1935, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration, almost 90 percent of America’s farms lacked power. When darkness fell, millions turned to fire for illumination. During harvest months, with no electricity for refrigeration, countless farmers’ wives and daughters devoted a good chunk of their waking hours to pickling and canning fruits and vegetables for the coming winter. But by the end of World War II, only half of rural Americans spent their evenings bathed in candlelight, and by 1950, that percentage was halved again. The majority of the American heartland was finally on the grid.
“They hired good, educated, Midwestern girls, gave them cars, and let them loose across the Midwest.”
For farm-equipment manufacturer International Harvester, this newly electrified population represented an enormous business opportunity. The firm was already selling tractors and other machinery to male farmers—what if it could leverage its existing distribution system to sell refrigerators and freezers to all those farmers’ wives? In fact, that’s exactly what the company did in 1947, when it unleashed an all-woman sales force and a newly created, Betty Crocker-like persona named Irma Harding to peddle its new line of home appliances to rural women. As one of the 70 International Harvester home economists once put it, “We were all Irma Harding.”
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