Introduction

In September 1958, a young girl living 60 miles north of Brownsville, Texas, decides to join the San Perlita Girls’ 4-H Club. Nine years later, Sarah Norris compiles a written record of her participation in 4-H, completing forms that document her every project and activity for the past few years. On these forms, she lists the meals she prepared for her family, the dresses she constructed, the grasses she identified, as well as the lambs she raised, and the rifle shooting positions she mastered. She assembles newspaper articles and arranges them on green construction paper, underlining her name and drawing arrows to pictures of herself where appropriate. She even pastes together a series of pictures, documenting the night she made the family its favorite dinner, Swiss Steak, and the darts she sewed into her wool skirt.

The 4-H organization, often stereotyped as rural, remains largely unexamined by writing studies scholars, and few academics outside of agricultural and extension history consider the implications of our nation’s largest non-academic youth organization. Often stereotyped as an exclusively rural club, the dominant picture constructed about 4-H in many academic minds is one dimensional: a training ground for agricultural-based employment. The historical roots of the organization are indisputably connected to a mission of advancing scientific knowledge about agricultural practices for rural communities, but its “learning by doing” motto also has another side, one firmly centered in writing as the practice of 4-H identity formation within local communities. For more than one hundred years, the clubs have reinforced learning by doing with written materials (forms and narrative compositions), leaving behind a written record of how participants encountered and responded to the expectations of their communities and local 4-H clubs. Because 4-H is organized, participated in, and tracked through its local clubs, it provides a unique opportunity for scholars to explore the intersections of power, place, and writing from an often overlooked perspective—considerations of (non-theoretical) places rarely drift to the rural areas of our country as academics, particularly those of us in writing studies, prefer, instead, the complexity and heterogeneity of urban centers (see Donehower et al). Even more limited than discussions of rural places are explicit discussions of how organizations in these rural areas used written records to exercise and mediate control over the practices of their participants. These locations, these rural situations in which rhetoric and power do circulate reveal materiality and discursive power as archived in written records, and they may allow us to (re-)consider how seemingly bureaucratic documents do more than track data for analysis.

The case study I present here documents how one individual used writing to participate in a non-academic organization organization. As she was completing the required documents for the organization, she was also constructing her own rhetorical purposes and framing her experiences with place as a means of circumventing the discursive control embedded in these same required forms. Sarah Norris' relationship with the power and place of 4-H is compelling because, as I discuss below, not only is her experience of the power gendered, but it is through discussions of place that she also finds an available means for constructing herself as more than just a girl 4-Her. Her final 4-H Record Book becomes a snapshot into the relationship between one organization, its community, and its members in a particular time and place.

Placing 4-H

As I discuss in “‘I Pledge My Head to Clearer Thinking’: The Hybrid Literacy of 4-H Record Books,” the history of 4-H as a national organization is somewhat indeterminate, but we know the idea for the organization came at the beginning of the twentieth century when rural residents were leaving farms for cities and urban lifestyles. Working with land-grant colleges to push for a more practical education, one that connected the traditional curriculum of the schools to the practices of the agricultural areas, educators soon developed a teaching philosophy for rural youth. This philosophy prioritized local places and “extending” the work of university to the farm.

The 4-H organization cites men like Liberty Hyde Bailey as being influential in the development of the idea for 4-H and club work in the states, but in Texas, the site of my case study, a pest invasion was largely responsible. In 1903, the Mexican boll weevil was destroying Texas cotton crops, and with now proven remedy, the USDA sent Dr. Seaman A. Knapp to Terrell, Texas, where he struggled to convince adult farmers that the USDA’s techniques were superior to their own. Undeterred by disinterested adults, Knapp and the USDA workers turned to rural youth. The USDA employees organized competitions, demonstrated new techniques, and guided the youth through their own growing seasons (Reck 53). By 1912, there were approximately 100,000 boys and girls enrolled in similar county clubs all across the nation. To track the work of each club member was learning and doing, the national organization built on the idea of record keeping. Each youth member in a local club was soon documenting her learning experiences for the organization on the National 4-H Report Form.

