Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and The "Development" of The American South

Practising Development at Home:
Race, Gender, and the

Development of the American
South
Mona Domosh
Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA;
mona.domosh@dartmouth.edu
Abstract: Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of
colonialism to critical histories of development, and based on archival research in Alabama,
Arkansas, and Mississippi, I argue in this paper that what we now call international
developmenta form of hegemony different from but related to colonialismneeds to be
understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of
governance that took shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze.
I do so by tracing some of the key elements of the US international development practices in
the postwar era to a different time and place: the American South, a region considered
undeveloped in the rst decades of the twentieth century, and the agricultural extension
practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm women, particularly African-American
women.
Keywords: American South, race, home, development, biopolitics
Our main aim should be to help the free people of the world, through their own efforts,
to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical
power to lighten their burdens (Harry Truman 1949, Public Papers of the President).
The infant death rate among negro children, especially babies, has been very great and is
yet greater than it should be. But great improvement is being brought about by the
women being taught how, without extra expense, to more properly feed their children.
And also how to make the most of materials they are able to secure in properly clothing
themselves and their children (R.S. Wilson 1924, Annual Report of the Extension Service for
the State of Mississippi).
In 1959 the Extension Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in co-

operation with the Agency for International Development published Homemaking
Around the World, a guide for how best to introduce the discipline of home econom-
ics to foreign countries. The purpose of the publication was to show ways in which
the basic principles of sound home economics may be applied in every home the
world over to make living more satisfying (USDA 1973:i). The book was reissued
through the early 1970s, only slightly revised, and was joined by a more detailed,
hands-on guide published in 1971 titled Homemaking Handbook for Village Workers
in Many Countries. The introduction to this 250 page book, titled Village women
Antipode Vol. 47 No. 4 2015 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 915941 doi: 10.1111/anti.12138
2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.
916 Antipode
help build nations, outlines the important role that women play in national
development, a role that is often overlooked (USDA 1971:11). They do so,
according to the guide, not only because they are involved directly in agricultural
production and exchange, but also because they serve as important tools of
modernization. A housewife wants better living for her family. She thinks of plenty
of good food, improved housing, and better health for her family, better care and
education for her children (USDA 1971:11).
That the US government targeted women and the home as sites of modernization
and development should come as no surprise to those who study the making of inter-
national development practices. Indeed, if one carefully reads the portion of the text of
President Trumans 1949 inaugural address dedicated to the discussion of the fourth
objective of US foreign policya discussion that most scholars agree was the orig-
inating point of US development practicesthe home and the domestic (as the site
for more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical
power to lighten their burdens) gure prominently as keys to American develop-
ment practices. Yet this important component of the ways in which the US gov-
ernment intervened in the lives of people living outside the US has been
relatively unremarked in the histories and historical geographies of development
(Escobar 1995; Mehta 1999; Peet and Hardwick 2009; Rist 2008; Unger 2010),
and thus the genealogy of these practices has been obscured from view. As the
second opening quote suggests, a focus on the home/domestic as a site of
improvement of others did not begin with Trumans directives, but instead
has a long and remarkable history and geography.
The goal of this paper is to begin to understand the genealogy of home work as
a key technology of biopower, both within the US (particularly the US South) and
outside of it (through practices that we now call international development). I do
so by focusing on what was called Home Demonstration Work (HDW)a funda-
mental component of the USDAs cooperative extension serviceas it was practised
in the US South in the rst three decades of the twentieth century. What I will show
here is that the extension service of the USDA, the co-sponsoring agency of Home-
making Around the World, had been focusing attention on women, the farm
family, and the farm house, as important agents of agricultural modernization
within the US since the early decades of the twentieth century, employing women
trained in home economics to dispense advice to farm women throughout much of
the country, but with a particular emphasis on the South. And much of that advice
and the technologies through which it was dispensed resonate clearly in post-
World War II development practices. In other words, and what I want to argue here,
there is an important and relatively unremarked link between early US interventions
into other countries under the guise of agricultural modernization and the USs
own domestic agricultural extension service, particularly in the South, and a
primary component of those interventions centered on the home and rural women.
I also document the ways in which African-American women and families became
particular targets of expert advice.
Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of
colonialism and domesticity to critical histories of development (Bergeron 2004;
Blunt 1999, 2005; McClintock 2013; Mills 1996; Robinson 2003; Sharp 2009;

Practising Development at Home: The American South 917
Staples 2006; Unger 2010), and based on archival research in Alabama, Arkansas,
and Mississippi,1 I suggest that international developmenta form of hegemony
different from but related to colonialismneeds to be understood not only as a
geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of governance that took
shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze. I do so by
tracing some of the key elements of US international development practices in
the postwar era to a different time and place: to the US, particularly the US South,
a region considered undeveloped in the rst decades of the twentieth century,
and the agricultural extension practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm
women. Thus I am able to interrogate two relatively unexamined elements that are
key to understanding the making of American international development: that
much of its early focus was on governing through biopolitical practices of the do-
mestic (food preparation, health, and sanitation), and that those practices were
based on the agricultural extension work of the USDA, particularly in the South.
For the most part, scholars have traced the roots of international development
within the European context to the advent of modern liberalism and the age of em-
pires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cowen and Shenton
1996; Dufeld 2007; Mehta 1999; Scott 1999). By so doing, they have opened
up productive engagements between development studies and postcolonial stud-
ies, and have provided a clear historical lineage that links biopolitical efforts to gov-
ern unruly colonized peoples with development policies and practices aimed at
creating more modern peoples and spaces (Robinson 2003; Sharp 2009;
Sidaway 2007; Watts 2003). But within the American context, those colonial ex-
periences have been difcult to trace, given the particular contours of the USs inter-
mittent territorial empire (but see Kirsch 2014; Kramer 2006). In general, scholars
tracing the historical geography of a US-styled development have focused primarily
on the postwar period, and the intersection of development with Cold War policies
and practices (Escobar 1995; Farish 2010; Peet and Hardwick 2009; Rahnema and
Bawtree 1997; Rist 2008). Although some recent scholarship is tracing US develop-
ment practices to the rst decades of the twentieth century, if not earlier, and to
events that occurred as much within the US as outside of it (Adas 2006; Birn
2006; Ekbladh 2002, 2010a, 2010b; Sneddon and Fox 2011), these studies do
not take up the issues central to much postcolonial work within the European con-
textthe role that the domestic and the space of the home played in the governing
of unruly peoples. Most work that has examined the social complexities and
oftentimes unintended consequences of governing peoples through expert
advice and practices in the name of development has focused on grand schemes
of techno-science (Adas 2006; Ekbladh 2010b; Scott 1998). By so doing, they have
ignored the everyday ways that expert advice was delivered to farm families and
particularly to women, thus preempting analyses of some of the most prevalent
and powerful biopolitical techniques of governance, those that targeted the site
of the home and the gure of the mother (Lovett 2009; Moore 2013).
In this paper I trace the genealogy of those practices and document the impor-
tance of considering the home and domestic as sites of biopower by examining
the USDAs home demonstration programs, the rst national-scale government
sanctioned program that focused on the home as a site of modernization, as

