“Women Work Particularly Well in Community Organizations”: Cultivating Community and Consumerism in the Comanche County REA Women's Club, 1939–1940

On december 7, 1939, the electric circus came to Comanche County, Texas. On T. J. Williams's farm, a mile and a half outside of the county seat of Comanche, hundreds of men, women, and children crowded into a large tent over the course of two days. The first night opened with welcoming speeches, introductory talks on lighting, and a demonstration of the uses of electricity in poultry production.¹ The night concluded with a free screening of the 1937 film The River, a documentary about the Tennessee Valley Authority's work to control the Mississippi River.² The following morning was devoted to a “special demonstration for school children,” while the afternoon was split into two sessions of programming for adults. In the main tent, home demonstration agents showed off electrified laundry machines, roasters, and refrigerators; out on the midway, engineers from the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) demonstrated how small electric motors could aid the farmer in tasks like feed grinding, silage cutting, corn shelling, and irrigation.³ In the evening, REA Home Economics Specialist Kathryn Harris led a cooking contest on electric ranges. Meanwhile, the local REA women's club operated an “all-electric lunch tent” where they served hot meals to guests all day and night. The local newspaper, the Comanche Chief, proudly advertised that “the whole family can come to the show prepared to stay all day without troubling to pack a lunch.”⁴

With its big tent, free food, and festivities, this “electric circus,” or Electric Farm Equipment (EFE) Show, was designed to bring electric education to rural farmers with all the pageantry of a fair and the camaraderie of a dinner on the grounds. The speeches and special guests represented a who's who of community leaders and government agents, including representatives from the REA's Utilization Department and home electrification specialists, as well as the agricultural extension agents from nearby counties. After all the prizes were awarded and the pomp and circumstance wrapped up late in the evening on that Friday, the tent and supplies were packed up, and they were on the road again.

Playing a critical role in the visit from the electric circus was the Comanche County REA Women's Club. According to the report “Training Programs for Farm Women,” prepared by Clara O. Nale, chief home electrification specialist of the Utilization Division of the REA, the women's club was formed in July 1939. When the local REA electric cooperative organized their annual meeting, they reached out to local women members of the cooperative to prepare the food. The “Food Committee” was apparently so well organized and such a success that the REA chair proposed an independent REA women's club. The summer after the electric circus (July 1940), the women's club organized an REA appliance school, most likely to coincide with the cooperative's annual meeting. Thirty-five women showed up for the first day of this appliance school.⁵ For four days in July, the women cooked on electric stoves, laundered shirts, and tested electric irons—all of which was made more enjoyable through the novelty of air-conditioning through a water-cooled window unit. The report notes that “many of the women commented on the fact that even $39.50 wasn't such a great price to pay to escape the Texas heat in the summer.”⁶ While the air-conditioning was an immediate success, none of the women had previously cooked using electric appliances, and they were initially skeptical. And yet, in Nale's experience she had “never found a group that was as responsive as this one was, as eager as they were, to tackle this problem of education in utilization and cooperation, which they felt was very much needed on this project.”⁷ By the conclusion of the school, the women proved to be passionate proponents of the “electric way” of life.

Other historians have shown how the REA's educational programming incorporated rural farmers into an emerging consumer culture defined by ownership of domestic appliances and farm equipment.⁸ These studies often frame the work of the REA as a precursor to postwar consumer culture and highlight ways that rural people—and rural women in particular—resisted or subverted the official agenda of the agency to make consumption serve their communities’ ends.⁹ Public policy scholars who study electrification and energy access in low- and middle-income countries also highlight the REA's work with rural cooperatives as an example of a successful electrification program.¹⁰ One quantitative analysis of energy consumption patterns confirms that living within reach of the EFE Show increased energy consumption by up to 90 kWh a year, which would have cost a farmer $4.45 in 1940 and around $87.00 today. By the REA's own calculations, that would have been enough power to grind 9,000 ears of corn, shear 3,600 sheep, or milk 2,700 cows.¹¹ This was a significant increase in electricity use, which enabled rural cooperatives to recoup costs, repay loans, and further expand across the country.

A key dimension of the REA's success relied on marketing electric modernity and electricity consumption to both men and women on the farm. Other historians have highlighted the role of the Utilization Division in encouraging greater consumption of electricity among individual consumers through the purchase of appliances and farm equipment. These scholars generally agree that the success of REA programs can be tied to the agency's efforts to market differently to men and women—REA agents sold electric farm equipment to men and electric home appliances to women. These studies often frame the work of the REA as a precursor to postwar consumer culture, in which gender roles also shaped mass consumption. Some studies also emphasize how rural people, and rural women in particular, resisted or subverted the official agenda of the agency to make consumption serve their communities’ ends.

The physical infrastructure projects of the New Deal—the construction of roads, bridges, and, of course, electric power grids—are among its more visible legacies, but its architects were equally committed to building the nation's social infrastructure.¹² Yet, as discussed below, cooperatives rarely functioned well as either economic or social organizations, despite REA leaders’ expectations about the potential for “cooperative spirit” among hardworking rural Americans. At the time, REA officials assumed that this was because co-ops were created in a top-down, “manufactured” fashion. Historians of the REA, like Ronald Kline, have largely agreed with their assessments and tended to frame dysfunction within cooperatives as the result of a top-down agenda.¹³ The case of Comanche County suggests that while the REA was misguided to assume that rural Americans might be natural founts of “cooperative spirit,” the decision to involve women who brought a deep local understanding of community needs had a tangible effect on the cooperative's overall success—whether or not it was “manufactured” by the REA.

