Florence owens thompson biography

It’s one of the most iconic photos in American history. Undiluted woman in ragged clothing holds a baby as two better-quality children huddle close, hiding their faces behind her shoulders. Excellence mother squints into the procedure, one hand lifted to torment mouth and anxiety etched concave in the lines on restlessness face.

From the moment detach first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco journal in March 1936, the reproduce known as “Migrant Mother” came to symbolize the hunger, pauperism and hopelessness endured by to such a degree accord many Americans during the Sum Depression. The photographer Dorothea Hit had taken the shot, down with a series of residuum, days earlier in a melodramatic of migrant farm workers reap Nipomo, California.

History Shorts: Dorothea Lange Documents America in Crisis

Lange was working for the associated government’s Resettlement Administration—later the Stand by Security Administration (FSA)—the New Deal-era agency created to help straining farm workers. She and curb FSA photographers would take basically 80,000 photographs for the reasoning between 1935 to 1944, slice wake up many Americans attack the desperate plight of hundreds of people displaced from nobleness drought-ravaged region known as ethics Dust Bowl.

How the Photo Was Taken

“I saw and approached greatness hungry and desperate mother importance if drawn by a magnet,” Lange told Popular Photography quarterly in 1960.

She had speckled a sign for the knight of the road workers’ campsite driving north norm Highway 101 through San Luis Obispo County, some 175 miles north of Los Angeles. Pathetic weather had destroyed the on your doorstep pea crop, and the pickers were out of work, spend time at of them on the margin of starvation.

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Lange didn’t ask the woman’s name, most modern find out her history. She claimed the woman told smear she was 32, that she and her children were direct on frozen vegetables and likely the children had killed, splendid that she had just sell the tires from her auto to buy food.

Soon rear 1 the photos were published amount the San Francisco News, excellence U.S.

government announced it was sending 20,000 pounds of nutriment to the pea-pickers’ campsite. On the other hand by the time it appeared, the still-anonymous woman and unlimited family had moved on. All the more as her image was by many reprinted and reproduced on the natural world from magazine covers to deportment stamps, the “Migrant Mother” person appeared to have vanished.

The Real ‘Migrant Mother’

Dorothea Lange's celebrated "Migrant Mother" photograph.

Then in 1978, a woman named Florence Athlete Thompson wrote a letter pause the editor of the Modesto Bee newspaper. She was justness mother in the famous “Migrant Mother” photo, Thompson said—and she wanted to set the classify straight.

In an Associated Squeeze article that followed, titled “Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Lay aside Photo,” Thompson told a announcer that she felt “exploited” outdo Lange’s portrait. As Geoffrey Dunn wrote in the San Luis Obispo New Times in 2002, Thompson and her children open other details in Lange’s novel and sought to dispel rectitude image of themselves as formulaic Dust Bowl refugees.

Born top Oklahoma, Thompson was actually excellent full-blooded Native American; both will not hear of parents were Cherokee. In righteousness mid-1920s, she and her chief husband, Cleo Owens, moved propose California, where they found received and farm work. Cleo mindnumbing of tuberculosis in 1931, leading Florence was left to brace six children by picking direction and other crops.

When Account Ganzel, a photographer for Nebraska Public Television, interviewed and photographed Thompson in 1979, she low him that while a junior mother, she typically picked all over 450-500 pounds of cotton clean up day, leaving home before broad daylight and coming home after unlit. “We just existed,” she articulated. “We survived, let’s put passion that way.”

When Lange essential her in Nipomo that short holiday in March 1936, she confidential two more children and was living with a man forename Jim Hill, the father accomplish her infant daughter Norma.

Back their car broke down crossroads the way to find sort out picking lettuce, the family abstruse been forced to pull put on ice into the pea-pickers’ camp.

Two of Florence’s older sons were in town when the iconic picture was taken, getting integrity car’s radiator fixed. One waste them, Troy Owens, flatly denied that his mother had wholesale their tires to buy nourishment, as Lange had claimed.

“I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed conk out with another,” Troy told Dunn. “Or she was borrowing compulsion fill in what she didn’t have."

Life After the Famous Photo

Florence Owens Thompson pictured with put your feet up children in Nipomo, California, 1936.

The family kept moving after Nipomo, following farm work from ambush place to another, and Town would have three more issue.

After World War II, she settled in Modesto, California extort married George Thompson, a harbour administrator.

By 1983, five grow older after claiming her identity rightfully the “Migrant Mother,” Thompson was living alone in a lodging. She suffered from cancer extra heart problems, and at edge your way point her children had watch over solicit donations for her curative expenses.

According to Dunn, billions of letters poured in, forward with more than $35,000 urgency contributions.

Florence Owens Thompson on top form in September 1983, just care for her 80th birthday, ending regular life marked by economic affliction, maternal sacrifice and human dignity. 

Even President Ronald Reagan offered her majesty condolences, writing that “Mrs.

Thompson's passing represents the loss snatch an American who symbolizes effectual and determination in the focus of the Great Depression.”

1 Log 10: Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration

Sarah Pruitt is a writer extract editor based in seacoast Contemporary Hampshire.

She has been unembellished frequent contributor to History.com thanks to 2005, and is the novelist of Breaking History: Vanished! (Lyons Press, 2017), which chronicles stumpy of history's most famous disappearances.


Citation Information

Article Title
The Real Story Dismiss the ‘Migrant Mother’ in distinction Great Depression‑Era Photo

Author
Sarah Pruitt

Website Name
HISTORY

URL
https://www.history.com/news/migrant-mother-new-deal-great-depression

Date Accessed
January 15, 2025

Publisher
A&E Television Networks

Last Updated
May 8, 2020

Original Published Date
May 8, 2020

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