918 Antipode
practised in the US South. I focus on the South for two primary reasons: rst, as the
region of the US considered undeveloped, and in need of modernization, its
people and landscapes were subject to far more scrutiny and targeted as in need
of assistance to a much larger degree than other regions of the US (Birn 2006; Cash
1991; Jansson 2005, 2010; Scott 1970; Winders 2003, 2005; Woods 2000)2; and
second, the USDAs home demonstration activities in the South, like their farming
demonstrations, were racially segregated, thus providing interesting insights into
the ways that racializing processes intersected with gender in the biopolitical prac-
tices of the state (Collier 2009; Foucault 2007; Macey 2009; McKittrick 2011;
McKittrick and Woods 2007). The culture of segregation (Hale 1998) that domi-
nated the American South and the Jim Crow laws that underpinned that culture
made explicit the ways in which white supremacy was constantly performed and
reinforced (Hoelscher 2003; Litwack 2010; Williamson 1984; Wilson 2002; Woods
2000). And given the anxieties over racial mixing and the fear of contamination,
it was crucially important for the maintenance of white supremacy that domestic in-
terventions, particularly around issues of bodily health and sanitation, be segre-
gated (Bellingham and Mathis 1994; Hale 1998; Harris 2009; Smith 1995; Yancy
2008). USDAs interventions in the South, then, were both gendered and racially
segregated. To explore these issues further, I will rst discuss the origins and pur-
ported goals of home demonstration work, the ways in which those goals were
translated into practice for both white and African-American women, and what
those practices tell us about the political and economic stakes in the US South in
the rst decades of the twentieth century. I then uncover and interrogate how those
practices morphed into post-World War II and Cold War international development
practices. Throughout, I hope to bring to the fore the ways in which gendered and
racialized formations shaped biopolitical practices as state experts intervened in
the lives of people living in undeveloped regions (both within and outside the
US) through the lens of improved health, sanitation, and quality of life.
Home Demonstration Work

What was called the home demonstration section of the USDAs agricultural exten-
sion service was one of several such Progressive-era movements to reform and
modernize people through interventions that focused on home and home prac-
tices. The program drew on but differed from two other efforts in the US that
targeted the home and domesticity as sites of assimilation. The rst programthe
Bureau of Indian Affairs eld matronswas similar in its commitment to the
home and the domestic sphere as sites of intervention, but it relied primarily on
Victorian notions of proper femininity not Progressive-era reform politics. From
1890 to 1938, white, middle-class eld matrons were sent to live on Native reser-
vations primarily in the Great Plains in order to civilize Native-Americans through
introducing Anglo-American norms of femininity (Emmerich 1991). Native women
were meant to forego their former lives as economic participants in their communi-
ties in order to become Victorian housewives (Bannan 1984). Coincident with these
interventions in the American West were those sponsored principally by private or-
ganizations in the East and Midwest aimed at assimilating immigrants to American

cities through teaching women how to become modern housewives. The set-
tlement house movement that had begun in mid-nineteenth century London
with efforts to overcome socio-economic class divides through providing educa-
tion at neighborhood-based centers or houses was transformed most famously
by Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago to address the problems of assimilating
immigrants to American life. Addams and other reformers in early twentieth
century America focused on immigrant women and children, providing classes
on such skills as proper cooking, cleaning, and clothing for women, and
providing recreational and sport activities for children with the assumption that
these skills would help transform foreigners into white, middle-class Americans
(Gagen 2000, 2004).
The home demonstration work of the USDA shared the primary assumption of
these two programs: that a key to transforming groups of people thought not to
be part of middle class America was modernizing and making more scientic the
domestic and all that went with it: food preparation, sanitation and health, textile
and clothing production, and home management and maintenance. Like the settle-
ment house movement, it brought together Progressive era reformist impulses with
the emerging eld of home economics, and drew on and contributed to the emer-
gence of the suffrage movement. But because HDW was part of a national-scale ag-
ricultural extension program, and in 1923 was institutionally recognized with the
formation of the Bureau of Home Economics (BHE), a division of the USDA, the im-
pact and signicance of this program was of a much larger scale (Goldstein 2012).
Originating in the Southern states, women were rst employed on an ad hoc basis
by local and state-run agricultural extension ofces to oversee girls canning clubs
(Frysinger 1933; Scott 1970). The 1914 Smith-Lever act provided federal appropri-
ations for women trained in home economics to work alongside the county agents,
funding that was augmented by a combination of support from state land-grant
universities, local and regional authorities, and organizations. By 1933, the USDA
estimated that over a million farm women were active members of groups orga-
nized by home demonstration agents (Frysinger 1933).
Whereas the goals of the farm demonstration program focused on modernizing
and making more productive farm outputs through adopting scientically proven
methods of cultivation and using modern technology, the explicit and implicit
goals of the home demonstration program were far more complex. According to
historian Carolyn Goldstein (2012), the emergence and growth of the discipline
of home economics that informed HDW centered on its key role in guiding women
to be correct consumers. Proponents of home economics, she argues, were moti-
vated by a diverse and sometimes contradictory set of factors, but the movement
began to coalesce around the notion of creating the rational consumer:
In contrast to 19th century domestic scientists who emphasized efcient production

within the home, the rst generation of home economists shaped their movement to ad-
dress the growing importance of consumption for the nations homemakers at the turn
of the century. Home economics found support for this social and cultural agenda from
Progressive educational leaders and reformers looking to modernize agriculture and all
aspects of rural life (2012:3).

920 Antipode
And indeed the desire to promote the consumption of durable home goods by
rural farm women was considered an important component of HDW. As the senior
home economist for the extension service wrote in her summary of home demon-
stration work: To meet these needs ways must be found to do the tasks of the
home with a minimum of labor and time and to devise sources of income that will
enable the home maker to purchase those things that will make for efciency, com-
fort, and attractiveness (Frysinger 1933:2). Yet my research into the activities un-
dertaken by home demonstration agents in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas in
the rst three decades of the twentieth century reveals a different picture of what
was being taught to farm women in the South. Particularly in the early years of
HDW (19141920), and for African-American women continuing throughout the
entire timeframe of this study (up to 1929), women demonstration agents focused
their activities on helping women full their families basic needs: food production
and preservation, housing, health and child care.
White Home Demonstration Work

Like all other parts of the extension service operating in the Southern States, HDW
was segregated: each state employed white women as county home demonstra-
tion agents to attend to the needs of white farm women, and African-American
women to serve as demonstration agents for African-American farm women (Harris
2008; Seals 1991). In its early years before federal funding was allocated, HDW
consisted primarily of volunteer interventions by prominent women community
leaders who often formed clubs to share their knowledge of new food preservation
technologies, focusing on the canning of fruits and vegetables from their gardens.
With more funding after 1914, the work expanded into other forms of homemak-
ing. For example, in 1915 the annual report for HDW in the state of Alabama made
repeated reference to demonstrations of correct canning techniques for either fruits
or vegetables and the best ways to construct and use what was called a reless
cooker. Fireless cookers were similar to what we today would call a crock pot; a
pot of food was heated by a stove or re and then placed in some sort of metal
pot, covered tightly, that was surrounded with insulating materials such as sawdust
or soapstone and allowed to simmer for long periods of time. This was considered a
far more economical, time-saving (one could do other activities while cooking),
and potentially safer (given that many rural women did not have access to stoves)
way to cook. Some limited attention was given to health-related issues such as
home sanitation, and (although listed as labor saving devices made in home)
attention to y traps and house screens. A survey of annual reports on home dem-
onstration work reveals similar activities, primarily focused on home production
(see, for example, Daly 1919). As the organization became more robust through
the next decade or so, this initial focus on canning and cooking was augmented
with attention to food production and health. Mary Feminear, the state agent for
Alabama, divided the work done for the year 1919 into two categories: agriculture
and home economics. For the former category she writes, in the work in Agricul-
ture in the past year stress was placed upon gardening, poultry raising, and home
orchards (1920:40). She categorized the work of home economics as consisting of

ve main areas: study of foods and cookery, food preparation, health, clothing, and
home improvement and beautication. Her description of what was involved in
health activities was the longest, and she lists the health problems that were
studied and discussed: home sanitation, extermination of pests, water supply,
sanitary toilets, communicable diseases, typhoid and malaria, and milk and its rela-
tionship to disease (Feminear 1920:40).
Yet alongside these concerns was increasing attention to consumption. By the
late teens and early 1920s pamphlets were being produced by home demonstra-
tion agents in each state offering advice about how best to launder clothes (in a
washing-machine of course; see Figure 1), to cook and clean prociently (often
through using new technologies), and to buy and arrange furniture, carpets and
drapes (Hill 1920). And the annual reports sent to Washington, DC began to in-
clude lengthy discussions of home and community beautication projects, land-
scape gardening, and interior design (see, for example, Pegram 1923). In 1930,
Figure 1: Victoria Hill, Cleaning and Laundering Clothes, Household Art Series No. 1,
March 1920 (source: courtesy of Mississippi State University Libraries)

