The Limits of Opportunity: Women of Colour and the WPA

This thesis examines the Works Progress/Projects Administration (WPA) across the South and its impact on women of colour throughout the region. Through focusing on a local level case study approach, it reveals the ways in which those working for the WPA at the district level ensured that although new opportunities were provided to women of colour, they would be limited, thus even in the most restrictive of WPA programmes, women of colour were still given new opportunities. These restrictions upheld white southern societal values, not least by confirming that women of colour would only be offered roles that would ensure they would remain as second-class citizens. This thesis identifies those mechanisms that were introduced at the state and district level to ensure that women of colour would gain support from the WPA, but it would be openly restricted to certain occupations or areas. In examining four key WPA programs and the effect of these programmes on women of colour, this thesis has continued to question the effectiveness and delivery of these programs at the local level. By focusing on nine key sites, this thesis has highlighted the differences in the allocation of aid between different counties, cities and states and has explained how and why this was different. The relationship between race and gender is central to this work and has been used throughout as a way to highlight when and where limiting/delimiting factors were introduced within the Administration. It is this work that has placed the WPA back into the central narrative of the New Deal historiography. This thesis has continued to question the impact of state and federal relations on the delivery of New Deal aid to one of the most disadvantaged groups in American society.