The Story of the "Migrant Mother"
The Story of the "Migrant Mother"
By Ben Phelan
POSTED: 4.14.2014
In 1936 Florence Thompson allowed Dorothea Lange to photograph her family because she thought it might help the plight of the working poor. "She always wanted a better life," her daughter later said.
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There are few images as deeply ingrained in the national consciousness as Migrant Mother. Yet for decades, no one knew what had become of this woman and her family. No one even knew her name: Lange never asked, and by the time the photo appeared in a local newspaper, the woman and her family had moved on to the next town.
Finally, in 1978, a reporter from the Modesto Bee found the Migrant Mother, tracking her down to a trailer park outside Modesto, California. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson; she was 75 years old. Lange had promised Thompson that her name would never be published — Thompson wanted to spare her children the embarrassment — but once she was discovered, she revealed her name and told her story.
Thompson was born Florence Leona Christie, a Cherokee, in a teepee in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, in 1903. She married at 17, then moved to California for farm- and millwork. When she was 28 years old and pregnant with her sixth child, her husband died of tuberculosis. Thereafter Thompson worked odd jobs of all kinds to keep her children fed. For most of the 1930s, she was an itinerant farmhand, picking whatever was in season.
During cotton harvests, as she described in interviews, she would put her babies in bags and carry them along with her as she worked down the rows. She earned 50 cents per hundred pounds picked and says she "generally picked around 450, 500 [pounds a day]. I didn't even weigh a hundred pounds." For a while, she and her children lived under a bridge. "When Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath about those people living under the bridge at Bakersfield — at one time we lived under that bridge. It was the same story. Didn't even have a tent then, just a ratty old quilt."
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