922 Antipode
Anne E. Jordan, a home demonstration specialist in Mississippi reported on the

results of her living-room campaign: The aim of this campaign is to help club
members and other women to have an attractive and comfortable room for the
family to enjoy every day and for guests. The cold dark parlor, wide drafty hall,
cluttered bedroom, or little used dining room may become a livable living room
with little expense and few changes (Jordan 1930). So the duties of white home
demonstration agents included teaching farm women how to become modern
citizen-consumers in addition to training them in the basic skills of home produc-
tion of food, clothing and housing. Their duties also included supervising their
African-American peers. Summarizing 30 years of home demonstration work in
Mississippi, May Cresswell explains:
Part of the duty of white home demonstration agents is the supervision and direction of
work among negro families by negro home demonstration agents. White leaders stand
ready to give encouragement and support to the negro home demonstration agents in
their efforts to lead negro families toward a better, more healthful, more wholesome
way of life (Cresswell 1944).
As I will explain in the next section, throughout the 1920s as white home
demonstration work became increasingly geared toward training farm women
to become modern consumers, African-American home demonstration work,
under the guidance of white demonstration agents, crystallized around inter-
ventions in regulating population and controlling disease, often voiced through
a discourse of morality and wholesomeness. In other words, African-American
home demonstrations became sites in which white women were meant to relay
to African-American women the markers of modernity and civilization that
were fundamental to the normalized role of white femininity: maintaining the
health and wholesomeness of their families.
Negro Home Demonstration Work

In 1926 Oscar Martin, a high-ranking employee of the USDAs cooperative exten-
sion service, outlined the status of home demonstration work among African-
Americans in his pamphlet titled A Decade of Negro Extension Work, 19141924. In
addition to enumerating the large number of women and girls engaged in garden-
ing, food preparation and preservation activities (as he notes, 12,355 women and
14,641 girls were enrolled in home gardening; 13,911 women and 13,826 girls, in
food preservation; and 14,731 women and 16,537 girls, in food preparation
(1926:24)), and other work such as home improvement and beautication, he
makes clear what he believes is the focus of the work: Perhaps no phases of home
demonstration work are more valuable among negroes than sanitation and health,
which were exemplied by more than 10,000 negro homes (1926:25). And in-
deed as historian Melissa Walker (1996, 2000) has argued in her detailed analysis
of home extension work in portions of the Appalachian South, the USDA in partner-
ship with state and local governments targeted African-American women and
homes as sites for interventions into health, sanitation, and the improvement of
living conditions. Robert Wilson, head of Alabamas cooperative extension

program, summarized the work of African-American women for the year 1924:
These women carry on largely the same projects as the white women, except that
sanitation and home improvement has been specially emphasized (Wilson 1924).
One of the primary methods developed by and for African-American extension
workthe movable schoolliterally brought expert knowledge to the site of the
home. Developed by Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute3 as an efcient
means of sharing expertise that could improve African-American farm life, the
school was composed of at rst a wagon and then later a truck that carried with
it tools and information for interventions into both farming and home life, and was
staffed with a farm demonstration agent, a home demonstration agent, and, by 1924,
a public health nurse (Campbell 1936; Simms and Coleman 1920). The staff would
pre-select a community in which to intervene, obtain permission from a farmer and
landlord (most African-American farmers were either tenants or sharecroppers), and
for 45 days involve the community by demonstrating better farming techniques
and, particularly, home improvements: building sturdier roofs, installing screens,
sanitary toilets, etc. According to Juanita Coleman, the Alabama state agent for
African-American women for the year 1920, the work dedicated to women varied
by season, and included instruction on gardening, food preparation, and preserva-
tion, including the use of the reless cooker (see Figure 2), and home nursing (Simms
and Coleman 1920:27). The one constant was attention to sanitation, health, and
children. Throughout the year, Coleman writes, home demonstration work stressed
sanitation, conservation of energy, food and time, and the care of children
Figure 2: Photograph of reless cooker demonstration, from Harry Simms and Juanita
Coleman (1920) Movable Schools of Agriculture Among Negroes in Alabama, Cir-
cular 39, March 1920, the Alabama Polytechnic Institute Extension Service
(source: courtesy of Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and
Archives)

924 Antipode
(Simms and Coleman 1920:27). At a 1927 conference on African-American extension

work, Rosa B. Jones, the Alabama state agent in charge of African-American women,
reported on what her experiences had taught her of how best to build and execute
a plan of work in a community (Proceedings of the Conference on Negro Extension
Work, State A&M College, Orangeburg, South Carolina, 2628 January 1927). The
one anecdote in this regard that she related is particularly telling:
To build a sanitary toilet without rst making the people feel the need of protecting their
health is a thankless task. One agent did it and the owner used it as a store room for his
cotton. Had the agent rst given the life history of the y and of the hookworms, the
results would have been different (Proceedings of the Conference on Negro Extension
Work, State A&M College, Orangeburg, South Carolina, 2628 January 1927).
African-American home demonstration work had become, in effect, a racialized

and gendered technology of biopolitical governance; a set of practices that moni-
tored and intervened in the conditions of improving life.4 A set of photographs
that accompanied the 1928 annual report for African-American women for the state
of Alabama (Hanna 1928) provide striking visual evidence of those interventions
(see Figures 37). In Figure 3 a home demonstrator agent shows local women
how best to can their fruits and vegetables, with Mrs Jamerson (Figure 4) clearly a star:
a woman who, as the original caption states, can Can. The before and after pho-
tographs of the Jarrett family house (Figures 5 and 6) document home improvements
that turn a seemingly slovenly (clapboards are peeling off the house; the outside
bench is broken; materials are scattered on the ground) and unhealthy (no screens
or glass on the windows; the front door is missing) farmhouse into a tidy, well built,
and healthy house, while Figure 7 documents a class in infant care, with presumably
Figure 3: Photograph from annual narrative report of L.C. Hanna, State Agent for Negro
Women in Alabama, year ending 31 December 1928. Original caption reads:
Can all you canthe motto of the Club Members of Montgomery County
(source: courtesy of Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and
Archives)

Mrs. Jamerson of Tyler Community, Dallas County. A Club Leader who can
Can. (source: courtesy of Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and
Archives)
a male doctor and female nurse using a house scale to track infant weight, a statistic
considered vital to infant health. May Cresswell was correct in her summary of
African-American home demonstration work: it indeed was centered on efforts to
lead negro families toward a better, more healthful, more wholesome way of life.
Dangerous to the Interest of the State

As I have shown, then, throughout the rst three decades of the twentieth century,
and particularly after 1914 when funds for home demonstration work were made
available by the federal government, the USDA embarked on programs to
modernize the South through home extension practices, and those practices
were racialized. HDW in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, for both white and
African-American women, began with three main overlapping areas of concern:
home production, particularly of food but also clothing (canning, poultry, gardens,
sewing), health and sanitation, particularly the health of children, and home main-
tenance, particularly kitchens but also general condition and repair of the home.
But throughout the 1920s differences emerged. White home economists re-
directed their attention to training women to become modern and better

