Maryland Crab Pickers, 1933, black-and-white lithograph, 11” x 14” plate
1. Show the picture to your students, without the title, and ask them what they think the women are doing. Once you get to ‘picking crabs’ ask if anyone has ever done that, and have a quick discussion about why you would do that (to eat them) and how long that would take (it’s slow going, typically). Explain that in order to get crab for things like crab cakes and crab soup and other foods with crab in them at restaurants, there need to be ‘Crab Pickers’, people whose job it is to pick crabs, and that this has been going on for a very long time. (Current rate required to be picked by some companies is 3 pounds of shell-free crab an hour.) Discuss how important this industry (and seafood in general) is to MD and the Eastern Shore, and how it used to be even more important. If you haven’t brought it up yet, this would be a great time to discuss how this lithograph is from 1933 when seafood was more plentiful. However, records on the amount of crabs in the Chesapeake were not begun being kept until 1945. (This report from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation about the impact of overfishing and pollution on the crab population may be referenced as well. https://www.cbf.org/document-library/cbf-reports/CBF_BadWatersReport6d49.pdf)
2. Ask your students these questions:
-Why do you think crab picking is considered to be “women’s work?”
-Why is there an absence of men or White women in this picture?
3. Discuss how boring this work is, and how you have to concentrate to prevent injuring yourself. Add to that, since you have to make a quota of crab, it is required that you work quickly and make sure that you remove all the shell from the crab.
4. Ask your students to focus on the one woman who is making eye contact with the artist. Why do they think that is happening? Do they think she has aspirations beyond crab-picking? What thoughts are going through her mind? Can you relate to her? Ask them to write one page from the point of view of one of the women picking crabs. What was she thinking? How hard was the work? They could write about her or draw about her.
MD State Standards
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.3.1/CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.4.1/CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.5.1/CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.6.1/CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.7.1/CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.1
Art: Cr2:E:3:3-5:2/Cr2:E:6-8:2
W.3.1/W.4.1/W.5.1&W.6.3/W.7.3/W.8.3