In home economics, Mamer “saw a longer, healthier, fuller life for women,” and Dreilinger wrote “No more headaches caused by squinting at books or mending under a sooty kerosene lamp."
Dreilinger had a soft spot for farm girls like Louisan Mamer, who made her way to the University of Illinois after a girlhood of unrelenting labor on a farm with no electricity.
During the Depression, Mamer went to work for the Rural Electrification.
Administration, trying to persuade farmers to get over their fears of fire or electrocution or the new, and sign up to join cooperatives that provided electricity.
This was home economics at its most passionate and endearing. Mamer “saw a longer, healthier, fuller life for women,” Dreilinger writes. “No more headaches caused by squinting at books or mending under a sooty kerosene lamp.
She saw laundry day freed of its shoulder-busting agony—lugging tubs of water from the pump up onto the coal stove, boiling dirt-encrusted clothes and linens, rubbing them by hand, wringing them through a hand-turned wringer, hanging them to dry, and ironing them with a seven-pound hunk of metal.”
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