Women were integral to the success of New Deal programming and the building of the modern American state.¹⁴ Historians have shown how assumptions about gender shaped New Deal programs, which in turn reshaped the structure of communities, families, and sexual relations, especially in rural areas.¹⁵ Policymakers and bureaucrats relied on existing assumptions about women's interests and aptitudes to construct their programming. In the case of the REA, other historians have highlighted how advertising and consumer education relied on assumptions about women's work, family dynamics, and aesthetic interests to turn rural women into electrical consumers, but we find that this reliance on gendered assumptions also shaped abstract notions such as “cooperative enthusiasm.”¹⁶

This article explores how assumptions about women's role in the community also played a part in REA programming. The REA's program of electrical expansion relied on the creation of rural cooperatives, but these cooperatives were plagued with management issues and often struggled to function well. In response to these shortcomings, REA officials such as John Carmody believed that women could improve the workings of cooperatives. We see in the Comanche County Appliance School case how the REA hoped to tap into what they understood to be a woman's natural inclination toward community work. In our close reading of the Comanche County training materials, we find that these women were neither coerced into implementing the policy goals of the REA nor fully opposed to them. Instead, the REA officials leveraged a certain alignment between their goals of widespread electrification and greater community buy-in and the goals of these women's clubs to support community development in the form of improved public facilities.

Scholars like Kline and Katherine Jellison focus on rural women as electrical consumers or women as agents of resistance to electricity regimes.¹⁷ In our research, by digging into that “resistance” in Comanche, where the women chose to focus on public spaces as opposed to private consumption, we see women embodying the very “cooperative spirit” that REA leaders thought was needed for the program, although in different ways than envisioned by the REA. The fact that the Comanche County REA Women's Club was created whole cloth at the behest of the REA, rather than tapping into an organically created, preexisting women's group, only reinforced agency officials’ perceptions that women were inherently community-minded.

The case of the Comanche County Appliance School exemplifies a key tension between agency leaders’ assumptions about women's work and their lived experience during the New Deal, which has been well documented in other histories of the REA.¹⁸ This article further examines this tension by exploring how officials like Clara Nale navigated the disconnect between the official REA project that assumed a gendered division of labor with the real needs of the farm women they served. Using the 1930 and 1940 censuses, we also gather biographical and demographic details of the club membership to better understand precisely who was being served by REA programming.¹⁹ The detail provided about these women allows us to complicate the image of who participated in these activities. Other studies of REA programming do comparatively little to explore the differences between the home economists and the women they were training. Our study digs into their personal lives to find a more complicated picture than the usual assumptions that home economists were younger, professional, and unmarried, while their rural women students were married and worked in the home. By unpacking the detailed story of this single educational program, this article highlights how the success of New Deal policies often relied less on policy agendas set by REA leaders than on the sum of many small-scale, local, everyday interactions between ordinary Americans.

The REA and the “Cooperative Spirit”

When the REA was created by executive order in 1935, officials planned to electrify rural America through a combination of private utilities, state power districts, farm cooperatives, and the federal government. Cooperatives became the primary recipient of REA loans because of an institutional preference for public power provision as well as hubris from the private utility industry, who initially sought to be the only recipient of REA loans and rubbed REA leadership the wrong way.²⁰

Through the cooperative model, REA administrators hoped to lean on the “cooperative spirit” to take advantage of a grassroots movement to implement their plans. The Cooperative League—the major advocate for the US cooperative movement—had been a key stakeholder in REA leadership's early deliberations about engaging electric cooperatives. The US cooperative movement borrowed philosophical principles from the European cooperative movement—namely, the Rochdale Principles, which emphasized open membership, democratic control, political neutrality, and fair business practices.²¹ One could imagine that the hope was that rural electrification from the bottom up would take on a life of its own, with REA loans acting primarily as a stimulant for rural infrastructure expansion.

However, REA leadership needed the program to move quickly, and building a cooperative from the ground up was time-consuming. In order to expand the program, REA officials resorted to working through other federal, state, and county agencies to get these electric co-ops off the ground, often relying heavily on county agents. While REA officials were not allowed to explicitly organize electric cooperatives, the creation of the Development Division speaks to how close the agency came to being a cooperative leader itself. The Development Division traveled the country to “initiate, stimulate, and develop [local] interest to the point where it results in a formal application for REA loans.”²² This top-down approach was not in the cooperative spirit. The first cooperatives in the United States to receive federal funding were under constant supervision of REA administrators, which ran counter to the traditional experience of agricultural cooperatives.²³ Leaders of the Cooperative League feared that “federally funded groups would ruin the cooperative movement,” which had made them hesitant to support the REA leadership's turn to electric cooperatives in the first place.²⁴ Even at the very beginning of the program, there was already tension between the cooperative ideal and the REA's organizational mission to electrify rural communities.

REA officials also realized that there was a pragmatic need to “build load,” or increase the use of electricity by end consumers. Without adequate utilization of the grid, it would be impossible for cooperatives to repay the federal loans that backed the program.²⁵ These loans were generously made at a 3 percent interest rate for a twenty-five-year loan tenure.²⁶ The expectation was that rural farmsteads, once they realized the impact that electrical equipment could have on their productivity and well-being, would flock to local dealerships to purchase refrigerators and electric corn grinders. The price per kilowatt-hour would then be sufficient for the cooperative to make a tidy profit and pay back its loan.

