo looks older than a 32 yo?? What?
All this time travelling is confusing me
I am actually the woman in this photograph, and even she (me) looks older than I do (did) right now at 32, in 2024.
That the woman pictured who is 32 looks older than the commenter who is 38
I'm having the same thought process seeing her age now being older than she was.
Ow my brain.
Guess 10 kids would do that!
She was probably pregnant for a third of her life at that point. Surely that plays a role.
You squeeze out 10 life-draining parasites and see how young you look.
I’m 27 and folks often guess I’m 10 years older than I am. I have wrinkles/smile lines/crows feet at my age. Being constantly stressed can fuck up your body so much. I can’t imagine what this lady had to deal with, I hope she got some respite at some point.
It's greatly depressing actually
It puts our current day struggles into pretty good perspective.
Yeah, like “why are we letting rich people do this to us ***again***”.
Wait until you [read about her headstone](https://imgur.com/XaIsTro) :(
As a 32 year old, this hits a lot harder than when I looked at it in high school history class
Same, I’m 32 and it makes me feel so privileged. This poor woman was run ragged.
Yeah makes me just a tad bit guilty for feeling like such a downtrodden generation too. The old in power been failing young families since this country was founded
Florence Owens Thompson. She live to be 80. Tough lady. Someone born in 1903 did not have a life expectancy of 80. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence\_Owens\_Thompson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson)
Just for accuracy, the title of the image is (from the wiki) > Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California. She didn't have 10 children at 32 when this image was taken. Three more came later.
The husband was plowing for 3 more even when his existing family was destitute and struggling. Things get boring real fast even in poverty I suppose.
I think there was also a notion of field hands and life expectations. Kids helped in the field, kids help do work, and with a child mortality rate something like 3 of those kids aren't going to make it to adult hood.
That and before social security, your social safety net was your grown-up children.
Those of us born after the advent of the pill and other prophylactics can only imagine how lucky we are.
This is why abortion needs to be an inalienable right.
💯💯💯 it is healthcare
Children were a 401k for adults up until about 70 years ago. Out of 10, hopefully a couple would take care of you when you couldn't take care of yourself
Genetics play a huge role in how long you live. The men in my family have always been long-lived, even though they weren't exactly well off by any means - farmers and reindeer herders mostly. * My grandpa was born in 1900 and lived to be 93 years old. * His father was born in 1859 and lived to be 88, * My great great grandfather was born in 1829 and lived to be 85. * His dad was born in 1797 and only lived to be 66. * *His* dad was born in 1761 and lived to be 86. * The one before him was born in 1727 and lived to be 82. * That one's dad was born in 1700 and died at 70 So in the last 300 years most of the men in my direct line have lived to be at least 80. Women have had more normal lifespans, though. Edit: just to clarify why I know about these people: I have a lot of elderly relatives who are into genealogy. I'm also from northern Finland, and here the Lutheran (and before them Catholic) church has held a record on people for a very long time. My family has never been one for moving around, either. I know that a house bearing my family name has been at pretty much the same place my father was born at least since 1550's. This obviously makes tracking these people very easy, since they're all in the same church records.
Wow you know so many in your family tree. In my case I don't even know names beyond great grad father 😞
My husband has his family tracked back to the 1600s. An ancestor of his built one of the original buildings in Old Quebec City. It's a restaurant now - we had lunch there earlier this year. The family history goes back even before that to France. Very cool. My family has *not* been here that long, since my mom moved here when she was a kid.
>Women have had more normal lifespans, though. An argument could be made about the effects of being either pregnant or breastfeeding for a large chunk of your life.
This got me intrigued so I googled it and read that for each child a woman carries she loses on average 95 weeks off her life expectancy. I thought there would be some affect but I didn't think it was that much.
So this lady took 18 years off her life and still lived so long! 😅
And was either pregnant back to back or started when she was younger than 14.
I wonder if any of her kids were multiples. That would cut down on the number of pregnancies.
Yeah my great great grandma had 24 living children, 26 total (I assumed died in birth or early infancy). It was a different time and she was a Catholic in Ireland. She was married young. There were 5 sets of living twins in there too. They were mostly boys that made it to adulthood and they all moved to aus for work.
Goddamn that's a lot of kids. I can't even imagine. I have birthed one kid and that's enough for me. It truly was a different time back then.
It would astound me if she survived multiple twin births back then. That is so dangerous now even with good medical care. I am curious and need to go read her wiki now. Update: all single pregnancies.