926 Antipode
Women in Alabama, year ending 31 December 1928. Original caption:
BeforeHome of the Jarrett Family, Montgomery County (source: courtesy
of Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and Archives)
consumers, while African-American home extension became even more focused on

sanitation, health and the improvement of life. As many scholars have noted (Hale
1998; Smith 1995; Yancy 2008), central to the culture of segregation and the mainte-
nance of white supremacy was the belief that the African-American population of the
American South was inherently and bodily problematic and in need of improve-
ment.5 This had particular salience in terms of agricultural extension programs, since
the purported goal of these programsincreased agricultural productivitycould only
be attained through the maintenance of t bodies. Thus we can see why African-
American home demonstration practices began to focus on health and sanitation.
Robert S. Wilson, the head of extension for the State of Mississippi, provides
(indirectly) some clarication in this regard. In a letter summarizing African-American
Women in Alabama, year ending 31 December 1928. Original caption: Af-
terHome of the Jarrett Family, Montgomery County (source: courtesy of
Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and Archives)

Figure 7: Photograph from Annual narrative report of L.C. Hanna, State Agent for Negro
Better Babiesa goal of demonstration work (source: courtesy of Auburn
University Libraries Special Collections and Archives)
extension work that he wrote to Bradford Knapp, the head of extension for the South
based in Washington, DC, Wilson begins by stating what the goal of that work is:
The object of Demonstration Work among the negroes is not only to increase the yield-
ing capacity of their lands, and the earning capacity of the men, but there is a very great
need of improvement and reform in their home life; especially are changes needed in the
condition of their premises. Therefore we have not thought best to load our negro
agents down with regular demonstration farms, but rather to decrease, somewhat,
the number of these demonstration plats, and give these agents more time for general
work among their people (Wilson 1916).
Wilson is telling Knapp that he is in effect shifting the work of his African-American
male agents so that they can devote time and energy to the improvement and
reform of their home life, among their people instead of focusing solely on
agricultural modernization. With few if any women agents in the state (1915 is just
the beginning point for funded HDW), Wilson clearly felt strongly that African-
American home life was so problematic as to merit the re-assignment of work for
his male African-American agents. Near the end of the letter, and in a plea for
additional funding, Wilson makes clear what the problem is:
I wish to say that after observing results among negroes on a small scale, on which it has
been conducted in Mississippi, I am fully convinced that we would be justied in a much
larger expenditure for work among negroes. Mississippi is strictly an agricultural State,
and a large majority of her laborers are negroes. Constituting, as they do, a tremendous
asset to the State, or a tremendous burden, as the case may be, I think that it is impera-
tive that we increase their efciency in every possible way they must be impressed
with the importance of Sanitation and better care of their bodies; since it is a well known
fact that, as a race, they are deteriorating physically, due to the unsanitary condition in
their home and their immoral way of living (Wilson 1916).

928 Antipode
In other words, Wilson is concerned with the health of his laboring population, a
population whose health is directly tied to the wealth of the State. So the
problem is a labor problem, and the solution is to intervene in the home and
family. And since for Wilson poor health was in fact brought on by poor behavior,
those interventions were meant to improve both the physical conditions of home
life, and also the moral/cultural way of living. He concludes the report by asking
for an additional $10,000 dollars so that we may be able to employ a larger corps
of negro workers whose duty it will be not only to instruct negroes as to better
farming, but organize the young negroes into Corn and Pig Clubs, and to visit
the homes of negroes and assist them in bringing about better home conditions
(Wilson 1916). In other words, Wilsons proposal for increased funding rested on
his belief that teaching better farming techniques alone would not improve
agricultural productivity; immoral workers would need to change their ways of
living if they were to become a modern workforce.
Wilson reiterates these ideas in all of his reports throughout the 1910s and 1920s.
In 1917 he made a direct plea to Washington for increased funding since, as he
says, the negroes compose such a large percent of our population, and such a
large majority of our laboring population, it would be not only foolish, but danger-
ous to the interest of the state to undertake to keep them as ignorant and destitute
(Wilson 1917). This sentiment expresses what was fundamental to African-
American agricultural extension work in general and in particular African-American
home demonstration workthat it was aimed as much at bodies as at farms. And by
1917 the nature of those dangers to the interest of the state had become increas-
ingly clear. The effects of what we today call the Great Migrationthe movement
of African-American farmers from the US rural South to cities and the Northwere
evident in most of the rural areas of the South, and Wilson must have been well
aware of the declining rural labor force in his state (Kyriakoudes 1998, 2003; Trotter
1991; Wilkerson 2010). It is within the context of a rapidly declining labor force,
and the anxieties that this must have caused over cotton production and the wealth
of the state, that Wilson and others begin to target African-American home life.6
The entry of the US into World War I in 1917 and the ensuing xenophobia caused a
dramatic decrease in foreign immigration, further spurring African-Americans to
move north for industrial jobs.
In his reports, Wilson does his best to reassure Washington that his African-
American extension agents are working hard to maintain and retain the states
laboring population:
But it is not only in their work on the farm and with livestock that these negro agents are
wielding a wholesome inuence on the members of their race. They go into their homes,
associate with them closely as the white agents cannot do and not only make sugges-
tions but also assist them in bringing about more sanitary conditions at little expense.
They also attempt constantly to impress upon these negroes the importance of clean
living both physically and morally (Wilson 1924).
He also suggests why teaching rural women how to improve their homes and
families by learning how to prepare more nutritious food and provide better
clothing is particularly important:

The infant death rate among negro children, especially babies, has been very great and is
yet greater than it should be. But great improvement is being brought about by the
women being taught how, without extra expense, to more properly feed their children.
And also how to make the most of materials they are able to secure in properly clothing
themselves and their children (Wilson 1924:64).
Although he never addressed the issue of a labor shortage directly, Wilson is using
the fear that that shortage generated to legitimize his states African-American home
extension work: improved living conditions, he is saying, would help alleviate this
shortage directly by lowering mortality rates, and indirectly by creating better condi-
tions and thus providing fewer reasons for African-Americans to leave the South.
Ofcials at the USDA ofces in Washington were well aware of the labor situation
in the rural South. W.B. Mercier, the assistant chief of the ofce of extension work in
the South, dedicated a section of his pamphlet Extension Work Among Negroes 1920
to what he titled Leaving the Farms, beginning with: A very serious problem
during recent years in many farming sections had been the migration of Negro
farmers to the towns and cities. This problem has affected the whites as well as
Negroes to a considerable degree (1920:5). And, like Wilson, Washington ofcials
credited extension work with improving living conditions and thus retaining
African-Americans as the Souths labor force. Oscar Martin, a high-ranking USDA
ofcial, pointed to land ownership and home improvement as keys to maintaining
that labor (see Figure 8), writing:
Home ownership is the largest factor in the solution of the so-called negro problem. Co-
operative extension work, especially since the comprehensive organization of negro ex-
tension agents, has been one of the greatest inuences in encouraging and helping
negroes to become landowners and to succeed with land investments. In most parts
of the Cotton Belt it has been possible during the last few years for farmers to make a
good living and to make a prot besides. The migration to the North has perceptibly
slackened (1926:1).
The concerns about African-American migration and the potential crisis of a scar-
city of labor were shared by many members of the African-American elites who be-
lieved in the discourse of racial uplift and who worked assiduously to create the
new southern negro (Moore 2003). The leaders of the Tuskegee Institute were
so concerned about northern migration that they devoted most of their 1917 annual
conference to that theme. Newspaper clippings documenting the conference contain
snippets of speeches and summaries of the primary addresses. The Buffalo, NY
Couriers opening paragraph provides a good overview of the conference themes:
Declarations were adopted the most impressive of which constituted an appeal to both
blacks and whites to check the emigration of the former to the north. To the south the
negroes are acclimated, and their progress in land ownership and development has
been accomplished. White labor being short in the north, they are tendered better
wages than they have heretofore known, but the conference warns them that these con-
ditions are transitory, whereas the south is believed to be entering upon its greatest era
of development, and offers the colored people best and permanent opportunities
(Newspaper Clippings Pertaining to Annual Negro Conference in Regard to Migration
North 1917).

