THE BEGINNINGS OF COUNTY AGENT WORK 177 



tions you are nullifying the uplift of the school. We are reaching 

 for the home." 



As far as records seem to indicate, the home demonstra- 

 tion work got under way in the South in a small way about 

 1913. The first girls were enrolled in clubs in 1911 as we 

 have seen. In 1915 the enrolment of 6,852 women is also 

 recorded. The number of women enrolled in 1916 was 

 15,455, and in 1917, 54,601 ; but no separate listing of home 

 demonstration agents occurs until 1917, when the number 

 is given as 566 agents for " women and girls' work." 

 There were, however, women agents working with girls' 

 clubs as early as 1910 and with adult women by 1915. 



The home demonstration work was really an expansion 

 and enlargement of the girls' club work, just as both girls' 

 and boys' clubs were an expansion of the original demon- 

 stration idea. As the boys' clubs had established a partner- 

 ship between father and son, so the girls' clubs now brought 

 about a mother-daughter combination for home improve- 

 ment. ' ' They began in the garden, worked in the backyard 

 and then into the kitchen," writes Mr. 0. B. Martin, one 

 of Doctor Knapp 's early assistants. 



Teaching by demonstration, gardening and poultry rais- 

 ing, canning and preserving fruit, vegetables and meats and 

 their juices, sewing and knitting, the women agents soon 

 gained large audiences in clubs and elsewhere. In pursuing 

 these details of the program, they apparently always kept 

 in mind the larger needs of the home and ever sought its 

 improvement. Kunning water in the house, fireless cookers, 

 installing motor-driven equipment such as washers, churns, 

 sewing machines and the like, all served this end. There 

 was scarcely anything which promised help to farm women 

 and the lightening of their tasks or broadening their vision 

 to which the home demonstration agents did not put their 



