Joyce Mendenhall might seem like the least likely person to talk about the domestic arts traditionally required of farm women.
Raised in northwest Missouri, she was a tomboy who grew up to be a Master Gardener.
But sometime during the decade she’s worked at the Washington County Extension Offce, Mendenhall got interested in Home Demonstration Clubs.
Organized nationwide in the 1910s - and so, celebrating their 100th anniversary - the organizations were intended to bring women together to improve their homemaking and bettertheir communities.
The best way to hook those women, the thinking went, was to lure in their children. Thus Corn Clubs for boys and Tomato Clubs for girls were born - and eventually evolved into 4-H clubs, Mendenhall says.
“The whole idea was they thought if they got girls interested, they could get into the homes and educate the mothers about sanitation, sewing and other things, too,” she says.
With her interest piqued, Mendenhall planted herself in Special Collections at the University of Arkansas’ Mullins Library and started her research.
The result was a 28-page essay - and today’s presentation at the Shiloh Museum of OzarkHistory’s Sandwiched In program at noon.
Each Tomato Club girl, Mendenhall explains, was allotted a 10th of an acre and spent the summer tending a tomato patch there.
Tomatoes were chosen, she says, because they could be easily grown, had a long growing season and were less likely to spoil during canning - “which was especially important considering they were canned in less than ideal conditions such as outdoors on makeshift tables.”
But, Mendenhall says, girls also learned virtues more important than properly preserved tomatoes.
“Tomato clubs not only allowed girls to learn about gardening, food preservation and marketing, they fostered interracial cooperation at a time of entrenched segregation. Girls met each other at state, regional and even national exhibits and competitions, wearing badges, trading songs and comparing record books,” she writes in her essay.
“Leave it to a group of Southern women and girls to slip the heady taste of freedom, modern life and social change into seemingly innocuous, ever-present cans and jars of home-grown tomatoes, resting on a shelf, waiting to be opened and savored,” Mendenhall quotes Elizabeth Engelhardt, author of “Canning Tomatoes, Growing ‘Better and More Perfect Women’ The Girls’ Tomato Club Movement.”
Although the clubs themselves were still segregated, that message of successful racial interaction was delivered to a large percentage of the country, Mendenhall points out. More than half the U.S. population lived in rural areas, and 30 percent of the workforce farmed.
Until Mendenhall was born, her parents farmed outside Hopkins, Mo., just a few miles from the Iowa line.
They moved into town - a community of about 700 - when she was a week old.
“I love to write about things I did when I was a little kid,” she says. “Everybody knew everybody. The only restriction we had was we had to be home at 12 noon for lunch and at 6 o’clock in the evening fordinner. Otherwise our mothers didn’t pay that much attention to us! We could go just about anywhere we wanted to.”
A favorite excursion for Mendenhall and her friends, she adds, was to the lumberyard, where they’d bury themselves and each other in a huge mound of sand.
Mendenhall’s grandparents remained on the farm, and she and her father shared a passion for horses, riding and showing them together.
“I was Daddy’s little girl.”
But her mother and grandmothers were members of Home Demonstration Clubs,and Mendenhall often found herself accompanying them to meetings.
It didn’t help.
“I can’t even make a button stay on,” she says.
Other women of earlier times took the get-togethers quite seriously, an excerpt from the history of the Mabelvale club - the first in Arkansas - illustrates:
“In the early days of the organization, the new homemakers in that community wanted more information on homemaking skills that had to do with food preparation and food preservation. If the Home Demonstration agent did not attend the monthly meeting, the members were discouraged and became cross with her and got into their buggies and went home. They had no business meeting, they had no group discussions, they had no recreation, it was a meeting held only and expressly for a demonstration by the home demonstration agent.
“In Baxter County in the late 1920s,” Mendenhall adds, “Miss Mattie Melton drove her horse and buggy all over the hills, organizing Home Demonstration Clubs to teach new bread-making methods, sewing skills, modern homemaking, pressure canning and cold pack canning.”
During the Depression and World War II, Mendenhall writes, women also learned to make budgets tokeep their families afl oat.
Nowadays, Mendenhall says, Home Demonstration Clubs - now called Extension Homemakers Clubs - are still helping women around the house, but some of the focus has shifted.
“As women began to work outside the home, home demonstration projects became oriented toward building stronger families, nutrition, food safety, child care and family time and financial budgeting,” shewrites. “These groups also took a much wider interest in helping others outside their own community” by way of projects to assist women’s shelters, children’s hospitals and veterans.
“It is my opinion,” she adds, “that Arkansas women will continue to benefit from the programsand fellowship of being members of the Extension Homemakers’ organization as it continues to adjust to their changing needs. Just like the tiny tomato seed that started it all, the organization has flowered and produced some wonderful fruit for everyone to enjoy.”
Life, Pages 6 on 08/21/2013