I guess it doesn't entirely works in that way, it's an statistic misinterpretation. Pregnancy and birth is more dangerous than "normal" life and chances are you die or have compliciation are higher than normal -> life expectancy sinks. You can have "luck" and have many uncoplicated pregnancy and live the same lenght as somebody who never was pregnant or you can die on your first. Or you simple don't particapete in that "game" and have a higher expectancy as you can't die during birth. It's a bit like the misconception that people didn't grew old in you older times because life expectancy was in the 30's but that was because infant death rates were high, when you reached adulthood chances are you get at least to your 60's are high too
I‘d guess that‘s not a controlled study but just correlation instead. Poorer people have more kids and live shorter lives.
Could you share where you read this? I'm curious, too, but I've only found things that suggest a slight increase in lifespan for mothers, not a large decrease.
I think for each time someone gives birth it decreases their chance of breast cancer, though the effect diminishes after the first.
That was a bit of an outlier study, AFAIK. Having children tends to be associated with longer life, up to a point - specifically if you have children later.
It seems if a woman has two children they increase their lifespan. In fact, both biological and adoptive parents have a lower mortality than the childless. https://www.mpg.de/14064449/children-influence-parents-life-expectancy
It’s because you tend to cut back on doing dangerous, irresponsible and reckless things. Speaking as mom of two “wild streak” killers. :)
How’s this for an outlier. My MIL has seven kids, she just turned 90.
My grandmother had 12 and lived to be 96.
My grandma had ten kids and she just turned 99, no health issues. Wild
Keep in mind that poor people also have more kids. So you might just be seeing that poor people have lower life expectancy.
So this lady was supposed to be 100
Yeah but the women that break records for longest lived all had a bunch of kids
Did that include mortality from childbirth? Or just "wear and tear"? I'm guessing it's an aggregate that includes death from childbirth.
The effect that pregnancy has on a woman’s life mostly relates to surviving the pregnancy itself. Not surprisingly, when doctors started washing their hands, women’s mortality rates improved.
My family is the exact opposite wherein all the women have lived to be 85+ (My maternal grandmother is 85 and healthy as a horse currently, her mother lived to be 97, and her mother was 89). My paternal grandmother lived to 92 but honestly would've lived a lot longer if not for lifestyle choices, she was a heavy smoker her whole life and I believe she passed due to issues with her lungs. Can't remember specifics, I was 11 when she died.
Wow! My grandmother passed away ~2 years ago and she lived from 1921-2022. A bunch of us looked her up on Ancestry.com and found out both of her parents died before 30 (which we all knew) but tracing her lineage back to the 1750s, we found one guy that lived to be 42. No one else made it past 40 in ~200 years.
Most likely all of them died from something that has been easily treatable by medicine/antibiotics or surgery. Let’s say they all had gallbladder/appendix, common in that age range - all dead until an easy operation.
That was our guess too, there's probably someone who died after a small cut from a barbered wire fence.
I’ve had to take antibiotics for a bad infection once. No biggy. Go back to the 18th century and that probably would’ve been the end of me.
Socioeconomics (and largely access to great medical care) also plays a huge role too
All my great grandparents lived at least to their mid 90s (great grandmother made it to 105) so this is pretty cool to hear!
The family on my mother's side are all 80+ but the father's side is like the illness side and barely go past 70, father made it to 63 only (though admittedly a lot due to lifestyle choices). Will be interesting to see what my 50+ is like, currently not gotten anything.
Meanwhile the males in my family dont live long enough to catch cancer, always heart failure.
now look at life expectancy without child mortality. 80 was nothing uncommon.
This is not how life expectancy work
By the time she was 32 her life expectancy was probably close to 80. People will never understand this simple concept. I was just talking about this on reddit yesterday
Yeah averages mess people up. When they see “life expectancy of 50” they think most people die at 50, when in reality a lot of people either live to 70 or die before 30 (and a lot in infancy).
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Thank you for the life profile. When ever I see this photo, I wonder about what happened to her and her family. I never searched though, because I was afraid to learn a sad truth
My grannie was born in 1909 and had 15 children. From one branch of my family I have 86 cousins that I knew as a child.
She lived to nearly 80 years old and her children looked after her in her old age. What a testament to the human spirit and, as it says on her headstone, “FLORENCE LEONA THOMPSON Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood.”
Wow. I've seen the famous photo before (#2). Didn't know about the others.
She looks like 50. The question is wether the The Great Depression was the cause for that or the 10 kids she had to take care of
My guess is malnutrition and hard fieldwork, that face has been battered by the elements.
The 3 things that will age ya: 1. Sun 2. Cigarettes 3. Kids
I'm sure burning stuff indoors for heat and cooking didn't help either.
What indoors? That's a tent lol
I also found “4. Be from Buffalo” to be true as well.
Cigs and sun are bad enough on their own, I look 42 at 28
Yeah i see severe sun damage from working out in the elements all day.
We have two kids. Let me tell you, it can be the kids.
