"The role of women in sharecropping depended on the arrangement. Traditionally, the assumption was that women were able to pay their share of the family debt through domestic labor on the landowner's estate. They would cook or clean, providing the same services that house slaves had before (again, sharecropping was partly a way to maintain slavery in all but name). This was certainly the experience of many women. However, more recent scholarship has illuminated a number of women who entered into sharecropping agreements as farmers, using this as a chance to get a piece of land of their own in a world where it was difficult for women (and particularly black women) to do so."