Writing Place into Forms

By the time Sarah Norris completed her senior-level Record Book (an extended compilation of all of her 4-H activities) in August 1967, the organization had outlined a clear aim and purpose for the form. Its central role as a written record was to be “accurate, complete, organized in an appropriate sequence . . ., neat and contains a minimum of repetition.” The instructions also stress that the record is intended to stand as a material representation of Sarah's identity within her local community and the national organization. More importantly, the form should explain and document who she has become as a member of her local 4-H club so that she may be evaluated and compared to other club members. The hierarchial evaluation of the 4-Her—at the local, state, and national levels—is not accidental; 4-H clubs were and still are organized on a national level (under the office of the USDA), while the daily operations of each club are handled by county extension agents, local clubs, and local club leaders.

Figure 2. National 4-H Report Form excerpt

The dependence of each 4-H club on its place is reinforced in the design and layout of the National 4-H Report Form. On page one of the form, the first information Sarah provides is her “State” and “County.” She then declares the project and/or award for which the record is being submitted, followed by the number of years she's participated in this project. Only after providing the place and project data is she asked for her name and gender. The form mimics the funneling that must have occurred as reader's evaluated the records: the document begins by positioning the 4-Her in a specific locality, in a particular place. After locating the participant, the form then places her into a particular category of activities, which allows the organization to evaluate the participation and progress of its members from a common starting point. The record form, thus, becomes a material representation of the 4-Her and a record of how the she worked to construct herself within her local organization.

Figure 3. National 4-H Report Form excerpt

The organization aims to produce a standard 4-Her, a goal easier to achieve by asking for and tracking compliance at the local level. Tracking 4-Hers within the national 4-H organization means more than noting a city and state (what may be considered a location identifiable on a map). Sarah must answer survey questions about her “Place of Residence.” Broken down into six categories, the form asks 4-Hers to check off the best description of where they live: either farm; rural area outside of town; town of less than 2,500; town or city of 2,500-10,000; city of 10,000-50,000; or, city of more than 50,000. By tracking more than a geographical accounting of place, the organization seems to acknowledge the importance of locale for its participants. 4-Hers may be situated in geographical sites, but these are mediated by the locations of human interaction.

The 4-Hers' learning-by-doing is now wholly dependent on locality. What a 4-Her learns is quite literally tied up with her locality, which determines her access to both clubs and agents, which are determined by the relationship between the organization, the government, and the land-grant institutions and county-extension agents, who are sent out from the university to the people. The National Report Form, the first document included in Sarah's 4-H Record Book, gives precedence to the geographic positioning of the 4-Her in its layout, and this deliberate design suggests that geography and place scaffold the work of 4-H projects and activities as well as the growth and development of personal, community, and civic responsibilities fostered by the organization in its participants.

Figure 4. National 4-H Report Form Instructions

Placing and Constructing Girls’ 4-H Club Work

Sarah Norris completed her final 4-H Record Book in 1967, and in it, she documents nine years of participation in a variety of activities and projects, all of which are grounded in two places: San Perlita, Texas, and Ozona, Texas. As a particular kind of document, Sarah's Record Book has nine distinguishable parts. In addition to the National 4-H Report Form, which I described above, the final record asks for multiple kinds of evidence and documentation, all of which is described and explained in the Report Form. Excluding the organizational elements (cover, photos, table of contents), Sarah includes a typed summary of her Total Accomplishments, which lists her ten projects, and her 4-H Story. According to her instructions, the 4-H Story should “strongly relate” her “growth and development in personal, community, and civic responsibilities through [her] 4-H experiences” (emphasis added). Sarah is instructed to write about things she has “done, tried, found successful and practices and procedures which may have ended in disappointment.”

The directions explaining the 4-H story push for more than a narrative accounting of chronological events because it asks the 4-Her to explain how 4-H experiences have contributed to “personal growth, improved family living and community betterment,” even as she discusses how she became a “better leader and citizen” and how, if at all, 4-H influenced her school and career plans (15). Supplementing her narrative explication are various kinds of evidence. There are the news clippings and project pictures, which she organizes into mini-stories about the work she completed, as well as project record forms, which document all the projects she completed over the years. Sarah even includes 4-H Correspondence, letters related to her activities and awards. Together, these records—both the bureaucratic forms and reflective narratives—are material and rhetorical accounts of how Sarah participated in her local 4-H club and her community. Sarah’s participation in 4-H becomes more than an accounting of after school activities; instead, the information presented and constructed by her documents reveal how a female 4-Her comes to navigate the gendered expectations of an organization by appealing to and connecting with her place.

