Moving On: Life After State

The State’s Mates organization gave members an opportunity to meet other women who were experiencing the same struggles with husbands, domestic responsibilities, family life , and meager finances that they were. “Nothing could be greater than getting to talk over your problems with [other women] and have someone to be with when your husband is spending hours studying, ” explains State’s Mates member Paula James in 1966. The organization assisted with helping deal with a complicated life that relatively few understood.

When the members of State’s Mates received their Good Wife Diplomas, they were on their way to the next chapter of life. Sometimes women stayed in town, sometimes they moved to other regions of the country. But whether or not life became easier or harder is unknown; what is known is that their experience at State’s Mates prepared them for the next chapter. Updating the State’s Mates about life after her husband’s graduation in 1961, former club president Barbara Medders wrote, “Ron thoroughly enjoys his job and really thinks he made the right decision. He has given a lot of responsibility and has had to work long hours. He worked 33 hours with two days a week or so ago!” Even though her husband had found a job, Medders went back to work after she and her family moved to Dansville, Virginia. Explaining she had “rejoined the ‘working race’ again,” Medders explains why she went back to work: “I really intended to stay at home and keep house but those terrific salaried don’t go quite as far as we thought when you are living in a higher income group and cannot use being a ‘student’ as an excuse for sacrifice.”

Even though the women of State’s Mates were learning—through State’s Mates programming and each other—the ways in which they could live comfortably as student families, that information served them for many years after graduation as well. Knowing she and her husband had to pay back loans and financially adjust to life without student benefits, Medders chose to share the responsibilities with her husband. This choice would have been much easier to handle considering the many roles she took on while at NC State. At least this time, her husband was able to share them too.

 State’s Mates was an organization on the North Carolina State campus that served to support and assist the wives of male students. The wife may have lived a life that was complex and often difficult to control, her membership in State’s Mates taught her lessons that could serve her many years past graduation. Although they were not the only women who had to work in order to support their family, they were part of an organization that very few were able to identity with. 

Visit other Exhibits in the Good Wife Diploma.