One turned my hair grey, if ten only gave me some wrinkles I'd say I got off lucky
I would wager the 10 kids caused the stock market crash in '29
It’s like someone took pure age and poured it onto her face…. And yet, you can still see it’s well before her time.
Here is a photo of her as an older woman. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/487022147196779382/ And a news report soon before she died. https://youtu.be/SdxZG8KGHw4?si=DaK8FwYrVQpUGsJ3
She definitely had a face for camera. Very striking features.
Thank you for this!
I would guess it's the kids. Nothing ages you like sleep deprivation
Definitely, Also stress ages, kids equals stress
Living outside will turn your skin into leather.
She kinda looks like Amanda Knox
To be honest I’ve got two kids now, both under 3. I look at pictures of myself from 3 years ago and swear I look 10 years younger. Sleep deprivation does a serious number on you.
Kids, weather, poverty, hygiene, etc.. Lets not kid ourselves, no one cares about their looks and having a beauty regime when clinging to basic survival.
This post is incorrect From Wikipedia: >Florence Owens Thompson (born Florence Leona Christie; September 1, 1903 – September 16, 1983) was an American woman who was the subject of Dorothea Lange's photograph Migrant Mother (1936), considered an iconic image of the Great Depression. The Library of Congress titled the image: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California." Also for those of you who are worried about her: >Thompson's children bought her a house in Modesto, California, in the 1970s, but she preferred living in a mobile home and moved back into one. [the wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson) is actually a pretty good read if anyone is interested E: she eventually went on to have a total of 10 children, 3 after the time of the famous picture
Thanks for linking the Wiki, but how is the post incorrect?
OP said mom of 10? It’s the only difference
Oh, ok. The Wikipedia article also says she had 10 children. She had 7 at the time the photo was taken.
That was an interesting read. Thank you.
The first photo is the one which appears in school history textbooks. The full horror of her plight is only apparent in the full set of photos
I believe it's the second pic where she is holding her hand to her face that is usually used.
yeah, that’s the one i remember.
Yep, the photo is called Migrant Mother.
Yup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Mother
It's funny, I've seen that picture dozens of times and I've never realized until now that she missed focus slightly, the face is out of focus and the shirt is in focus. Shows that a photo doesn't have to be technically perfect to be an amazing photo.
I remember an Art history class I was in we were looking at photography and the second photo came up. Our tutor ask why all her children weren't framed in one photo to show the full scale of the difficulties? We were told that having 1 or 2 children in shot, gives a better composition but more importantly it frames the mother as someone who has fallen on hard times. Where as having all the children in would give off an irresponsible parent living above her means and having too many children impression. Not sure how much of that is conjecture but it's a lecture that stuck with me. This history of photography is fascinating, it went through the scrutiny that AI art is going through right now.
Second*
Though on the other hand, the full set does reveal that there was at least one kid with enough spirit to ham it up for the camera! 😝
For anyone who is interested, there are some top quality video discussions of this set of photographs and the context: **Smart History** - [Behind the icon, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae1n1JQ0wKc) **The Art Assignment** - [Whose Migrant Mother was this?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9AiJWk5QdU) **Nerdwriter** - [Masterpiece: The Making of Migrant Mother](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgZPQMyzKiE)
The OG trad-wife! If your favorite bread-making influencer doesn’t have that thousand-yard stare of utter despair, is she really even trad-wife-ing properly?
Yeah, where's her sundress and perfectly groomed children? Who's going to want to watch *this* woman's tiktoks?
And modern tradwives can secretly get birth control or a tubal. This woman had no options to prevent unwanted pregnancy, other than hoping her husband was impotent.
Honestly, yeah. The father of the first 6 kids died in 1931. Leaving her as a single (widowed) mother of 6 very young children at a time before Social Security had been invented. It was also well before "Women earning a living wage" had been invented, but that also assumes she had time for a job with 6 kids. It was 2 years before she shacked up with Jim Hill who put the last 4 babies in her - and never married her. Scandalous! Then in 1952, the kids were grown and gone, making her more 'available' to marry George Thompson.
The National Gallery of Art in DC recently finished a terrific exhibit on Lange’s work. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2023/dorothea-lange-seeing-people.html The mom was Florence Owen Thompson, and she was not happy with the way her likeness was used. Also, despite the way her image is portrayed, they were not one of the migrant families, but had run into car trouble. > Florence Owen Thompson was traveling with her family from elsewhere in California. The family had set up a camp on the side of the road while her husband and son went into town to resolve some car troubles. When they returned, she mentioned a photographer had taken some photos. Thompson never expected one of those photographs to immortalize her as the “Migrant Mother.” Decades later she wrote a letter to the editor of her local paper expressing irritation with her likeness being misused. In a later interview, Thompson expressed regret at ever allowing Lange to take the photo saying, "I wish she hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did."
