Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Kozol’s article focuses on the Great Depression and how the photographs taken in the time period seem to have a similar focus, the mother. During the Great Depression obviously it was hard to get work for anyone; yet the reforms promised by the New Deal really only focused on the middle class. Photography during the time focused on the women as children almost as if they were the real victims who needed protecting. A mother is seen as someone who is a caretaker and who would help raise the future generation, seeing a mother in need is supposed to provoke a sense of wanting to help. These photos of mothers and sometimes their children have an underlaying purpose to help bring about welfare programs. Kozol does state that even though these photos seem to have a larger focus on women and it is not necessarily exploitive or sexist. They say that these question the social issues of class of gender but they also enforce them. These photos were often staged as the public generally accepted photography as a true state of documenting and did not question if they were staged. Photos generally followed similar patterns to help move people, they would focus on people in a desolate land that brought pity to the subject but also dignified them to make the images easier to digest for the general public. Koloz says that the programs were paternalistic and the photos helped push that ideal because children are a blameless victim and protecting women plays on the patriarchal ideals of men being at the head of a household. Jessicabode touched on this in their post on gender as a historical category they talk how in patriarchal values the men are dominating over the submissive women, by showing the women as submissive and helpless in these photos it plays into that ideology.