Women's Clubs
![Agents in training to can tomatoes and green beans. The canner is the popular Flowers model manufactured in Hickory [North Carolina]. The can with the label is a 4-H brand for green beans](https://soh.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/files/fullsize/4961075479b123134833ccec14102bf7.jpg "Agents in training to can tomatoes and green beans. The canner is the popular Flowers model manufactured in Hickory [North Carolina]. The can with the label is a 4-H brand for green beans")
While taking this photo, these "agents in training" practiced their canning skills. After earning certificates in food preservation women could become county agents. County agents were well respected throughout their communities, and, frequently, county teachers took on the responsibilities.
The Extension Service formally organized North Carolina women’s clubs, or home demonstration clubs, in 1913. The clubs operated in conjunction with the girls’ clubs but officially separated around 1916. The women who participated in the clubs came from varied backgrounds. Home demonstrations encouraged trial and error learning. Women often practiced different methods of cooking or preservation and immediately saw the results. Like the boys’ and girls’ clubs, women were encouraged to sell surplus goods in community markets. Home demonstration clubs expanded beyond traditional agricultural education into issues of health, hygiene, and literacy. Partnerships between the Extension Service and the Public Health Service provided medical check-ups to mothers and their children. Women used their extension involvement and skills to better their home, family, and their community.
African American Home Demonstrations participate in a demonstration on foundation or dress patterns.
County agents worked with wives of large, small, tenant, and sharecropper farmers. Shopkeepers and teachers also participated in club work. However, the Extension Service did not develop demonstration clubs for African American women until at least 1917. Even though there was a strong desire for adult extension among African American parents whose children were involved in club work.[1] In counties that did offer extension clubs for black women, extension agents were often unaware of the agricultural and traditions that they were trying to reform. Practices taught by extension agents opposed African American traditions of mimicking nature within their gardens. While they appeared chaotic and jumbled to white extension agents, the organization limited weeds and pests. However, not all traditions ran counter extension agents. Many African Americans subscribed to symmetrical gardens based on older traditions of planting crops in rows, but these women did not simply yield to Euro-American farming practices. Extension agents began to alter competition rules to accommodate established African American traditions. Many women were successful in these Extension run competitions because of a blending of gardening techniques learned or utilized from African traditions or slavery.[2]
Like the girls’ clubs, home demonstration clubs carved out a distinctive role for women. Extension leaders envisioned men as producers and women as consumption managers. Reformers hoped that within that role, women would make farm life more appealing to younger generations by raising the standard of rural living. Extension leaders used the role of women as tool in a battle between rural life and the lure of urban living. In many ways, this new role presented women with opportunities to become producers themselves by earning a small income and saving for new home conveniences, but this new role also committed women to stay on the farm. The place of a women’s club member was at home providing a comfortable lifestyle for her family.[3]
[1] “Biographical Sketch of John D. Wray, the First African American Club Leader in North Carolina,” Cooperative Extension Service: 4-H Development Records.
[2]Hammett, Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Service: to Family, Community, and North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Family and Consumer Science Foundation and North Carolina Extension and Community Association Foundation, 2011), 8; Dianne D. Glave, “‘A Garden So Brilliant with Colors, So Original in its Design’: Rural African American Women, Gardening, Progressive Reform, and the Foundation of an African American Environmental Perspective,” Environmental History 8, no. 3 (July 2003): 404, accessed November 17, 2014, http://jstor.org/stable/3986201.
[3] Mary S. Hoffschwelle, “‘Better Homes on Better Farms’: Domestic Reform in Rural Tennessee,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 1 (2001): 53-54, accessed November, 25, 2014, http://jstor.org/stable/3347068.