Breaking Socioeconmic Boundaries
When the Great Depression swept the United States, few were spared. Given the financial holdings of each person and their family obviously differed, social class played a significant factor in what each individual's Depression and recovery experience was like. Those who had the least suffered the most, and some members of the middle class weren't far behind. With the Depression having swept the feet out from under so many people, everyone suddenly became more alike than had ever been, with many fighting to put food on the table every night. The Depression had broken down a critical part of the socioeconomic barriers which had so starkly enforced classism. The WPA, however, was the driving force in making sure those walls stayed down.
It is also no secret that women were one of the many groups of Americans disadvantaged in their society, especially leading up to the Great Depression. Prior to the recovery efforts of the WPA, the most notable women's event had been the suffragette movement, which even then only gave them a fraction of the opportunities that men had (American Women: An Overview). The collapse of the economy forced this to change. Women were no longer so easily barred from doing work, and because rebuilding the American economy was the first priority of the New Deal, the WPA had few restrictions on integrating women into the workforce.
Being able to not only draw upon items archived by the Library of Congress but to insert my own thoughts on the item allowed me to draw more connections between the items that I pulled and the argument I am trying to fulfill. Annotation is commonly a format of note-taking, not a technique that would be employed by professional historians. This being said, annotating an image directly provided a way for me to bring my thoughts while researching, to the front lines when discussing the social boundaries of the '30s, and the influence of the WPA. Image annotation also provides a way to seamlessly integrate information important to conveying my argument where it would not have fit well elsewhere.