Gendering the 4-H Experience             

Sarah's experiences of the 4-H organization as a place are gendered from the onset because she joined the San Perlita Girls’ 4-H Club, the only option available to her at that time. Over the course of the next nine years, Sarah’s activities and leadership skills were (seemingly) gendered and aimed at her learning how to make a house into a home and herself into a homemaker. In nine years of participation, Sarah participated in ten different kinds of 4-H projects, but the bulk of her time was dedicated to three project areas: Clothing, Junior Leadership, and Citizenship. Having seven years of participation in these projects was quite an accomplishment for her, since, as she discloses in her 4-H Story, she “was not really aware of what 4-H was all about.”

Figure 5. 4-H Story excerpt

project in 1961. When reflecting back on her decision to start a clothing project, Sarah frames her choice through a lens of familiarity: she chose this option because her “mother could sew quite well” and because she “had seen quilts, lace, clothing, and many other beautiful things [her] grandmother had made” (1). She self-identifies with the project because of its anticipated intimacy—working with her mother and connecting with her grandmother through beautiful things—and, after winning a blue ribbon for her orange print dress, she continues sewing, constructing a pink eyelash dress the next year.

Figure 6. Girls' 4-H Clothing Record form excerpt

Figure 7. Title Page excerpt

Supporting Sarah's explanation for what she learned with her sewing project are the requisite record forms, and it is her completed Girls’ 4-H Clothing Record forms from 1963-1967 that document the expectations held for female 4-Hers by the organization. Much like her first 4-H club (which was designated as and operated as the girls' club), the forms Sarah completed to accompany her sewing projects are gendered. Titled the Girls’ 4-H Clothing Record, these forms assume that only young women needed to learn sewing skills. During this same time period, Sarah was also participating in Foods and Nutrition projects, but the forms she completed for this work were simply titled 4-H Foods and Nutrition Project Record. From her records, it is unclear why clothing forms are marked with a gender designation, and it is beyond the scope of this project to detail the motivations for such a gendering (though I discuss one possibility below). What is clear from Sarah's work with the ten different projects and the record forms she archived is that clothing was set apart and designated for female-only participation.

Just as she had done for the National Report Form, Sarah fills in the year and the county in which she resides on the Girls' Clothing Record form. After supplying her name, age, address, and club name, Sarah situates herself locally by counting the number of club meetings she attended during the year. She then checks off which 4-H Dress Revues she entered and at what level (County, District, Junior, Senior, State). Immediately after Sarah explains where she has exhibited her clothing work, the form solicits details about her hygiene practices and physical appearance. Listed on the form are a series of habits that we must assume were deemed appropriate for girls. For example, the 4-Her is supposed to check off the grooming habits she maintains: bathing and brushing hair and teeth daily, shampooing hair weekly, cleaning nails daily. She must also affirm that she practices good posture habits. Even though Sarah has room to comment or explain her particular grooming habits, the preferred check-mark system eliminates or at least overrides the commentary possibility.

Figure 8. Girls' 4-H Clothing Record form excerpt

There are, at least, two ways to read the report form’s checklist and questions about hygiene measures. The first option is to treat an interest in these practices as historical residue. One outcome of the country life movement was the contested perception that rural residents did not know enough about proper sanitation practices and health principles. While some disputed this belief as a false urban-based perception of rural areas, there remained a belief that “farm people were simply ignorant of sanitary conditions” (Bowers 125). Given the historical context in which 4-H began—namely its connection to the country life movement—it seems likely that this form, distributed and amended by an act of Congress in 1914, was simply a push to improve rural residents' standards of living by promoting and educating young women about good health practices. But if the stated purpose of record forms was to track learning by doing within the organization, in this case to document the female 4-Hers' advancement in sewing activities and skills, then information solicited about health and hygiene practices stand out. By making girls accountable for their participation in routine personal care, the form constructs behaviors and practices for female bodies even as it creates a system to track these practices.