930 Antipode
Figure 8: Cover of O.B. Martins A Decade of Negro Extension Work, 19141924 (USDA,
Miscellaneous Circular No. 72, Washington, DC, October 1926)
Thomas M. Campbell, head of African-American extension for seven southern states

based at Tuskegee, chided white newspapers in the South for not providing any
positive publicity about what he calls the new southern negro: if the negro
is needed to help develop this section it is suggested that in their own way the
daily white papers of the South carry on a system of publicity, setting forth some
of the many good traits and virtues of the New Southern Negro as a racial group
(Campbell 1923b). Most of the Southern states, he argues, are putting on
advertising campaigns to attract white farmers from other sections into the South.
Similar methods might be employed to help keep Negro labor here which the
South already has (Campbell 1923b). Summarizing her work for the year 1923,
African-American home demonstration agent for Tunica County, Mississippi, Julia
Pegram addresses directly the issue of population loss:

Some contagion for the betterment of the Negro has undoubtedly swept thru Tunica
County, for there has been more improvement in the living conditions than in any other
phase of work touched by the efforts of the Extension Department. Though the exodus
has struck this county the [improvement] from the ills seems to have in a measure re-
placed the shortage (Pegram 1923).
In other words, she suggests that an improved population provides almost as

much labor as more population.
George Washington Carver, the head of the Department of Agriculture at Tuskegee,
provided a slightly different perspective on what was at stake in the potential loss of
African-American labor. Given his research into food and nutrition, he directed his
attention to the health of African-American farm laborers and particularly to diseases
caused by malnutrition. As he wrote in 1917, So, therefore, let us stop deceiving
ourselves further, and strike at the very root of the trouble, which is poor food
(Carver 1917). He then outlines succinctly the costs of ill health:
Careful statistics show that there are 112,000 Negro workers sick all the time, at an an-
nual loss in earnings of $45,000,000; and that there are 450,000 seriously ill all the time,
which means 18 days a year for each Negro inhabitant, at an annual cost of
$75,000,000. It is also shown further that much of the sickness and 45 percent of all
the deaths among Negroes are preventable (Carver 1917).
Thomas M. Campbell echoed Carvers sentiments. He opens the section on home

demonstration work in his 1923 annual report by arguing that the most important
improvement during the year was the addition of a public health nurse who trav-
eled extensively throughout the South teaching practical sanitation among the
people (Campbell 1923a). This was because, as he said, one cannot work among
the rural Negroes without being conscious of the fact that possibly the most
neglected phase of public service among them is sanitation and health instruction
(Campbell 1923a). And the costs of such neglect could be catastrophic: It is esti-
mated by the Negro Year Book that the annual economic loss to the South from
sickness and death among Negroes is probably $300,000,000 and that it would
pay the South to spend alone, $100,000,000 to improve Negro health (Campbell
1923a). So whether one blamed emigration, or a poor diet, or unsanitary living
conditions, or immorality, or the degeneracy of a race, the literal costs to the state
of the loss of African-American labor were considerable. For elite Southerners, white
and African-American, that loss constituted a potential crisis, a problem that
required state intervention. For white Southerners like Wilson, the dangers to the
state involved not only the loss of productive capacity but also the fear of an
unhealthy and possibly degenerate race infecting the body politic. For African-
Americans like Campbell, the fear was not only a loss of productive capacity but
also the potential loss of an entire community, either through emigration or death.
Dangers to the Empire

The impacts of Tuskegee and African-American extension work in general were not
limited to the national scale. Andrew Zimmermans (2010) compelling book
Alabama in Africa documents the ways in which Tuskegee personnel and methods

932 Antipode
of instruction were involved in the German exploitation of the colony of Togo in the
early 1900s. And throughout the rst three decades of the twentieth century,
African-American demonstration work undertaken by the USDA in the South was
an object of curiosity, and an object lesson, for many international visitors. The ar-
chives at Tuskegee are lled with anecdotes about international visits, particularly
missionaries and agricultural leaders from African countries. In his 1936 book sum-
marizing the work of the movable school, Campbell mentions numerous interna-
tional visitors: the idea of carrying education to the very doors of rural people
seems to have so completely met the needs of farm folks that visitors from Africa,
India, China, Japan, Poland, and Russia and many other countries have
journeyed to Alabama to make a rst hand study of it (Campbell 1936:145).
What he sees as his most striking foreign comment came from a missionary from
South Rhodesia, who, after spending several weeks at Tuskegee, writes back that
he was inspired by the consecrated efforts of the demonstrators, the trained
nurse, the home economics teachers and the extension workers, giving such sim-
ple, practical, and obviously useful instruction (Campbell 1936:146). Campbell
then ends the anecdote by mentioning that three years later the government of
South Rhodesia started the work. They now have demonstrators at work in many
of the native reserves, and many more workers in training (Campbell 1936:146).
These rather ad hoc and voluntary replications of African-American home
demonstration outside the US became institutionalized in the postwar period. In
September 1944, the USDA convened a conference in Washington, DC titled
The Contribution of Extension Methods and Techniques Toward the Rehabilita-
tion of War-Torn Countries. Although very much overshadowed in history by
the conference that preceded it by 2 monthsthe United Nations Monetary and
Financial Conference, otherwise known as the Bretton Woods Conference, held
in New Hampshire in July of 1944I suggest that the importance of the USDA
conference needs to be reconsidered in the historical mapping of an emerging
American empire. Just as Bretton Woods is considered a key site in the making of
the new international monetary order controlled by the US, the USDA-sponsored
conference was a key site in the making of an American-styled development. The
opening address delivered by M.L. Wilson, the head of the Extension Service,
outlined the goals of the conference. The primary goal, he states, was to assess
how the United States could assist other countries by sharing its agricultural
expertise given that insuring ample food for its people will be the number-one
problem of most nations after this war is over (Wilson 1945:2).
The conference attendees were primarily American or American-trained agricul-
tural scientists, and they provided committee reports on the agricultural situation
of eight regions of the world, as well as separate consultant reports on various
issues in regard to extension efforts throughout the world. One of those consultants,
Louise Stanley, who had been the head of USDAs Bureau of Home Economics since
1923 and is listed at the conference as a special assistant to the research administrator
at the USDA, wrote a short report outlining home demonstration work in the US and
how it might be useful elsewhere. Based on the American precedent, the work
should be organized under the leadership of a local homemaker who knows the
needs and resources of the local community. The primary goals of such work should

