Guest Speakers

The annual report for the 1960-1961 academic year is a good example of the kinds of programs that State's Mates held during the early 1960's.  Speakers for the year included the Chancellor's wife, as well as speakers from the Home Economics Extension Service, who spoke about refurbishing old furniture.

During the 1960's, State's Mates used Erdahl-Cloyd Union for its monthly meetings.  Floor plans such as this one were marked up so that club members and Union employees would know where speakers would stand and what equipment (e.g. microphones) they would need.

This agenda is for one of the State's Mates meetings, probably from the 1960's, in which the director of the Student Union spoke with State's Mates members about services on campus.  It also shows the door prizes that State's Mates members could receive simply for showing up to a meeting.

Guest speakers were a staple of the activities that State's Mates provided at its monthly meetings.  They were useful and informative, and the meetings were easy to organize.  Most years, one of the speakers was someone from North Carolina State University, who spoke with members about services available on campus, especially to married students.

Speakers almost always had a connection to members based on their status as wives.  In the 1950's, there was in fact a special subgroup of State's Mates made only of homemakers, who met each month separately from the rest of the group and relied heavily on speakers for their programming.  Guest speakers discussed such things as home decorating on the cheap, budget shopping for groceries, pregnancy, and childbirth.  When the subgroup dissolved, many of these topics were subsumed into the annual monthly meetings for all members.

Beginning in the 1960's, speakers began to take up a greater proportion of the monthly meetings, probably because they were easier to organize than events like potlucks and social dances, and because they could better sustain drops in attendance.  This especially became the case once State's Mates began to run the Mrs. NC State beauty pageant, which took considerable effort to organize and run each year.

Speaker topics changed over time as well, reflecting, to some extent, larger changes in women's history.  For example, whereas in 1958 a guest speaker discussed parent-child relationships, in 1969 a gynecologist was invited to speak about childbirth and birth control.  By 1971, speakers were invited to talk about women's liberation, and self-defense for women.  Shifts like the shift from obstetrics speakers to gynecologists, and the introduction of birth control to discussions, reflected larger trends in women's health during the 1960's.

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