Current gender theories accept that we are not born with a gender, suggesting, instead, that gender is a process, one accompanied by developmental and transitional stages that lead to the final acquisition of gender. These stages can be and often are affected by a variety of contexts and contingencies, and social organizations are one such context. R.W. Connell suggests in Gender and Power that gender should be traced to social organizations, in part, because humans live out their daily lives in schools and offices, not solely in one-on-one interactions or in collective social encounters. The socially mediated reality of daily life prompts Connell to argue that “[g]ender relations are present in all types of institutions” (120, original emphasis). If gender relations are part of institutions and structured by individual's social interactions, then gender regimes are the “structural inventory of a particular institution” (99) that represent the “state of play in gender relations in a given institution” (120). As a listing of expectations and behaviors, gender regimes are one way to understand the requirements established by and maintained within organizations. Connell, thus, provides theorists with a term through which we might consider how gender operates in the practices of “compact formal organizations,” such as schools, by looking at how institutions divide labor, structure power, and even organize personal attachments between the genders.

This concept of gender regimes provides a lens through which to read information solicited by the Girls' 4-H Clothing Record forms. The documents Sarah completed in the 1960s seem to “impose a definition on the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality” (107), all of which Connell attributes to the institutional use of social power; thus by compiling data about the hygiene practices and bodies of the girls participating in sewing projects, the organization spells out, quite literally, its gender regime, making the recording and mapping of the 4-H body a literal practice.

After soliciting information about Sarah's grooming habits, the form moves away from the body, temporarily, and on to clothing care practices. Sarah confirms that she keeps her clothes clean, pressed, and mended. She affirms that she wears clean underclothes daily, and she also cleans and repairs her shoes as needed. The questions about Sarah's clothing practices are related, at least tangentially, to clothing projects, but these questions also establish female 4-Hers as cleaned and pressed participants in social spheres. By reporting on her clothing, both outer- and underclothes, Sarah responds to a regime that demands women be clean and tidy. The organization even makes sure the girls do not misunderstand their place. The final two questions shift the surveillance from hygiene to notions of place by requiring Sarah to report on the status and organization of her closet; does she, in fact, keep her closet and drawers straight?

Figure 9. Girls' 4-H Clothing Record form excerpt

The gender regime outlined in the report form assumes that Sarah will not only sew her own clothes but also organize and order all the clothes within the home. As a young woman, she is expected to prepare herself for a time when she will be responsible for other people's garments. The washing, folding, and storing of laundry are household duties. Under her division of labor, the caring for the home and its contents are feminine responsibilities, just as the laundry room is a feminine space, so the form wants evidence of her practicing expected skills. She must also confirm that she helps her family with their clothing care and sewing needs. Implicit in the question “How I help family members with clothing care” are expectations for Sarah and her mother. Not only can a daughter best participate in clothing care if those activities take place in her home, but she must also being caring for other even before the responsibility is clearly defined as hers once she becomes a wife and mother—the assumed outcome, I would suggest.

Gender Regimes and the Body             

The Girls' 4-H Clothing Record Form is interested in more than just tracking and setting the parameters for appropriate behaviors for female 4-Hers. After tracking her hygiene and clothing care practices, recording the clothing she bought, and recording the sewing she completed, Sarah documents her “planning” for a given year's sewing project in a section titled “A Description of Myself.” In this section, the report form surveills the bodies of female 4-H members. There are six sections, each of which solicits different information. The “Color Type” section wants to capture the coloring of the member. For example, is she a redhead or an olive skin brunett? In the “Figure Type” section, the member records her current height and weight, and she must also determine if the ratio means she is short and stout or perhaps tall and stout. The “Best Lines in Dress” captures information about the kinds of lines that best accompany the 4-Her's figure type because, as any accomplished female 4-Her would know, a woman who is short and stout should avoid horizontal lines just as a woman who is too tall should avoid vertical lines. As a member Sarah must recognize that in addition to wearing diagonal lines, she needs to select only the fabrics and colors that best suit her; while she may report the color selections for herself, the form solicits direct responses for the particular kinds fabric textures she might wear: dull, lustrous, fine, coarse, and/or medium. While it may be within the scope of a sewing project to ask the members to plan for and understand fabric choices and colors, this self-description section goes even further, asking the female 4-Her to check her personality type. Sarah has four options from which to choose: feminine, vivacious, athletic, shy.

