The REA was a government program created under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, and its goal was to bring electricity to rural America. The REA provided loans to farmers so they could buy expensive electric appliances. In addition to the loan program, the REA tried to spark rural Americans' interest in electrification with educational outreach like the Electric Circus, a traveling carnival-like event to teach rural families about electric appliances. The effort was extremely successful, as the percent of electrified farms leaped from only 3.2% in 1925, to 90% by 1950.
The REA’s very first “home electrification specialist,” Louisan Mamer, was a pioneer for women’s leadership in this organization. Coming from a family that included 12 home economists, or professionals in the study of homemaking and family development, Mamer wrote in the magazine Practical Home Economics that her “background was, as astrologers would put it, propitious to home economics.” She grew up in Hardin, Southern Illinois, on a farm without electricity, where she did farm labor to pay her way to the University of Illinois. After graduating with a home economics degree in 1931, Mamer worked as a home economics teacher in DeKalb and then as a writer for the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program providing work and education for youth. In 1935 Mamer joined the REA. Her work, combined with the agency’s larger efforts to electrify rural areas, gave women across the United States new opportunities to work professionally and take on leadership roles.
It’s easy to overlook the many ways that the REA empowered rural women in midcentury America, in large part because the agency’s publications and advertising embraced conservative views of women’s identities and role in society. One telling quote published by the REA says that “the woman on an electrified farm, along with all the other women on farms and women in the cities of America, must plan to get all home tasks done with the greatest possible saving of time and energy.” The REA assumed that women on farms would be focused on "home tasks" rather than farm work or other employment.
Mamer faced these gendered expectations. She recalled in Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences that in college she switched from journalism to home economics, stating that “[she] thought [she] would have less competition from men in that field.” The concept of separate spheres continued in Mamer’s career at the REA, where women were the face of the REA at educational events, while few to no women were involved in the loan program or engineering work. Even though Mamer played a major role in the leadership and business practice of the Electric Circus, her published job description focused more on gendered public-facing responsibilities like women’s, youth, and community outreach.