Figure 1.--Here we see girls from a rural Illinois school walking home. The photograph was taken in May 1943. By this time most American children had shoes. But here the girls appearently prefer to walk home barefoot. The children have shoes, but seem to have taken them off for the walk home which we do not understand. The school was near Cobden in the far south of Illinois. Notice how flat the terraine is. Illinois is a nirthern state, situated on a north/south axis and thus climatic conditions in areas like Cobden are similar to the upper south.

While we have very little information on the early-19th century. Children in rural areas must have mostly come to school barefoot. America was one of the countries that launched public school systems and the only one to do so in rural areas.which is rare most of the population lived. We do not begin to see how people dressed in detail until the invention of photography (1839). School photography was not feasible until the introduction of the albumen process (1860s). We first begin to see substantial numbers of school portrait until a decade later (1870s). And curiously we do not see many barefoot children in these early images (late-19th century). For reasons we do not fully understand, we only begin to see large numbers of barefoot children (early-20th century). At this point most of the barefoot children we see are in rural schools. This could in part be because difficult economic conditions beginning in rural areas a decade before the Depression of the 1930s. This is something that was much less common in city schools. Coming to school was especially common for the younger children and most common in the southern states for climatic reasons. In the Deep South it was common to go barefoot even during the Winter. This was not possible in the north. This was especially the case in the South and rural areas through the 1930s. Differences between city and rural schools did not change until World War II (1941-45). This may be because World War II was reviving the American economy. But the major reason was that states began to close small rural schools and bus the children to consolidated city schools. This was an economy measure. Maintaining small schools for a handful of children as too expensive. We we still see a few boys coming to school barefoot in the early-1950s, mostly in southern states.

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Created: 1:58 AM 3/30/2024
Last updated: 1:58 AM 3/30/2024