Figure 10. Girls' 4-H Clothing Record form excerpt

Examining these forms forty-five years after their completion, it is hard to imagine any purpose for “A Description of Myself” other than the direct surveillance of the female body—a surveillance intended to teach the female 4-Her to monitor the shape and cleanliness of her body. Michel Foucault's theories about power, subjects, and control suggest that mechanisms of surveillance are not only a way for individuals to police themselves and one another but also a way for power to enter and operate in our lives. Because the notion of surveillance cannot be understood without its “historical counterpart” self-surveillance, it is helpful to think of the relationship between the two ideas, namely that individuals self-surveil by paying attention to their behaviors “facing the actuality or virtuality of an immediate or mediated observation by others whose opinion he or she deems as relevant—usually, observers of the same or superior social position” (Vaz and Bruno 273, emphasis added). Because the record form was a required component of participation in 4-H projects, 4-H members knew that leaders, extension agents, and, in some cases, judges would use these forms to evaluate the progress of their 4-H work. No 4-H member could complete his project record forms without understanding that someone would be evaluating his performance based on the discursive record; no 4-H member could read her Girls’ Clothing Record Form without learning to observe her practices and behaviors for how they would be read, particularly at the local level—the most immediate experience of the 4-H organization.

In “Types of Self-Surveillance: From Abnormality to Individuals ‘At Risk’”, Paulo Vaz and Fernanda Bruno reconsider notions of surveillance, and like other contemporary researchers, their interest in surveillance connects to health-related issues—in their case, early action against disease and illness. The authors propose that “practices of the care of the self” depend not only on identifying the parts of individuals that must be “cared for and worked upon” but are also “based on the cultural postulation that certain thoughts and actions are dangerous or unwholesome to the constitution of the individual as a subject” (273). This seems to be the environment in which Sarah constructed her responses to the form as well as the situation in which she must explain any actions that extend beyond the gender regime outlined in the clothing record form. Asking Sarah to self-identify each answer, the form contains a series of questions about her coloring, physical shape, and personality, providing a range of acceptable options for each category. So Sarah dutifully reports herself to be a “colorful blond” who wears a combination of dress lines: vertical, diagonal, and horizontal. She records her figure type as “tall and slender,” including the accompanying height and weight data. She identifies her personality type as “athletic.” She also notes that her best colors are turquoise, white, magenta, and the textures she wears best are fine and medium, not dull and coarse. Not missing a point, the form asks Sarah to document her measurements and pattern type. In addition to recording her bust, waist, and hip sizes in inches, she provides her pattern size, and by checking the “I do not adjust my pattern” box, she is free from explaining how her body does or does not conform to pattern measurements.

For a moment, I’d like to contrast the information embedded in the gendered Girls’s 4-H Clothing Record form with the 4-H Foods and Nutrition Project Record, which Sarah would have been completing almost simultaneously. As I already noted, the foods form is not overly gendered. The form solicits information about the participants’ activities during the year and what they accomplished; for instance, Sarah gave five talks at local meetings (discussing vitamins and minerals, as well as fats, carbohydrates, and proteins), and she dutifully records the individual dishes and meals she prepared, as well as the canning, freezing, and preserving she completed by herself and with assistance. Though there is nothing overtly gendered about the data requested, this form also asks Sarah to locate her participation at the local and county level. She must also consider the relationship between her behaviors and the standards of her location, particularly when she explains what she has learned about manners and courtesies (which I suggest are clearly gendered concerns). In 1967, she learned that if she does not want tea or coffee, then she should turn her cup upside down; she also learned that “one must have colorful, appetizing foods that are nutritious as well” (6).

