Arkansas was a demographic frontier after the U.S. Civil War. Despite marked agricultural land deforestation and development after the 1870s, it remained agrarian well into the twentieth century. We fuse life course and racial state frameworks to examine Black and White women’s settlement in Arkansas over the post-Civil War period (1880-1910). A racial state empowers residents and enacts policies based on race rather than equal citizenship rights. We highlight three institutional domains shaped by racial state policies: productive economies (subsistence, mixed commercialism, and plantation production); stratification on an agricultural ladder (from sharecropping to forms of tenancy to farm ownership); and rules of raced (and gendered) social control. We examine women’s settlement patterns and related outcomes in an institutional context at different life course stages using mixed methods: women’s oral histories and Census data analysis. We find that by 1880 White women and families, less attracted by forces of marketization, had largely migrated to subsistence and mixed commercial subregions. Black women and families, generally desiring to rise on the agricultural ladder to farm ownership, largely migrated to the rich lands found in plantation production counties. Black women in Arkansas could rise but, by 1910, new racial state (Jim Crow) policies more severely limited travel, material resources, and education for tenant farm families, predominantly Black, in the plantation subregion. Commensurate with this, Black women in the plantation subregion had experienced less status mobility on the agricultural ladder, with reduced living standards, by later life.

阿肯色州是美国内战后的人口疆土。尽管在1870年代后出现了明显的农田砍伐和发展，但直到20世纪，它仍然是农业。我们将生活历程和种族状态框架融为一体，以研究内战后（1880-1910年）阿肯色州的黑人和白人妇女定居点。种族国家赋予居民权力，并根据种族而不是平等的公民权制定政策。我们重点介绍了由种族国家政策塑造的三个制度领域：生产性经济（生存，混合商业主义和人工林生产）；在农业阶梯上进行分层（从耕种到租赁形式再到农场所有制）；和比赛（和性别）社会控制的规则。我们使用混合方法：女性的口述历史和人口普查数据分析，在制度的背景下，在不同的人生历程中研究女性的定居模式和相关结果。我们发现，到1880年，白人妇女及其家庭在很大程度上不受市场化力量的吸引，已大量迁移到生活区和混合商业区。黑人妇女及其家庭，通常希望在农业阶梯上崛起以拥有农场，因此大部分移民到了人工林生产县的富裕土地。阿肯色州的黑人妇女可能会崛起，但是到1910年，新的种族国家（吉姆乌鸦）政策将更加严重地限制对种植园子地区的农户家庭（主要是黑人）的旅行，物质资源和教育。与此相对应的是