Initially, electric cooperatives struggled to achieve these utilization goals. Agency leaders operated on the faulty assumption that rural consumers would follow urban purchasing patterns, in which nuclear families would purchase home appliances, farm equipment, and durable goods for individual households. From initial reports of agents in the field, REA administrators quickly learned that the cultural attitudes and activities of rural life did not lend themselves to the modern appliances that had become the symbol of convenience and modernity for urban households. In many cases, farmers who joined cooperatives would sign up, connect their household, and then only purchase lighting—a technology that quickly improved life but used very little electricity. The major appliances pushed by REA home economists because they used significant power, such as refrigerators and electric ranges, were mostly ignored by rural consumers, who had practical reasons to prefer their current technologies.²⁷ Although an electric range might save a housewife money over its lifetime, it still used five times as much electricity per month as a refrigerator and required an installation fee in addition to its upfront cost.²⁸

When their initial strategies fell short, REA leaders introduced the traveling Electric Farm Equipment Show. From 1939 to 1941, the “electric circus” traveled to over sixty locations scattered across the United States.²⁹ The agency willingly partnered with corporations and encouraged them to create equipment designed specifically for rural consumers.³⁰ Private companies and local dealerships were invited to supply appliances for the roadshow, as well as “permanent” space reserved for national manufacturers, including General Electric, Westinghouse, and Frigidaire.³¹ In exchange, these national companies obtained a front-row seat to the electric circus and first dibs on a brand-new market. In the reports on the Comanche County Appliance School, the authors note that the school was set up to include products from local “dealers and distributors.” In a faded photograph of a handful of women standing around two electric sewing machines, one of the women listed is “Miss Young,” a representative from Singer sewing machines (fig. 1).³²

Yet REA officials were acutely aware that interest in electrification might ebb once the circus packed up and left town. Home demonstration agents recognized that converting rural men and women to the “electric way” required more than a two-day demonstration, hot meals, and a movie screening. Lasting impact needed local champions of electric living. To address this need, REA agents tapped into existing social infrastructures, training and cultivating advocates through the agricultural extension service, church groups, farm organizations, 4-H clubs, rural co-ops, and more. Among these groups were the over forty-seven thousand home demonstration clubs across the country, which the REA engaged for their local organizational capacity.³³

A key dimension of this work was outreach to women. Upon entering a new county, home economists were encouraged to connect with local leadership, including parent-teacher associations and women's clubs, in order to share information and set up public training for women on farm electrification, electricity and family health, and home appliances. Although men often made the final decision on major purchases, a woman's dominion over the home made her a critical target of the REA's messaging. This was an early lesson from the first days of the Tennessee Valley Authority: without a wife's support, it was almost impossible to sell energy-intensive appliances like the electric range.³⁴

Reaching the Women in Comanche County

Comanche County, Texas, was just one of many areas to which the REA's “electric circus” paid a visit, but it is a unique case in the particular attention paid to setting up an REA women's club. A cursory examination of Comanche County's history reveals few obvious clues that might explain why the REA thought the county was a good candidate for the REA's messaging. Comanche County, Texas, had a population of 19,245 people according to the 1940 census, with 19.8 people per square mile.³⁵ Comanche experienced many similar episodes as other rural Texas counties. In the 1880s, it drew migrants from eastern states seeking a fresh start and developed a reputation as a Populist stronghold.³⁶ Comanche also had a reputation for racial strife; by 1939, it had been a sundown county for over fifty years.³⁷ The county experienced an oil boom in the 1910s, and farmers were soon hit hard by the boll weevil and the Great Depression. Many of them turned to peanut farming.³⁸

REA officials arrived in rural communities like Comanche during a period of profound change and upheaval. The definitions of “rural” and “farmer” had always signaled a wide range of class, race, and labor relationships that often had very little to do with either population density or relationship to the land.³⁹ From the 1930s, many self-identified “farmers” began engaging in off-farm work such as long-haul trucking to supplement their income.⁴⁰ Some residents achieved quasi-middle-class lifestyles, in which car ownership and trips to the city were the norm. Meanwhile, others lived lives that more closely resembled their homesteader ancestors.⁴¹ Tenant farmers and sharecroppers were often excluded from government programs designed to serve rural Americans, as well as from popular understandings of agrarian life.⁴² Gender relations were also in flux during this period. Farm programs such as 4-H and the Future Farmers of America constructed and reinforced gendered divisions of labor and expectations about heteronormative sexuality through educational programming aimed at rural schoolchildren and teens.⁴³ The discipline of home economics incorporated and perpetuated this gendered division of labor, and the REA electrification specialists arrived with those assumptions in mind.

Home Economists, Women's Work, and REA Appliance Schools

As the REA's home economists promoted the electric way of life, they embodied the tension between creating the discerning consumer and promoting mass consumption. To what extent were REA home economists truly working in support of consumer education and the philosophy of cultivating “citizen consumers,” and to what extent were they the handmaidens of capitalism who helped corporations like General Electric and Westinghouse reach a new market of rural Americans?⁴⁴ The relationship between producers and consumers was also shifting rapidly during the 1930s. While urban business interests focused their attention on increasing spending by middle-class consumers, New Deal economists advocated for the importance of increasing the purchasing power of the working class. An emerging philosophy of “consumerism” focused on consumer education and empowerment in the face of corporate oligopolies who had little incentive to create cheap, quality products available to all. New Dealers envisioned these modern consumers as educated, rational decision-makers whose knowledge of products in the marketplace could counterbalance corporate capitalism.⁴⁵ Home economists were thus key actors in the cultivation of early twentieth-century “Mrs. Consumers.”⁴⁶ While historians have explored the divisions between working-class consumerism and the emergence of mass consumption after World War II, the role of rural consumers in earlier histories of consumerism is less well explored.⁴⁷

Other scholars have noted the tension that emerged as the Bureau of Home Economists saw how cooperating with industry was pushing home economists away from consumer education and toward providing advice about consumers to companies throughout the 1930s.⁴⁸ Specifically, within the REA, home economists and county agents pushed back at pressure to act as sales agents, noting their true role as educators.⁴⁹ Carolyn Goldstein argues that home economists sought to “construct an ideal American citizen consumer,” which “emphasized women's roles in consumption over their roles in production, but it also worked to elevate the status of that role through the idea that women's work as consumers had social and economic value.”⁵⁰ From the perspective of the home economist, then, the educated consumer was a critical actor in a rational marketplace, which allowed them to argue that the education of women was the cornerstone of a happy, healthy economy.

