Fair and Tender Ladies is often as much a love song for rural America as a story of a single woman’s life, and Smith’s nostalgia for pastoral life is clear. Ivy loves her life as a child in Sugar Fork. While she recognizes that life is difficult, Ivy is surrounded by family, love, and people who will tell her stories. Life is relatively simple even if it has its drawbacks. Ivy spends the rest of her life defending the way of life of her home even as she sees it slipping away. On some level, she understands that farming is not a viable way forward, but she takes a very long time coming to that conclusion.

Smith’s strongest indictment of capitalist business practices is in her portrayal of the coal company. Once coal becomes an industry, the coal company drives the lumber company out of business, depriving men of work and forcing them to work in the mine instead. Trusting locals are duped by shady businessmen into selling off their land, told that the men are buying the “mineral rights” and that nothing will happen to them. Ivy herself finds out what those promises mean as she must defend her home in her old age when the coal company attempts to mine her land.