Making Choices, Making Do: Survival Strategies of Black and White Working-Class Women during the Great Depression (Rutgers University Press, 2023) is based on 1930s interviews with women in Chicago,Cleveland, Philadelphia, and South Bend, and on letters by domestic workers nationwide, criticizing New Dealers for excluding them from labor legislation. They articulate common resourcefulness in employment, housework, and acquisition of relief. Institutionalized racism assured that Black women worked harder, but fared worse. She calls on white women to make racial justice a priority.

Lois Rita Helmbold is a long-term activist, historian, writer, textile artist, martial artist, and retired women’s studies professor. Teaching at a HBCU in rural Mississippi in the late 1960s made her commit to a lifelong struggle for racial and social justice. She lives in Oaktown.