148 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



clubs and greater city committees, so are the club women thinking of 

 the community. And so I would say to you today, in planning your fairs, 

 give some thought to the club women and the value they can be to you 

 in reaching women. They are interested in many things and can give 

 you valuable assistance, but the time has gone by when you can get a 

 crowd of people at a fair just to look at fancy work and cross stitching, 

 and that sort of thing. They are all right and they have their place in 

 the homes, but women are interested in many other things. It seems to 

 me that we should be careful in making our plans to make them inter- 

 esting to both the city and the country women. Our interests are one, 

 we are learning that more and more. We no longer have class interest; 

 there is no town interest or country interest — it is all one. If you can 

 get the leading women in your community, the women of influence and 

 prestige, if they will get in and help you in this thing, you will be able 

 to build a constructive program that can be developed from year to year. 

 There are 20,000 club women in Iowa in the federation; there are over 

 700 clubs; there are, I think, only three counties in Iowa that don't 

 have a federated club. There are some good clubs that aren't federated, 

 but when they are federated they are in touch with all the work that 

 we as club women try to do. They are not working at random; they 

 have eleven definite committees with many sub-committees. We have 

 five counties where there is a county federation, meaning that all of the 

 women's clubs in the county are federated — that is, city and country 

 club women — and we have fifteen cities where all the clubs in the city 

 are federated, so that they are all pulling together. 



When this committee in the Iowa Federation was asked to take over 

 the program at the state fair, it was an entirely new project, we didn't 

 know just what we could put on, or just what we could do, but we did 

 know that women were interested in certain vital things. We knew that 

 the club women had a program that other women would like if we could 

 get it to them, so we approached the matter with open minds. We went 

 in and studied the crowd and studied the people, and we soon found that 

 there was a very great difference in the crowd than was to be found any- 

 where else. We found that they came to be amused, and they came to 

 be entertained, and when they got there we wanted to give them some- 

 thing that they would see the value of and at the same time they would 

 be interested and amused, because we wanted to interest, we wanted to 

 educate, we wanted to give them recreation and wanted to give them 

 amusement — and how could we do all those things? The first thing we 

 learned was to visualize those things. You cannot hold them for very 

 long at a time if it is undemocratic, so we finally worked out our program. 

 Women want to learn; there are lots of things that they want to learn, 

 and the rural women want to learn what the city women are interested 

 in. They want to learn it just exactly as the city women want to learn 

 it, but it seems to me that the ideal program is one that will interest at 

 the same time both classes of women. Whatever is put on must be well 

 put on, it must not be done in a second-rate way. You may make it go 

 for a moment, but you cannot put on a constructive program that will 

 draw your women year after year unless it is well done. 



When we started to plan our program at the state fair, we felt we 



