Visual Culture & Other Media

Women in Ken Burns' The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl, a film by Ken Burns for PBS 2012.

In his documentary The Dust Bowl, Ken Burns focuses on female homesteader, Caroline Henderson, as an example of a farmer who endures the largest environmental disaster in modern American farming history.  Burns’ portrayal of Henderson as a person who dreamed of owning her own piece of land and the hardships she overcame in the process brings feminine insight to the view that homesteaders were predominately male.  Burns uses Henderson’s writing about life as a homesteader and wheat farmer to narrate much of the film.  His decision to choose the words of a female writer as representative of farmers’ experiences in the dust bowl implies a certain gender bias. However, the viewer comes away from the film with the perception that the hardships, in addition to being an experience defined by male and female roles, were also part of a larger human experience. The narration serves, in a sense, to bring together both males and females as equal players in ecological tragedy.

Burns devotes a portion of the documentary to the female dominated domestic sphere when he examines the futility of keeping the inside of the home clean over a decade of dust storms. The images of women sweeping dust out of the interior of their homes, hanging wet sheets around windows and setting dishes upside down on the table remind the viewer that the consequences of the great plow up effected professional and domestic, male and female spheres equally. We also see the equal treatment of gender in the stories of men and women who, whether because of financial difficulties or domestic struggles, committed suicide to find relief from the madness the dust bowl created in their lives.

The film concludes with a look at Henderson’s life after the dust bowl. Burns’ points out that she never sold out or left her land despite the trials she faced.  She stood as a symbol of character in a male dominated occupation. He also discusses how her experiences in the 1930’s affected the rest of her and her husband’s lives as farmers.  She refused to irrigate her land after the Ogallala aquifer was accessed and lived a simple life within her means. Henderson seemed grasp the lesson that other men struggled to learn; that nature was ultimately in control of no man’s land on the prairie and man was not.