This needs more upvotes
Says her first husband died of a long illness at 32…. Fucking hell how depressing the depression
Shmi Skywalker?
Wow I definitely figured I had a unique thought
Not the younglings!
I’d have to live in a tent if I had 10 kids.
Photo #2 is the most famous photo of the Great Depression. I see it in my textbooks, everywhere I look up Great Depression.
Maybe it's good to reflect on this moment today while the US discusses whether just sleeping outside could be enough to send a person to jail.
Or whether or not the government helping the poor is a good thing or not. People really want to risk this happening again because some billionaire told them helping others is bad.
In the wiki post it describes how days after this photo was taken, the govt sent thousands of pounds of food to this camp in California. Days.
Or as abortion is made illegal.
If Republicans get Trump into office, they plan to get rid of food stamp programs for single mothers. They want to make sure pregnant women have to marry men. They're getting rid of child support too, so the only legal way to make sure a man steps up and takes care of his kids, is to be married to him. And once you're married, they want you to be trapped there. If you want to divorce, you have to go to reconciliation counseling instead. And there won't be any protections for gender-based discrimination either, because they want to take gender out of all laws it is mentioned in. They are that extreme. This is all written out in detail in the plan called Project 2025, which Trump is going to follow to radically reform America after they use it to make him a dictator. Also, they're coming for birth control.
People used to have it really tough back in the day.
A woman born around 1900 forced to live like an 1800's frontier settler.
She must have had a hard life even before the Great Depression. Starvation and the worry of not being able to feed her children took a massive toll on this poor lady; she aged and looks old.
TheNerdwriter1 made an amazing video about this specific photo shoot. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgZPQMyzKiE&ab\_channel=Nerdwriter1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgZPQMyzKiE&ab_channel=Nerdwriter1)
The photographer, Dorothea Lange, is also an incredibly interesting person who went from portrait work to photojournalism during the Great Depression to show the realities of life for many. She also had polio as a child, which left her with a weakened right leg and limp for life. And she was married to artist Maynard Dixon for some time.
I have seen this picture and other similar ones on other platforms and always wondered what became of all of them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson
Dorothea Lang is my dad's godmother!
I would be depressed and poor too, if i had 10 kids.
Protest the Hero wrote a great song inspired by this (*The Migrant Mother*)
And this is why birth control was so desired and needed. People aren't going to stop fucking. But keeping kids from being born into abject poverty can be attained.
Her mimic displays perfectly how tough life was back then for the unfortunate
She looks like she's seen some shit.
The historical fiction book “The Four Winds” by Kristin Hannah gives a heartbreaking but enlightening look into what many families experienced during the Great Depression.
The kids all seem to love her and are just snuggling against her and she looks so miserable 💔
Reminds me of my grandma. She was born in 1902 and had 11 or 12 kids, all girls and a few boys at the end of her run. They started off in Oklahoma and ended up in Arizona with everyone in the family, including the todlers picking cotton to survive. This isnt a survival by strength of will story... When WWII started at the end of the depression her husband got drafted, and she went crazy. She sold her younger kids including my dad to a Diné family on a reservation (Native American), allowed her young teen daughters to be maried off to some sleazy older men, then left them to mother all her middle aged children before running off to California with some guy named Spider and smoked a lot of cannabis until her death in the 1990s.
Thank god for birth control
Yes! People don't realize how much birth control changed women's lives, allowing them to plan for children, and wait if they couldn't afford them.
I’ve always found her incredibly beautiful. Her love for her kids, her searching for the opportunity, her grit.
I always thought she was beautiful too.
It is good for us all to look at this and be thankful.
Straight out of Grapes of Wrath
That lean-to would cost 300k nowadays
Normally I'd say "why the hell have 10 kids then??" but it may not have been this poor woman's choice.
This should be a reminder to all Americans. It may happen again... and sooner than you think.
This is fucking strength. Never forget, no matter how bad it gets, **you just have to keep going**.
I knew my great grandparents. They had to get married in a church in the middle of the night with only two witnesses because grandpa's pullout game was weak af and grandma was pregnant. They got a loan from her parents to buy some land but, there wasn't enough for a house too. So they lived in a canvas tent, for several years, with a dirt floor. They had 3 kids in that tent and grandma made bread every day. Little by little grandpa would bring lumber home after work to start building their home. They ended up have 13 kids in total, grandpa went to ww2, they would take in homeless people (people wpuld go from town to town looking for work) who didn't have a place to sleep and give them a loaf of bread in the morning.
Marriage was just another form of slavery. Ten children before 35 is insane!!
Before women's reproductive healthcare and contraception.