Forgotten Women: Florida Women’s Letters from the Great Depression

Rife with palpable misery, the hundreds of letters assembled in
Forgotten Women
paint a bleak and accurate portrait of the female experience among Floridians during the Great Depression. In pursuit of a means to provide for their families, Florida women doggedly, often naively, wrote letters to agencies, charities, and state and federal government officials asking for relief assistance. Green gathers more than three hundred letters written by Floridians that reveal the immediacy and intensity of their plight. The struggles of many of the women, however, reflect the Depression’s extraordinarily devastating impact in Florida, where it followed on the heels of massive hurricanes, a medfly epidemic, and a land bust of monumental dimension.