Sarah must also demonstrate an awareness about her situatedness when explains what she has learned about the connections between her body and food. Sarah confirms that she uses her Food for Fitness Guide to plan and select her meals, and she explains what she learned about foods and what they do for how she looks and feels—again, a surveillance of her body through a concern about her overall health: “I have learned the necessary foods needed for proper function of the body, for healthy skin, for strong bones and teeth, and for a overall strong body needed in playing and working. I have also learned more about the nutrients and about cooking certain foods” (5). Sarah notes the connections between food and health, but implicit in her response is awareness about the materiality of her body and its ability to conform to the connected gender regime: healthy teeth and bones are necessary for overall health, but healthy skin is regime requirement.

Figure 11. 4-H Foods and Nutrition Project excerpt

Though not as overt as the clothing record, the foods and nutrition forms are also surveilling the 4-Hers' bodies (though in a much less scripted, formalized way). Read together, these record forms reveal the (implicit) gender regime of 4-H. The aim of this study is not to uncover the historical motivations for the construction of the content solicited by the Girls' 4-H Clothing Record Form, though the influence of the country life movement and its perceptions' about rural hygiene and health seem like one explanation for why the club began surveilling the bodies of female 4-Hers. Rather, my focus is on highlighting the surveillance that took place, considering how this focus on the female body acted as a surveillance mechanism of 4-H, and, knowing that 4-H is primarily a local and placed organization, understanding how and why Sarah may have used spatial explanations to contexualize her experiences in non-domestic projects. Regardless of how Sarah responds to the national forms, surveillance begins in her club and her community, so what role, if any, did place play in Sarah's local experiences of the gender regimes established in the forms and documents of the organization?

Mediating Gender Regimes with Constructions of Place

In “Trying on Gender, Gender Regimes, and the Process of Becoming Women,” L. Susan Williams adapts R.W. Connell's concept of a gender regime to examine how place, and communities specifically, shapes the ways in which adolescent women try on gender—a phrase Williams uses to denote a period of time during which young girls can be seen “anticipating, experimenting, retreating, and resisting” the behaviors that they think are “womanly” (30). Williams finds that trying on gender can be irreverent, playful, and fun (33) for girls, who may understand and know “women’s ways of doing gender” but are exempt from the reality of these activities and actions, like dating and dieting, for the time being (often because of their pre-adolescent age). Although Williams’ concedes that opportunities to shape alternatives for gender are fairly narrow, a fundamental implication of her study is the assertion that communities can be “identified by specific gender regimes that shape the ways adolescent girls try on and adopt gender standards” (48, emphasis added); thus, a gender regime is a mode of rule for gender-specific behaviors in pre-coded places and spaces and not simply an orderly procedure. By highlighting the mode of rule in gender regimes, Williams’ definition focuses on two important components of gender: namely its time- and place-specific aspects and the fluidity of its structure (31). The focus on gender regimes connection to time and place allows Williams to argue that we may examine locations and identify local gender regimes; researchers may also explore how “communities organize gender relations and reveal how [this] structure intersects with [a] process to shape the experience[s] of adolescent girls” (32). Thus, Williams has expanded the work of Connell to reveal how gender regimes are not just part of organizations but also embedded in a particular place and time.

Figure 12. 1963-1967 Girls' 4-H Clothing Records Excerpts

Organized at the local level and staffed by members of the surrounding community, 4-H created a community for Sarah Norris that had particular expectations for behavior and performance (as seen in the instructions accompanying her forms and narratives). But because Sarah includes her Girls' Clothing Record forms from 1963 through 1967, we have evidence of a shift in her reporting of and compliance with the gender regime as she aged—a shift that seems to reveal how Sarah participated in and subverted the gender regimes she encountered in her 4-H clubs. As I have already suggested, Sarah's Record Book documents the discursive gender controls of 4-H, revealing how this organization used bureaucratic forms to exert a particular kind of control over its female participants. I would like to complicate this picture of Sarah as simply a compliant 4-Her. By reading these forms within their larger context, we see that Sarah's encounters with 4-H's gender regime are textual, discursive, and centered around the surveillance of her body, but her completion of the Girls' 4-H Clothing Record forms offers only part of the picture, particularly when read in conjunction with the other reflective pieces included in her final Record Book. Embedded in these other narrative constructions is the story of a 4-Her explaining why she deviated from the gender regime—and its feminine, domestic projects—by highlighting her interest in outdoor activities and the new place in which she lived. Williams and Connell are essential to this reading because their theories offer a way to read Sarah's gendered treatment in the institution of 4-H (through the bureaucratic forms) as well as her reliance and dependence on local communities (through her narratives).