Home economics had grown out of the domestic science movement at the turn of the twentieth century with the pioneering work of women like Ellen Swallow Richards and Margaret Murray Washington, who created a scientific discipline that could be the purview of women. During the New Deal, the field of home economics was subsumed into the larger project of cultivating rural consumers.⁵¹ Since then, the legacy of home economics has been decidedly mixed. Scholars have identified how home economics reined in efforts toward women's equality and erroneously confined the scope of women's labor to work inside the home.⁵² Today, home economics is criticized for its political conservatism and the ways that its messaging reinforced traditional gender roles.⁵³

That gendered division of labor was baked into the very structure of the REA. Women employees were home economists, home electrification specialists, while men were simply engineers and electrification specialists. While typically sidelined to matters related to the kitchen, the laundry, and the household, the women of the REA had an opportunity to shape key elements of the agency's programming. In late 1939, as the Utilization Division was getting started in earnest, the REA employed seventeen (female) home electrification specialists and an equal number of (male) agricultural engineers, who covered the entire country.⁵⁴

Home economists were career professionals, and other researchers have noted how they were often younger, well educated, and less likely to be married than their rural students.⁵⁵ They were also significantly harder to track down in the US Census, given that they spent most of their time on the road, were likely to change their name after marriage, and pursued a variety of careers after their time at the REA came to an end. Our examination of the US Census reveals that some of the ancillary staff were locals, like Miss Verna Castleberry, who hailed from the nearby town of Ranger, in Eastland County; for others, it is impossible to know.⁵⁶ Some, like Dora B. Haines, who reported that she owned her home in Washington, DC, more closely fit the definition of a Washington bureaucrat with little connection to the rural areas she served as an REA representative. Clara Nale, on the other hand, hailed from Franklin County, Alabama—an area that was just as likely to be visited by the electric circus as Comanche County, Texas. Nale studied home economics first at Alabama Polytechnic Institute and then at the University of Tennessee. She went on to establish her professional reputation as a home economist in her local area before moving to her position as a regional representative for the REA. According to her wedding announcement in 1937, which was reported in great detail in the society pages of the Franklin County Times, Nale was already “head of the Home Economics Program at the Rural Electrification Administration” at the time of her marriage to another Franklin County native, James (“Jimmy”) Gentle.⁵⁷ Based on census records, Clara and Jimmy may have lived apart for the first few years of their marriage while Nale built her career at the REA and Jimmy built up his business as a local automobile salesman. When the census taker came by in 1940, they were lodgers in separate boarding houses, she in Washington, DC, he in their home state of Alabama (appendix C).⁵⁸ Nale continued to use her maiden name and the honorific “Ms.” in her professional life and her work with the REA clubwomen.

By 1940, when she wrote the report on electric education, Clara Nale had ambitions that went beyond trainings or women's clubs. Nale was hired in 1937 to head the home economics section of the Utilization Division. In short order, she had earned a reputation as an effective leader and recognized expert in her field.⁵⁹ The report made a compelling case for the importance of women's participation in the “cooperative spirit” of the REA, but the design and formatting of this report gives little indication of Nale's relatively high rank or professional accolades. Unlike many New Deal–era reports, which were often centrally printed and conformed to typesetting and design trends of the time, this report had a particularly homespun feel about it. It featured a hand-drawn cover with the title printed in blocky bubble letters, followed by a plaintive, typewritten foreword from Nale, and the contents presented a similar hodgepodge, with each section separated by hastily handwritten cover sheets denoting only the name of the training location—“Comanche,” “Upshur,” “Washington State College.” Each section included a report of a women's club, appliance school, or training with state extension services or colleges. Prepared in 1941, almost a year after the Comanche County women's appliance school took place, and on the eve of World War II, the report presents an impassioned justification for the role of women in the REA's programming. The report's layout and design suggest that Nale's corner of the Utilization Division likely ran on a shoestring budget compared to other units. In making her case for the value of women's participation in REA work, Nale was also making an explicit request for more resources.

In her report, Nale described the acute need for expanding outreach to women's groups, not just for the purpose of education on electricity or home appliances but for what she described as the “training of farm women leaders.”⁶⁰ The success of the REA women's club in Comanche County, a place with apparently no prior organized agricultural clubs for women of any kind, was prime evidence of the potential of such programs. Nale appears to be looking ahead to the near future, when traditional heads of household will be drafted into service, but she also is explicit about her vision that farm women can be effective “community leaders” in their own right.⁶¹

While it is all too enticing to read the cultivation of “women leaders” as a feminist project of women's empowerment, the reality of what Nale advocated for in 1940 is much more complicated. Nale probably envisioned herself as a leader; after all, she had climbed the ranks of the REA home economics division and established herself as an expert in her field by the age of thirty-six. In many respects, Nale embodies the tensions embedded in early twentieth-century home economics, which reinforced notions of separate spheres for men and women, even as it allowed a new group of educated women to join the professional class in one of the few areas where they were viewed as unquestioned experts.⁶² In envisioning a greater role for women leaders, Nale may have been advocating for herself as much as the farm women.