include the promotion of better nutrition and healthful, satisfying conditions of living
and so serve as an important factor in decreasing the high death rate of all groups,
and to train local leaders to take over the important job of improving the conditions
of home living and gear this group into an over-all national effort to build a level of
living for the country based on its tradition and culture (Stanley 1945:221). In other
words, the goals were to educate local peoples about how to create better living
conditions measured particularly in regard to health and nutritious food, and to train
groups of people to take on these educational goals locally and nationally. And the
American precedent was African-American home demonstration work.
Yet if the overriding concern in the South was a scarcity of population, a fear that
agricultural productivity would decrease, the committee report on the Middle East
begins to suggest a different fear about the balance between population and
resources; a fear of over-population. The committee reported that:
coupled with the limited area under cultivation is the tendency toward a high natural
increase among the people of the region. Infant mortality is high, but the birth rate is still
higher. With the advent of modern medical care and sanitation into the rural areas of the
Middle East one can reasonably expect an acceleration of population growth. Here we
have the elements of a serious problem, that of the balance between land and people,
which should not be overlooked in any long-range project of rural extension or rehabilita-
tion (USDA Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations 1945:4142).
In this way, US development discourse paralleled what historian Joseph Hodge

argues is the case for shifting development discourses within the UK: While earlier
colonial development debates revolved around the central problem of population
scarcity amidst an apparent bounty of untapped wealth, in the late 1930s and
1940s the discourse was transgured, and experts suddenly began warning of
the dangers of surplus population and the loss of productive resources
(2002:23). Dangers to the empire were still about the potential loss of productive
capacity, but the causes of that loss were being rewritten. Interventions that were
meant to control problem populations were still directed at health and sanitation,
at women and the domestic, and the home work retained its prominent position.
Five years later, in 1949, a follow-up conference was held with similar goals, and
the opening address specically spoke of Trumans Point 4 Program:
In recent months much discussion has been centered on the Presidents Point 4 Program
to extend technology and the benets of science for improvement of underdeveloped
areas of the world. This conference, therefore, would seem to be an early effort toward
the implementation of the Presidents hope for other countries to receive the benets of
technology (Minor 1951:1).
And that implementation was noticeable in the conference report as the

discourse of agricultural extension morphed into the discourse of development.
The regions under discussion, for example, expanded from the 1944 conference
to include Latin America and Africa, and the problems that were discussed were
not voiced in the language of agricultural extension per se (farm demonstration
and home demonstration) but rather ranged more broadly and uidly. The
committee on Latin America, for example, divided its discussion into three main

934 Antipode
areasfarm, home, and community problemswith the latter two comprising the
bulk of discussion (15 of the 20 main points). The committee on the Middle East
likewise identied 10 major problems, of which only two pertained directly to agri-
culture (problem of monoculture and the application of modern techniques to
agricultural production). The other eight problems included things like population
growth (equally fundamental and important is the problem of population growth
in relation to cultivated areas [USDA Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign
Agricultural Relations 1951:21]), land distribution, tribal settlement, and health
and sanitation problems. The committee on Africa reported the trouble is that
without better health, better food, better education, and new and socially accept-
able incentives, natural resources cannot be exploited (USDA Extension Service
and Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations 1951:88). In other words, throughout
the conference report the focus was on how to intervene within the home and com-
munity life in order to provide the best contexts for resources to be exploited.
And, as in the USDAs work in the US South, much of that work was to be done
by women in the home/village.
Conclusion/Homemaking Around the World

Ten years later in 1959 the USDAs extension service published Homemaking Around
the World, an introduction for women being trained as home economists who were
going to work in the USDAs foreign extension service. The opening chapter tells
these women that their jobs will require attention not only to the details of domes-
tic work but to the deeper principles of home economics: basic principles of bring-
ing about any change in the living habits of a people and in their thinking; basic
principles in human relations that govern a way of living; basic principles in the per-
formance of small skills that may lead to larger practices (USDA 1973:3). The sub-
ject of each chapter and the order of their appearance indicate where those
interventions would occur: child care, food and nutrition, management of the
home, health and sanitation, home gardens, poultry, rabbit and goat production,
housing and home improvement, and care and construction of clothing. As I said
in the opening of this paper, this book was reprinted throughout the 1960s and
1970s, when the new US Agency for International Development added its sponsor-
ship and name to the title page. It was also joined in 1971 by a more detailed
hands-on guide, Homemaking Handbook, meant, as the second half of its title indi-
cated, for women village workers in many countries. The opening chapter of
the guide, titled Village women help build nations, outlines the rationale for
why US experts in home economics are vital to development. The new housewife,
the authors say, wants better living for her family she thinks of plenty of good
food, improved housing, and better health for her family, better care and education
for her children (USDA 1971:11). With better living, they go on to say, nations are
strengthened: governments are beginning to recognize that helping the family
and the home helps the nation. They recognize that good homes, happy families,
and educated children are basic to a great nation (USDA 1971:11). This far more
detailed and lengthy guide follows a similar chapter outline as the 1959 book with
some small changes: food and nutrition, growing food at home, food storage and

preservation, child care, health, housing and home improvement, housekeeping

and home management, and clothing. It also includes a lengthy section on teach-
ing methods, beginning with the importance of nding and training local leaders
to assist with the work.
In their discussion of the signicance of training people to become leaders, the
guide offers a telling anecdote of how one woman became a garden leader in
the village:
Let us take Mrs. Hudan, a member of the homemakers club in the village. She grows
beautiful tomatoes, but no one else in the village has much success with tomatoes.
The other women in the club want to learn how Mrs. Hudan grows tomatoes. She
was asked to tell the club what she did. She was timid at rst. The village worker helped
Mrs. Hudan demonstrate each step. The village worker taught Mrs. Hudan more about
tomatoes and helped her prepare for each demonstration. Mrs. Hudan has experience,
knowledge, and ability in growing tomatoes. As the village worker trained and helped
her, she gained more condence in herself. Soon she was trying out new vegetables
and talking to the club about the need for good gardens. Mrs. Hudan developed into
a garden leader in the village (USDA 1971:194).
Like Mrs Jamerson (in Figure 4), Mrs Hudan had become a model homemaker
and local leader. Many of the descriptions of village work in foreign countries
are similarand at times identicalto African-American home demonstration work
in the American South; a similarity not only in terms of subject matter, but also in
terms of pedagogical practices such as identifying local leaders, forming canning
clubs, and using those leaders to demonstrate better techniques of health and
home management. A comparison of two images from this 1971 book with two from
the 1928 annual report of African-American womens work in Alabama provide stun-
ning visual examples of this similarity. Figure 9, taken from the section on the reless
cooker and depicting, as the caption says, a village worker in Fiji demonstrating how
to use a hot box, bears a strong resemblance to Figure 2. And somewhat uncannily,
Figure 10 is almost identical to Figure 7: local women posing around the authority
gure (either a local leader or a nurse or perhaps in the case of the Alabama photo
a doctor) who is demonstrating how to correctly weigh infants. Note the similarity
not only in the subject matter and pose, but also in the technologies assembleda
table brought outside covered in a white cloth, an infant being weighed using a tabletop,
portable scale, and an authority gure with pencil in hand about to record the weight.
These striking visual comparisons provide strong examples of the ways in which
African-American home demonstration work in the US South served as an important
site in the genealogy of American development practices. Although there are clear dif-
ferences between the particular historical context of African-Americans living in the
Jim Crow South and foreign rural populations living outside the US, similarities in
biopolitical practices of governance are difcult to ignore. Concerned with unruly
and unsettling foreign populations who were seemingly in need of improvement, the
USDA in conjunction with the State Department turned to practices of governance that,
if not totally successful (as Tania Murray Li (2007) reminds us, improvement never
ends, it is always deferred) were at least familiar. Confronting the problem of how to
establish some sort of control over foreign peoples of different races who were

