The Criminal Great Depression: Wisconsin Women 1930-1933

Abstract

The Great Depression was arguably the most devastating event in American history. The economic collapse during the late 1920s, with consequences lasting into the 1940s, forever changed the lives of millions of citizens. So often history tells the story of the man who gets laid off from his factory job or cannot sell his crops in a downtrodden market because of the monetary crisis, but theirs is not the only story to be told. American women struggled just as much, if not more than the men because it was up to them to keep their families in tact. Women in Wisconsin felt this strain as well, from their farmhouses in the rural West or their urban communities of Madison and Milwaukee. The purpose of this paper is to reassemble what the world for Wisconsin women was like for those who lived in it and to tell the story of the Great Depression from their point of view. I will use the Milwaukee County Women's Jail Intake Records to put a different spin on the research, learning about a segment of the female population during the era who may have committed crimes due to the strains they were feeling from the economic pressure being applied on themselves and their families.