Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps

In Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps, Cherisse Jones-Branch offers a ground-breaking, comprehensive study of African American women who worked on behalf of their rural Arkansas communities through the cooperative extension service, educational institutions, and other organizations. By centering Black women’s transformative leadership within the contexts of segregation, global war, racial violence, natural disasters, and the civil rights movement, Jones-Branch brings the voices of rural Black women into larger conversations about the significance of life and labor in the countryside. Painstakingly researched, her thoughtful cultivation of historical records brings to life the Black women who worked in Arkansas as extension agents, farmers, educators, and activists during a period of tremendous transformation." —Jenny Barker-Devine, author of On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farm Women’s Activism Since 1945

"American rural history needs more women’s history. And rural women’s history needs more Black history. Cherisse Jones-Branch addresses these needs by writing about Black women in Arkansas who had been rendered invisible by previous scholarship. Beginning with a profound respect for Black women leaders, Jones-Branch brings her skillful archival research and her enthusiastic storytelling to the task of setting the historical record straight. Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps makes a major contribution to Arkansas history and American rural history." —Linda M. Ambrose, author of A Great Rural Sisterhood: Madge Robertson Watt and the ACWW

"In impressive detail and lovely, engaging prose, Cherisse Jones-Branch argues that African American women who remained in Arkansas during the years of widespread migration remade the countryside through their struggle to improve their communities’ access to health care, food, political representation, and economic opportunity. With this book, Jones-Branch has established herself as a leading historian not only of rural Black women’s twentieth-century activism but also of American rural history overall." —Adrienne Monteith Petty, author of Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina since the Civil War