936 Antipode
Figure 9: Fireless cooker demonstration in Fiji (source: Extension Service of the USDA in
cooperation with the Agency for International Development, 1971, Homemaking
Handbook for Village Workers in Many Countries)
Figure 10: Weighing infants demonstration in India (source: Extension Service of the
USDA in cooperation with the Agency for International Development, 1971,
Homemaking Handbook for Village Workers in Many Countries)

potential threats to American geopolitical rule, and hoping to shape these populations
into better producers and consumers, the US government drew on its experiences
with HDW in the American South in order to conduct home work overseas. I realize
that the genealogy of home work that I have presented here is inherently partial
and limited, but I hope that it will prompt other investigations in geography and else-
where into the complex histories and geographies of the technologies of biopolitical
governance practiced by the US both within its own borders and outside of them.
Acknowledgements
Im very grateful to the archivists and librarians who assisted me at the following archives:
National Archives, College Park, Maryland; Auburn University Archives, Auburn, Alabama;
Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama; Mississippi State University Archives,
Starkville, Mississippi; and the University of Arkansas Archives, Fayetteville, Arkansas. The ideas
in this paper were formulated from many conversations with colleagues, particularly those in
the hallways of Dartmouth Geography: Kevin Grove, Paul Jackson, Susanne Freidberg, and Chris
Sneddon. I have presented various versions of this paper at conferences and seminar series.
Many thanks to the generous audience members who listened and provided very useful
feedback. I was fortunate to have four simpatico reviewers and an editor who helped me stay
on course; thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to Katherine McKittrick. The research for this
article was supported by the National Science Foundation (#1262774). Any opinions, ndings,
and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do
not necessarily reect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Endnotes
1
I conducted archival research at the following institutions: Auburn University Archives,
Tuskegee University Archives, Mississippi States University Archives, University of Arkansas
Archives, and the National Archives located in College Park, MD.
2
For example, in 1914 there were 843 white agricultural agents in the US, of which 640
were in the Southern States. All of the 348 home demonstration agents were located in
the South (USDA Extension Service, November 1924).
3
The Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, was founded as an independent teaching
college for African-Americans in 1881. Under the Presidency of Dr Booker T. Washington,
from 1881 to 1915, the Institute became a prominent institution for the education of
African-Americans in the South, and became part of the Federal land-grant system in 1899
(see Mayberry 1989, 1991).
4
African-American home demonstration work was also a form of empowerment for many
African-American women. The history of African-American womens involvement in im-
proving health in the rural South is well documented in Susan Smiths (1995) book, Sick
and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Womens Health Activism in America, 18901950.
5
For a brilliant discussion of the limitations of those improvements in terms of unequal
medical treatment for African-Americans, and the implications of those limitations in terms
of Foucaults biopolitical concerns, see Bellingham and Mathis (1994).
6
Recent scholarship has made clear the importance of cotton production to American capitalism
and the making of an American economic empire (see Baptist 2014; Johnson 2013).
References
Adas M (2006) Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and Americas Civilizing Mission.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Bannan H (1984) True Womanhood on the Reservation: Field Matrons in the United States
Indian Service. SIROW Working Paper No. 19, University of Arizona

938 Antipode
Baptist E (2014) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
New York: Basic Books
Bellingham B and Mathis M P (1994) Race, citizenship, and the bio-politics of the maternalist
welfare state: Traditional midwifery in the American South under the Sheppard-Towner
Act, 1921-1929. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society 1(2):157189
Bergeron S (2004) Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Birn A-E (2006) Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary
Mexico. Rochester: University of Rochester Press
Blunt A (1999) Imperial geographies of home: British domesticity in India, 18861925. Trans-
actions of the Institute of British Geographers 24(4):421440
Blunt A (2005) Cultural geography: Cultural geographies of home. Progress in Human
Geography 29(4):505515
Campbell T (1923a) Succinct Report on Negro Extension Work for the Year Ending 31
December 1923. Available in the Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama
Campbell T (1923b) Recognition of Negro Progress in the South (reprinted from The
Montgomery Advertiser). Available in the Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama
Campbell T (1936) The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer. Tuskegee: Tuskegee
Institute Press
Carver G W (1917) Newspaper clippings from The Negro Farmer, 10 February. Available in
the Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama
Cash W J (1991) Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books
Collier S J (2009) Topologies of power: Foucaults analysis of political government beyond
governmentality. Theory, Culture, and Society 26(6):78108
Cowen M and Shenton R W (1996) Doctrines of Development. New York: Taylor and Francis
Cresswell M (1944) Home Demonstration Work in Mississippi, 19141944. Available in the
Mississippi State University Archives, Starkville, Mississippi
Daly L A (1919) Annual Report of Home Demonstration Work for Women and Girls,
Calendar Year 1919. Available in the Auburn University Archives, Auburn, Alabama
Dufeld M (2007) Development, Security, and Unending War. Cambridge: Polity
Ekbladh D (2002) Mr. TVA: Grass-roots development, David Lillienthal, and the rise and fall
of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Diplomatic History 26:335374
Ekbladh D (2010a) Meeting the challenge from totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Author-
ity as a global model for liberal development, 1933-1945. International History Review
32:4767
Ekbladh D (2010b) The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an
American World Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Emmerich L (1991) Right in the midst of my own people: Native American women and the
Field Matron Program. American Indian Quarterly 15:201216
Escobar A (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press
Farish M (2010) The Contours of Americas Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Feminear M (1920) Report of Home Demonstration Work in Alabama in 1919 (Circular No. 41).
Auburn: Extension Service of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute
Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 19771978.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Frysinger G (1933) Home Demonstration Work. Washington, DC: United States Department of
Agriculture
Gagen E A (2000) An example to us all: Child development and identity construction in early
20th century playgrounds. Environment and Planning A 32(4):599616
Gagen E A (2004) Making America esh: Physicality and nationhood in early 20th century
physical education reform. Cultural Geographies 11(4):417442
Goldstein C (2012) Creating Consumers: Home Economics in 20th Century America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press
Hale G E (1998) Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 18901940. New York:
Knopf Doubleday

Hanna L C (1928) Annual Report for Negro Women, State of Alabama, Year Ending 31
December 1928. Available in the Auburn University Archives, Auburn, Alabama
Harris C (2008) The Extension Service is not an integration agency: The idea of race in the
Cooperative Extension Service. Agricultural History 82:193219
Harris C (2009) Well I just generally bes the president of everything: Rural black womens
empowerment through South Carolina home demonstration activities. Black Women,
Gender, and Families 3(1):91112
Hill V (1920) Cleaning and Laundering Clothes, Household Art Series No. 1, March. Avail-
able in the Mississippi State University Archives, Starkville, Mississippi
Hodge J (2002) Science, development, and empire: The Colonial Council on Agriculture and
Animal Health, 1929-1943. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 30(1):126
Hoelscher S (2003) Making place, making race: Performances of whiteness in the Jim Crow
South. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(3):657686
Jansson D (2005) A geography of racism: Internal orientalism and the construction of
American national identity in the lm Mississippi Burning. National Identities 7(3):265285
Jansson D (2010) Racialization and Southern identities of resistance: A psychogeography of
internal orientalism in the U.S. Annals of the Association of American Geographers
100:202221
Johnson W (2013) River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press
Jordan A (1930) Living Room Campaign. Available in the Mississippi State University
Archives, Starkville, Mississippi
Kirsch S (2014) Insular territories: U.S. colonial science, geopolitics, and the (re)mapping of
the Philippines. The Geographical Journal doi: 10.1111/geoj.12072
Kramer P A (2006) The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Kyriakoudes L M (1998) Southern black ruralurban migration in the era of the Great Migra-
tion: Nashville and middle Tennessee, 18901930. Agricultural History 72(2):341351
Kyriakoudes L M (2003) The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender, and Migration in
Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 18901930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Li T M (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics.
Durham: Duke University Press
Litwack L F (2010) Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Knopf
Doubleday
Lovett L L (2009) Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the
United States, 18901938. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Macey D (2009) Rethinking biopolitics, race, and power in the wake of Foucault. Theory,
Culture, and Society 26(6):186205
Martin O B (1926) A Decade of Negro Extension Work, 19141924. Washington, DC:
United States Department of Agriculture
Mayberry B D (1989) The Role of Tuskegee University in the Origin, Growth, and Develop-
ment of the Negro Cooperative Extension Service, 18811999. Tuskegee: Tuskegee
University Press
Mayberry B D (1991) A Century of Agriculture in the 1890 Land-Grant Institutions and Tuskegee
University, 18901999. New York: Vantage Press
McClintock A (2013) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.
New York: Routledge
McKittrick K (2011) On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social and Cultural
Geography 12(8):947963
McKittrick K and Woods C (eds) (2007) Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto:
Between the Lines
Mehta U S (1999) Liberalism and Empire: A Study in 19th Century British Liberal Thought.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Mercier W B (1920) Extension Work Among Negroes 1920. Washington, DC: United States
Department of Agriculture
Mills S (1996) Gender and colonial space. Gender, Place, and Culture 3(2):125148