Although home economists highlighted the value of consumer education in their reports to superiors, these schools primarily functioned as marketing campaigns to increase utilization of electricity. It should not be forgotten that this education was in the service of the economics of rural electrification. The degree of resistance to the REA's marketing messages relied on how well those messages fit these women's visions of their own lives. First and foremost, the REA needed to sell equipment that would be appealing for farmers to buy, and for dealers to sell, that also used a lot of electricity.⁶³ The electric range fit the bill perfectly. However, many farm women had grown accustomed to their existing gas, kerosene, or wood-burning stoves and needed considerable convincing to adopt a new appliance that operated differently and produced slightly different results.⁶⁴ To overcome this hurdle, REA bureaucrats emphasized that electric stoves could be cheaper in the long run. In a script for a famous “Cookery Duel” that featured two men having a cooking competition, electric stoves represent “economy—in time and labor, as well as money.” Nale asked the women of the Comanche County Appliance School to prove this for themselves by calculating the cost of operation for an electric stove versus their current gas or wood-burning stove.⁶⁵

REA experts were tasked with developing distinct curricula for men and for women, with electrification specialists segregated by gender. The aim was to provide the information that a farmer or his wife might need in order to furnish the farm with the latest technologies. As seen in the example above, electrical equipment was not gender-neutral. The electric range, as a kitchen appliance, resided in the domain of women. The “Cookery Duel” was billed as entertainment precisely because it was humorous that two men might cook dinner. In this vision of the world, women's participation on the farm kept her largely indoors, and any market participation took the form of supplementary income to the farm's main agricultural outputs. Not only did this gendered division of the curriculum rely on prior assumptions about which aspects of farm living occupied men and women, it simultaneously reinforced those assumptions.

As a result, at least according to the REA's training materials, men worked outside and women worked inside. No matter how Nale's Training Program in Home Electrification tried to slice up the work of the farm, this division of labor is entrenched in its pages. The four-day program for women focused primarily on kitchen and laundry equipment, from electric stoves and refrigerators to irons and washing machines. Even when women were asked to step outside the kitchen, they rarely left the home. On the first day of the appliance school, women were instructed to make a floor plan of their home lighting—carefully noting the number of circuits and fuse sizes—in order to identify potential issues with appliances and whether they had adequate lighting.⁶⁶ Although “adequate lighting” is never defined in this report, it harkens back to other lighting campaigns that warned women of how poor lighting can be a danger to children's eyesight.⁶⁷ To borrow from Virginia Woolf, women in REA programming were viewed as the angels of the house—domestic, diligent, caring mothers—who considered electricity to be a means of protecting their children.

This indoor-outdoor division of labor falls into a pattern of gendered assumptions evident in other New Deal programs. Men's labor was the purview of coherent, national programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, whereas women's labor was often incorporated into state programs with varying degrees of efficacy.⁶⁸ The National Recovery Administration set women's minimum wage below men's minimum wage, which ultimately discouraged women from participating in paid labor. Agricultural workers, domestic workers, and teachers were exempted from Social Security benefits, which meant that 30 percent of women in the paid labor force were not supported under the scheme. Even the women who had fought for women's wages and lower working hours did so in order to allow working women to spend more time with their children. The proponents of the Maternalist movement identified poor wages for women not as a cause of poverty and economic dependence but as a barrier to women being good mothers. In their eyes, women's natural place was in the home.⁶⁹ Resettlement programs in the South defined their own success in part through images of rural women working in the (newly electrified) home and not out in the field.⁷⁰ In the case of the appliance school, the focus on housework may have been an assumption based on the target audience of middle-class women, whose farm labor was less likely to have included field labor. However, even within this brief report, we can see women resisting the gendered labor split between domestic and farm work, and we see evidence of home economists attempting to broaden the curriculum for women accordingly.

By confining women's lives to the domestic sphere, REA agents ignored several realities of farm life. First, there were outdoor farm activities that were also gendered. Well into the 1930s, rural women were regularly responsible for the raising and care of poultry as well as often taking charge of milking cows and caring for livestock.⁷¹ (By the 1950s, many of these tasks would be gendered male, as “backyard” poultry operations were replaced by mass production in confinement.)⁷² Despite this reality, advertisements for electric brooders were included with images of men using machinery in pamphlets titled “More Power to the Farmer”—not next to images of women using sewing machines.⁷³ Another reality ignored by REA marketing is that the location of a woman's labor often changed over the course of her lifetime. Many women enjoyed working alongside their husbands and handling outdoor tasks, but motherhood proved to be a key turning point that led women to toil indoors.⁷⁴

While expectations for rural women's work were circumscribed by social norms about the division of labor, many historians have found that, when pressed, rural women did what they needed to do to get by.⁷⁵ Reports like the one compiled by Nale offer a glimpse into the work that women actually did on the farm, as well as the work of the women home economists at the REA. Although the women asked some amusing questions—Would pudding cooked in an electric oven not taste like onions?—they also posed questions that revealed unexpected details about their lives. In contemplating the switch to an electric stove, one woman wondered whether it could cook enough beans for eight farmhands—hardly the ideal nuclear family envisioned by male bureaucrats in Washington.⁷⁶

