Rural Electrification Sources Behind the Story

		Source: Rural Electrification Administration: Electricity Comes to the Farm These "before" and "after" pictures were taken by the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to show the changes brought to farm families when they received electric service. Magazine articles and REA newspapers emphasized how women's work – like washing clothes – could be made easier by flipping a switch.
"After twenty years of exposure to the urban domestic ideal, farm women used a ready reference point when attempting to demonstrate the extent of their poverty – their lack of modern equipment. ... [W]omen made their opinions known to national leaders, the editors of farm life publications, and other individuals whom they saw as possessing the potential to ease their distress through the Great Depression. Farm women also praised New Deal programs and leaders whom they viewed as coming to farm people's aid during the depression. ... "The photographs by ... Farm Security Administration photographers helped publicize midwestern farm women's continuing lack of many types of modern equipment during the New Deal era. On the other hand, the photographs also provide visual evidence of the types of technology that impoverished farm women had acquired and thus lend some insight into the technological priorities of midwestern farm families. "Statistics for 1940 ... demonstrated that washing machines were popular in the Midwest because farms there still depended on large numbers of field workers whose dirty work resulted in heavy loads of laundry. The proximity of midwestern farms to the nation's major washing machine manufacturers may have also been a factor in the appliance's popularity among those farm families who had electric power. ... [Nonetheless], electricity was ... presented as a panacea for farm women's problems. Hyperbolic statements that described electricity as a 'good fairy' whose magical powers were released by the 'touch of a button' gave the impression that women's household work would virtually disappear with the acquisition of high-line electric power. Electrically powered machines would now quickly perform work that had once taken hours to do. Such statements not only exaggerated the extent to which electric power would transform housekeeping but more subtly reinforced the notion that women's domestic labor - so easily replaced - was less important than the work farm men performed. REA propogandists exaggerated the extent to which electric power eased women's work and at the same time reinforced existing gender hierarchies." --historian Katherine Jellison
Source of the Source: Publicity stills for the Rural Electrification Admin. Photographer unknown. ca 1950. "TVA: Electricity for All." New Deal Network website. (http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva27.htm). Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 67, 94, 102-3
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