field hands
Crop tending crew
Field hands are workers who perform manual labor in agricultural fields—planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops.
The term carries historical weight from American slavery and sharecropping, when enslaved people and later impoverished Black workers formed the bulk of field labor on Southern plantations: The field hands worked from dawn to dusk.
It distinguished outdoor laborers from house servants.
- workersPeople doing jobs
- laborersWorkers doing physical tasks
- slave laborCoerced unpaid servitude
- sharecroppersFarmers paying rent in crops
- stoopSmall entry porch
hired help · bondsmen · harvest · tenant farmers · dirt poor · cotton · cotton picking · migrant workers · gangs · agriculture · plantation · picker · sweat · antebellum · hoes · baskets · sun · dawn to dusk
- Rural Agriculturefarmers, farming communities, ranchers, farm workers, dairy farmers
- rural lifefarms, village, villages, farming, farmhouses
- farmworkharvesting, farmworkers, planting, farm labor, crop farming
- laborerslaborers, day laborer, day labourer, day laborers, manual worker
- Antebellum Southplantation, cotton kingdom, overseer, slave quarters, big house
- colonial workersblacksmiths, carpenters, cobblers, coopers, craftsmen
field handsoffice workers
Indoor professional employees
factory workers · white-collar workers · clerical staff · clerks · secretaries
field handsplantation owners
Large-scale agricultural landholders
masters · slaveholders · landowners · overseers · employers
field handsprofessionals
Skilled, paid practitioners
executives · knowledge workers · accountants · intellectuals · lawyers
hand, field, hands, handsome, handful, fields, handed, handfuls, handing