Even the appliance school's own programming failed to stay inside the home. The group took two “field trips” to the farm of Miss Alice Robertson and the farm of Mr. John Cowan. Miss Robertson's farm on Route 1 represented “a real human interest story, rather dramatic in character.”⁷⁷ According to Nale's report, Alice Robertson left her small-town job and returned to the family farm in Comanche after her brother, a college professor, had a nervous breakdown. Since the farmland was relatively poor quality, she started by selling flowers and pressing grape juice. Both of these businesses became quite lucrative, and she further invested in them by getting an irrigation system installed and an electrically heated pressure cooker. A little further down the road, Mr. Cowan showed off the electric brooder that he used for raising pheasants and African partridges, which were sold to the Golden Pheasant Restaurant in Dallas for $1.50 a bird—described in the report as “a very fancy price.” Although Mr. Cowan's main cash crops were actually peaches, grapes, and cattle—and pheasant brooding was therefore a side business—these two examples present outdoor farm activities that REA home economists at least believed would interest the women.⁷⁸

Savvy home demonstration agents recognized that rural women had a more expansive role on the farm than was acknowledged in their curriculum, and they made adjustments as they went. For example, while an earlier 1936 pamphlet of “Xmas suggestions” for a Clinton, Tennessee, cooking school listed “gifts for Mother” that only included electrical equipment one would find inside the four walls of a kitchen, later materials acknowledge that women stepped outside of the home.⁷⁹ A chart labeled “Routine Housekeeping Tasks,” which appears multiple times in the work materials of REA home economist Louisan Mamer, shows the ebbs and flows of what counted as housekeeping all through the calendar year (fig. 2). From January to December, the chart includes school and community activities, sewing, home cleaning, gardening, rearing baby chicks, haying, field work, harvesting and meals, canning, vegetable storage, readying the house for winter, and, in December, a spike simply labeled “Christmas.”⁸⁰ In Comanche, agency experts were “simply swamped” with questions from their students about everything from plumbing to electric wiring, which prompted Nale to contemplate “the type of information that . . . users should have before and after they get electricity.”⁸¹ In many ways the appliance schools acted like focus group discussions where the REA was learning just as much about the consumer as the consumer was about the product.

In her notes on training programs, Clara Nale repeatedly emphasized how the women of Comanche County were an integral part of the farming economy. She observed that farm women “were alert to changes that might affect farm incomes” and “were quick to see the application of electricity to many types of farming.”⁸² More important, she recognized that the REA was losing out on potential load building by ignoring the full extent of women's labor. Nale took issue with how agency programming focused on promoting outdoor uses of water to men, while ignoring the distinctly indoor uses for women: “While the [REA] project personnel has been talking a great deal about [outdoor] water pumps, they have done very little on plumbing.”⁸³ By assuming that women were confined to the home and, crucially, that their tasks within the home followed prescribed gender expectations, these programs missed out on opportunities to market items like indoor plumbing equipment, electric brooders, and irrigation systems directly to women. Across the country, farm women were busy, indoors and out. Was that any different in Comanche County?

The Comanche County REA Women's Club

Although the Comanche County REA Women's Club was unusual in that it was created by the REA, a survey of the census data for each club member reveals that it generally fit the mold of a club composed of prospective middle-class consumers as envisioned by the REA and New Deal policymakers. In fact, the middle-class nature of the students helps to explaining the focus on domestic electricity use. The club certainly included a few notable locals one might expect to serve as “rural farm leaders,” such as Zora Black, wife of the local postmaster, and Mrs. Beatrice Helm, part of a husband-and-wife team of schoolteachers with her husband, J. C. Many of the club members had high school educations, and they had, on average, one more year of schooling than their husbands. (In appendix A, education level is indicated by number of years, in conformity with the way the data is listed in the census; someone with a high school diploma would have twelve years, a graduate of a two-year college would have fourteen years, and someone with a four-year degree would be listed as having sixteen years of education). A few of the women, such as Birdie Lou Thomas and Edna Cowan, had literally married into the cooperative as wives of REA draftsmen, engineers, and local leaders. But the clubwomen's husbands pursued a broad range of occupations from general store owner to filling station operator. Nevertheless, of the thirty-one clubwomen who appear in the report, all but seven identified as farmers in the 1940 census (appendix A).⁸⁴ For those who did identify as farmers, there would have been a notable difference between tenant farmers and farm owners. At the time, tenant farmers still worked land under suffocating conditions that often left them in debt to landowners.⁸⁵ For comparison, in 1935, 57 percent of all Texas farmers were tenant farmers.⁸⁶ And yet, in our group, almost all who self-identified as farmers owned their farms. Home ownership was quite high overall, with 80 percent of the households involved in the program owning their home (appendix A; fig. 3).

Upon closer inspection, the co-op membership was just as complicated and interesting as the lives of real farm women: there was Ruth Laughlin, a divorcée who described her occupation as “farmer” and “employer,” and Edna Cowan, the wife of John Cowan, who raised those “fancy” pheasants for the restaurant in Dallas. The club crossed generational lines as well: the average age of membership was forty-six, but the group included women of all ages (fig. 4). The women also had varying life experiences: in 1940, Alfa Straley, wife of REA electrician E. E. Straley, was a new mother to a ten-month-old son, while fellow clubwoman Minnie Roberts had three sons and a daughter ranging in age from ten to twenty-three years old. The definition of “household” was as fluid for these women as it is for many families today. Several women lived in the same household as one or both of their aging parents, including Miss Martha Wetzel, Alice Robertson, and Edna Easley. Ruth Stevens shared a household with her son, daughter-in-law, and four-month-old granddaughter. Eighteen-year-old Frankie May Wood joined the club along with her mother. Perhaps the most unusual story was that of Miss Alice Robertson, who (as noted above) left her job in a small town to return to Comanche to embark on a new venture as a self-described “florist” who sold “flowers and fruit” (appendix A).⁸⁷

The women of the appliance school may not have been working-class tenant farmers who spent their days alongside their husbands in the fields, but an examination of the census data shows that their middle-class lifestyles still included a wide range of labor: from schoolteachers to homemakers, farmers to flower sellers. The programming of the electric circus, like other programs targeting rural populations, reinforced an idealized vision of farmer and wife, but those identities were never clearly delineated. By the end of the appliance school, Ruth Laughlin knew what she might look for in her next iron, but who would give her advice about processing her corn or irrigating her fields?