940 Antipode
Minor W A (1951) Address of welcome. In USDA Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign
Agricultural Relations (ed) Conference Report on Extension Experiences Around the World,
Washington, D.C., 1620 May 1949 (p 1). Washington, DC: USDA Extension Service and
Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations
Moore F (2013) Governmentality and the maternal body: Infant mortality in early 20th
century Lancashire. Journal of Historical Geography 39:5468
Moore J M (2003) Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift.
Lanham: Rowman and Littleeld
Newspaper Clippings Pertaining to Annual Negro Conference in Regard to Migration North
(1917) Available in the Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama
Peet R and Hardwick E (2009) Theories of Development: Contentions, Arguments, Alternatives.
New York: Guilford Press
Pegram J (1923) Annual Report of County Extension Workers, Tunica County, Mississippi.
Available in the National Archives, College Park, Maryland
Proceedings of the Conference on Negro Extension Work, State A&M College, Orangeburg,
South Carolina, 2628 January (1927) Available in the Auburn University Archives,
Auburn, Alabama
Rahnema M and Bawtree V (eds) (1997) The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books
Rist G (2008) The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. London: Zed
Books
Robinson J (2003) Beyond the West. In K Anderson, M Domosh, S Pile and N Thrift (eds)
Handbook of Cultural Geography (pp 399404). London: Sage
Scott D (1999) Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton
University Press
Scott J C (1998) Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press
Scott R V (1970) The Reluctant Farmer: The Rise of Agricultural Extension to 1914. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press
Seals R G (1991) The formation of agricultural and rural development policy with emphasis
on African-Americans II: The Hatch George and Smith-Lever Acts. Agricultural History
65:1234
Sharp J P (2009) Geographies of Postcolonialism. London: Sage
Sidaway J D (2007) Spaces of postdevelopment. Progress in Human Geography 31(3):
345361
Simms H and Coleman J (1920) Movable Schools of Agriculture Among Negroes in Alabama.
Auburn: Alabama Polytechnic Institute Extension Service
Smith S L (1995) Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Womens Health Activism in
America, 18901950. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Sneddon C and Fox C (2011) The Cold War, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the
technopolitics of river basin development, 19501970. Political Geography 30:
450460
Stanley L (1945) Suggested approaches to education for improvement of homemaking
practices. In USDA Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations (ed)
Conference Report on the Contribution of Extension Methods and Techniques Toward the Reha-
bilitation of War-Torn Countries, Washington, D.C., 1922 September 1944 (pp 220221).
Washington, DC: USDA Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations
Staples A L S (2006) The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Orga-
nization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 19451965. Kent: Kent State
University Press
Trotter J W (ed) (1991) The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race,
Class, and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Unger C R (2010) Histories of development and modernization: Findings, reections, future
research. H/SOZ/KULT 9 December. http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/
2010-12-001 (last accessed 4 December 2014)
USDA (1971) Homemaking Handbook for Village Workers in Many Countries. Washington, DC:
Extension Service of the USDA in cooperation with the Agency for International
Development

USDA (1973) Homemaking Around the World (2nd edn). Washington, DC: Extension Service of
the USDA in cooperation with the Agency for International Development
USDA Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations (ed) (1945) Conference
Report on the Contribution of Extension Methods and Techniques Toward the Rehabilitation of
War-Torn Countries, Washington, D.C., 1922 September 1944. Washington, DC: USDA
Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations
USDA Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations (ed) (1951) Conference
Report on Extension Experiences Around the World, Washington, D.C., 1620 May 1949.
Washington, DC: USDA Extension Service and Ofce of Foreign Agricultural Relations
Walker M (1996) Home extension work among African American farm women in east
Tennessee, 19201939. Agricultural History 70(3):487502
Walker M (2000) All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 19191941.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Watts M (2003) Alternative modern: Development as cultural geography. In K Anderson, M
Domosh, S Pile and N Thrift (eds) Handbook of Cultural Geography (pp 433454). London:
Sage
Wilkerson I (2010) The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration.
New York: Random House
Williamson J (1984) The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since
Emancipation. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wilson B M (2002) Critically understanding race-connected practices: A reading of W. E. B.
Du Bois and Richard Wright. The Professional Geographer 54(1):3141
Wilson M L (1945) Objectives of the conference. In USDA Extension Service and Ofce of
Foreign Agricultural Relations (ed) Conference Report on the Contribution of Extension
Methods and Techniques Toward the Rehabilitation of War-Torn Countries, Washington, D.C.,
1922 September 1944 (pp 17). Washington, DC: USDA Extension Service and Ofce of
Foreign Agricultural Relations
Wilson R S (1916) Letter Reporting on Work Among the Negroes in Mississippi for the Year
1915, 12 February. Available in the National Archives, College Park, Maryland
Wilson R S (1917) Letter Reporting on Work Among the Negroes for the Year 1916, 19
February. Available in the National Archives, College Park, Maryland
Wilson R S (1924) Annual Report of the Extension Service for the State of Mississippi.
Available in the National Archives, College Park, Maryland
Winders J (2003) White in all the wrong places: White rural poverty in the postbellum U.S.
South. Cultural Geographies 10(1):4563
Winders J (2005) Imperfectly imperial: Northern travel writers in the postbellum U.S. South,
18651880. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95(2):391410
Woods C (2000) Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta.
New York: Verso
Yancy G (2008) Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Signicance of Race. Lanham:
Rowman and Littleeld
Zimmerman A (2010) Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the
Globalization of the New South. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and The "Development" of The American South

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and The "Development" of The American South

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Practising Development at Home:

Race, Gender, and the

Keywords: American South, race, home, development, biopolitics

In 1959 the Extension Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in co-

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Home Demonstration Work

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

In contrast to 19th century domestic scientists who emphasized efcient production

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

White Home Demonstration Work

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Anne E. Jordan, a home demonstration specialist in Mississippi reported on the

Negro Home Demonstration Work

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

(Simms and Coleman 1920:27). At a 1927 conference on African-American extension

African-American home demonstration work had become, in effect, a racialized

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Dangerous to the Interest of the State

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

consumers, while African-American home extension became even more focused on

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Thomas M. Campbell, head of African-American extension for seven southern states

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

In other words, she suggests that an improved population provides almost as

Thomas M. Campbell echoed Carvers sentiments. He opens the section on home

Dangers to the Empire

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

In this way, US development discourse paralleled what historian Joseph Hodge

And that implementation was noticeable in the conference report as the

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Conclusion/Homemaking Around the World

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

preservation, child care, health, housing and home improvement, housekeeping

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

2015 The Author. Antipode 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

You might also like