18-year-old Oklahoma Mother Stranded in Imperial Valley, California, March 1937

Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange captured this view of a young woman struggling to keep her family together during the Great Depression. Even when those caught at the bottom of the economic downturn of the 1930s could manage to meet their basic needs of food and shelter, they often had to deal with the related emotional realities of desperation and loneliness.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, photo by Dorothea Lange