To target consumers who could pay for power and help reach utilization goals, the agency focused its resources on middle-class consumers like the women of Comanche County. This was the case throughout the country; when home electrification specialists were tasked with surveying local organizations, they prioritized organizations that embodied the “middling ranks of the socio-economic system.”⁸⁸ This included grammar and high schools, public libraries, churches, farm organizations, men's and women's clubs, parent-teacher associations, 4-H clubs, Future Farmers of America, and other organizations.⁸⁹ While lower-class and working-class households also formed social clubs and organizations, the REA did not engage with those organizations as frequently as middle-class clubs.

Reaching those middle-class women typically involved plugging into the world of women's clubs and similar organizations. In the early twentieth century, women participated in numerous civic associations that often straddled the lines between social club and political organization. Organizations ranged from PTAs (two hundred thousand members in 1920), the Women's Christian Temperance Union (five hundred thousand members), the National Association of Colored Women (one hundred thousand members in 1917), and the behemoth General Federation of Women's Clubs (1.5 million members).⁹⁰ Others, like sewing clubs and quilting bees, emerged more organically around traditional domestic activities.⁹¹ While these clubs ostensibly reflected a communitarian ethos, they also demarcated subtle class divisions within communities.

The agency's decision to focus on middle-class women's lives also helps explain the bifurcation of gendered labor in the REA's program of education. REA leaders assumed that women did not work outdoors or in the fields precisely because they expected their audience to be educated, middle-class, and therefore removed from the physical labor of the farm. The agency's rationale for working with local organizations and local people was never really about bringing power to the masses; it was a strategy to tap into a new class of consumers in middle America.

“They Have Community Interest at Heart”: Women and the Cooperative Spirit

As the appliance school drew to a close, Mr. Thomas of the REA and Mrs. Black of the cooperative board opened a discussion on the question, “Do the farm families on REA lines really know what membership in the cooperative means, do they know what a true cooperative is, and if not, what can this women's club do to help them?” The conversation quickly turned to school improvements such as school lighting and hot school lunches. One woman suggested that through the REA women's club, the communities represented could advocate for better lighting “in both the schools and the homes.” Despite the days of appliance demonstrations and field trips, we do not know that a single electrical appliance was sold. Instead, some of the liveliest discussion, with the greatest plans for follow-through, revolved around the everyday benefits of electricity for the community and the schoolhouse in the form of “wholesome, hot lunches for the children.”⁹²

It is hard to know what the New Deal–era proponents of a politically engaged “consumerism” would have thought about this turn in the conversation. New Dealers like Gardiner Means saw the education of grassroots organizations as a means of creating powerful consumers—not as an engine of private sector growth but as a corrective to powerful oligopolies.⁹³ It is an open question as to what extent hot lunches were really subverting the whims of corporate capitalism, but the focus on community electrification ties into the initial prompt from Thomas and Black about the true meaning of the cooperative.

There is a very good reason why the cooperative leaders included this question in their discussions. As they saw it, the lack of cooperative spirit had been a real barrier to expanding the work of the electric cooperatives. Dora Haines herself, along with colleague Udo Rall, noted that farmers joined cooperatives just to get lighting but felt “no personal loyalty to the enterprise,” which they blamed on the REA's top-down, technocratic approach to developing these organizations.⁹⁴ Lack of personal connection to the enterprise led to poor attendance in meetings, little interest in elections of boards of directors, and general apathy toward the day-to-day work that was needed to get the electric cooperative off the ground and keep it going. John Carmody, who served as the head of the REA in the early years of the agency, thought that women might help solve this problem. Carmody believed that women should be on co-op boards and supported the joint membership of husbands and wives, because in his mind rural women simply cared more about electricity. It meant more to them. As he phrased it, rural women “know what electricity is about; they have social vision; they have community interest at heart.”⁹⁵ That community interest was key, in some minds, to unlocking the power of the cooperative.

Whether that community interest was also profitable is open to debate. In the annals of Rural Electrification News, school electrification was sold on its community benefits, but there are also hints that the REA may have also seen it as a potential cash cow. By 1939, of the sixteen thousand customers served by REA-financed projects, two thousand were newly electrified schools.⁹⁶ Articles in Rural Electrification News painted a picture of happy children, now living in a modern world, full of ambition (fig. 5). Radios now enabled them to learn about modern affairs outside of their towns; schools now had modern lighting and plumbing, improving sanitation; and electrified classrooms offered an opportunity for use of electrical equipment in shop and domestic science courses.⁹⁷ Of course, these opportunities were still divided by gender. One article noted that “in agricultural training classes boys become familiar with the many ways in which electricity can be used to increase farm income and decrease expenses.” Meanwhile, the girls could practice their ironing.⁹⁸

