Women, Energy, and the REA Circus

In summer 2020, I had the opportunity to serve as a project manager for a summer research project, led by Victoria Plutshack, Robert Fetter, and Jon Free, focused on whether we could learn lessons for contemporary electrification efforts from the Rural Electrification Administration in the 1930s. I worked with an amazing group of student researchers who produced a written report based on scanned materials from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in just six weeks.

After the project concluded, Victoria Plutshack and I continued working together to further explore the role of rural women in shaping the trajectory of electrification in the United States. In 2024, we published “Women Work Particularly Well in Community Organizations”: Cultivating Community and Consumerism in the Comanche County REA Women's Club, 1939–1940,” in Agricultural History.

By tracing the story of a single REA Women's Club in Texas, the article explores how REA administrators imagined that women would participate in its cooperative-led electrification efforts, the ways that women engaged with and resisted the REA's expected programming, and how technology adoption was ultimately mediated through women's priorities.