Pickers, Packers, and Beauty Queens: Women's Labor and Sex Symbolism in North Carolina's Strawberry Fields and Festivals, 1900-1970

At the turn of the twentieth century, Chadbourn, North Carolina emerged as a strawberry producing powerhouse, filling the coffers white male landowners and white commission men sent from northern wholesale fruit houses. However, in the fields and in celebrations of the town’s strawberry industry, women, both black and white, took center stage. Thousands of African American women and children had to be trucked in from surrounding counties to handle the annual harvests. Contemporary photographs pictured fields full of workers stooped over and bent down, expending energy under the watchful eye of white overseers. Once picked, white women stood under make-shift pine bough sheds packing strawberry quarts in wooden crates for shipment. Women’s labor in the strawberry industry also extended to the annual strawberry festival inaugurated in 1926. White women decorated tobacco halls for the celebration and served sugared strawberries to festival attendees. More noticeably, they provided entertainment and pagentry in the form of beauty contests where they paraded in swimsuits and gowns, being observed by leading local men who crowned the strawberry queen. African American women also provided spectacle to white onlookers who purchased tickets to watch the segregated “Negro dance” during of the strawberry festival. These varied experiences of southern women in relation to truck agriculture illuminate several aspects of the region's social and cultural history during the Jim Crow era and demonstrate the centrality of women to the success of strawberry farming in a region blanketed by sharecropped fields of cotton.