Rural Electrification News presented school electrification stories as feel-good pieces about the benefits of electricity, but their value to the economic puzzle of rural power is more complicated. In one article, school electrification was literally described as a “by-product” of the REA program, a pleasant but unintended consequence of farmer electrification.⁹⁹ However, Harry Slattery, who took over as REA administrator in 1939 and served until the eve of World War II, conceptualized the electrification of community buildings as one of two pillars of rural electrification: individual maximum use and community maximum use. In an article titled “A Goal for All Members—Maximum Service,” Slattery exhorted co-op members to use more and more electricity. Under “Suggestions for Load Building” he writes, “Is your community a Maximum User? Is it using electricity to light schools and churches and other public buildings? Is there street lighting on the main business highway? Are there other community needs which electricity could meet?”¹⁰⁰ Clearly, then, school electrification was a part of a broader plan to increase utilization. As historian Gabriel Rosenberg has shown, rural educational programs like 4-H played an important role in normalizing heterosexual relations, and the rural electrification programs were no exception.¹⁰¹ One article in Rural Electrification News described young women as “future farmwives of America” who were primarily interested in electricity as a means to “make a pleasant and comfortable home.” The article promised that “learning to cook, to care for home and clothes is fun with electricity.”¹⁰²

Yet the case of Comanche County offers a powerful example of the ways that technology adoption was actively mediated by the interests of women, even when those interests were aligned with the interests of the REA officials. At the end of each day of the appliance school, the “students” convened to discuss the role that their group could have in the county's electrified future. As the session wrapped up, they agreed to take their learning out to other members of the community. They planned to start by educating the local public schools on proper lighting and food preparation. By plugging into these networks, the home economists helped integrate women into the overall state-building project of electrification. Ultimately, the Comanche County REA Women's Club—not REA officials—promoted better school lighting. As Nale explained, “The training of these key women in the proper utilization of electricity is basically important from both the standpoint of helping the community to enjoy the social and economic benefits of electricity, but also to help in making the cooperative secure and successful.”¹⁰³ Nale understood that these women's interest in community was core to the success of the REA project itself.

Conclusion

The case of Comanche County, as compiled by Nale in her report on training programs, offers an opportunity to closely examine the key ingredients of the REA's success, which provides important insights for historians as well as scholars of contemporary rural electrification. The women of Comanche County proved to be far more than savvy “consumers in the country”; they actively shaped the agenda of the cooperative model to serve community interests. The REA clubwomen subtly pushed back on the REA's technocratic agenda that reinforced norms of gender and sexuality, simply by expressing interest and asking questions on topics that went outside the bounds of the carefully contrived programming. The home economists recognized the contradictions inherent in their work and embraced any opportunity to turn the sales pitch for appliances into a pitch for women's leadership in their communities. While it is appealing to frame both of these actions as resistance, they ultimately benefited the electrification program by building load and fostering the elusive cooperative spirit.

The REA's marketing of their appliance schools relied on patriarchal assumptions about rural farm life that poorly reflected the range of work that women actually did on the farm. Home economists agreed that women were half of the equation: sell to the farmer, sell to the wife. But this approach only works when selling the correct product to the correct customer. REA officials tried to sell appliances to women and farm equipment to men, without considering that women may also have been customers for farm equipment. Even Nale, arguably the woman with the most control over REA programming to women, acknowledged how the incorrect assumptions about women's lives likely limited the efficacy of the program.

These appliance schools turned out to be much more than a sales pitch. We have shown how the women home economists made intentional choices to build up women's leadership in the community, which Nale identified as crucial to maximizing electricity's social and economic benefits.¹⁰⁴ From Nale's perspective, enlisting women's groups in community education campaigns was a crucial element of the success of the program. In reports to her superiors, she argued that the “training of farm women leaders . . . would not only strengthen the electric cooperative, but it would also contribute in many ways to other agricultural programs.”¹⁰⁵ Extension studies shared with REA home economists highlighted how indirect influence through previously existing networks was one of the most important methods of information dissemination.¹⁰⁶

Establishing opportunities for women's leadership in the cooperatives benefited the electrification program. At least some within the organization believed that women's membership fostered the community spirit needed to keep co-ops functioning. As we have discussed, scholars have argued that REA representatives so heavily emphasized utilization growth that they forced household appliances on rural farmers and elicited resistance in the form of disengagement and distrust. At first blush, the Comanche County women's interest in community electrification over consumer goods looks like resistance, but when we consider the struggles the REA had with getting cooperatives together, we see that the women realized one of the agency's stated reasons for women's involvement in the first place—a cooperative spirit.

At the same time, the Comanche County REA Women's Club had crucial, if familiar, limitations as an example of women-led activism aided and abetted by the state. In part because the REA program's target audience consisted of potential consumers of home appliances, the agency found the most success in comparatively affluent, predominantly white communities who could afford to purchase those appliances. While the gendered dimensions of the agency's efforts are obvious, Nale's report is conspicuously silent on the ways these programs were also segregated by race—if they reached nonwhite farmers at all.¹⁰⁷ In this light, it may be more than a simple coincidence that Comanche County was also a sundown county at the time the REA selected it as a stop for the EFE Show.¹⁰⁸

Nevertheless, the Comanche County training school gives us insight into how women were not just consumers but partners in technological change, which they sought according to their own interests. Although the white, male REA leaders did not understand the needs of farm women, the home economists successfully leveraged existing women's groups and networks to make the agency's programming more responsive to the needs of rural communities in ways that also increased utilization overall. In this way, the appliance schools had an impact that lasted long after the REA's electric circus had packed up and left town. In challenging the expectations of their own educational mission, REA home economists did more than inform women about modern conveniences available through electricity—they helped women envision a role for themselves in their communities’ electrified future.

Notes

Works Cited