Sarah's 4-H experiences are layered. She participated in seemingly feminine and masculine projects simultaneously: sewing dresses and preparing meals even as she raises lambs and masters shooting positions. To focus only on how one set of forms constructs an expectation of gender would be mean ignoring the rhetorical situation she constructs for herself and the means of persuasion that seem to scaffold her positioning; it would mean ignoring the intersecting relationships of power and place and gender that constitute Sarah’s 4-H experience in the 1960s. Take, as an example, the clothing record forms she completed between 1963 and 1966. For these years, Sarah identified her personality type as feminine. In her final year of 4-H, 1967, however, she identified herself as athletic—a fairly substantive shift given her other choices of shy and vivacious. While there is not enough evidence in the forms to explain why Sarah chose athletic rather than feminine for her senior year, the shift can be contextualized within the Record Book itself, which allows this one change to be seen as part of a layered thread she constructed that year. In constructing her explanations for why she participated in certain projects, Sarah appeals to place as a catalyst for or explanation of her non-domestic participation. In fact, if we concede to Williams and Connell that places are gendered and that gender expectations are space- and place-specific, then Sarah’s Record Book becomes a written artifact documenting how one 4-Her affected the gendered meanings she attached to her specific locations (Williams 32) by claiming her own connection with the places in which she was living. She uses place as a justification for deviating from the gender regimes she encountered in the organization.

In her 4-H Story, Sarah reveals that 4-H has been a “family affair,” something she connects, as you may recall, to her decision for beginning a sewing project in 1961. When her mother returned to school teaching in 1963, Sarah takes on a junior leadership role in her mother’s sewing group, allowing her to teach the other girls “some of the principles [she] had learned in making a garment look store-bought instead of home-made” (2). When the girls’ and boys’ 4-H clubs of San Perlita joined forces in 1964 to create the San Perlita 4-H Club, the club members selected Sarah to serve as co-chairman of the new club, a position granting her representation on the Willacy County 4-H Council. At the county level, she served as the delegate to the District 12 4-H Council, a position that took her to San Juan, Texas, and Cloudcroft, New Mexico. That same year, Sarah competed in the District Dress Revue at Corpus Christi, Texas. By accepting leadership positions in the organization, Sarah found outlets for travelling outside of her local community, taking brief trips for camps and competitions. Her discussion of this travel hints at her desire to be more than a local 4-Her focused on domestic work and skills, and after she moves to Ozona, Texas, with her family, Sarah finds the available means she needed to explain why her interests extend beyond surveilled, feminine projects and into more masculine undertakings.

Sarah grounds her move from south to west Texas in experimentation and curiosity. She writes in her story, “In August of 1964, our family moved to Ozona in Crockett County [ . . . . ] I became interested in the area of Texas in which I now lived, so I began projects in meat animals and range management” (3, emphasis added). In the opening narrative of her Record Book, Sarah frames her non-domestic interests as an opportunity to learn more about her new location; to understand where she is now living, she explains that she needed to engage in projects that took her outside of the house and into the fields and farms surrounding her. With her sister’s help, Sarah raises lambs and even judges grass, wool, mohair, and livestock. Sarah adds these non-domestic projects to her more domestic projects (in Foods and Nutrition and Sewing). She also layers in her justifications for how she uses place to support different kinds of learning: “I thought hunting sounded great, so I joined the Rifle Team” (4). Sarah seems to recognize that non-domestic projects go against the gender regime she had been experiencing through the clothing projects, her first and longest-running experiences in the organization, so when she describes what she accomplished and learned from the projects that take her outside the realms of surveillance, she makes sure to explain why she wanted to do these projects: because she has moved and she is outdoorsy.

Figure 13. 4-H Story Excerpt

In her 4-H Firearms Project Record Form, also completed in 1967, her family’s relocation appears again. In her descriptive summary of how her project originated, Sarah explains when and how she became interested in shooting sports: “I joined the Crockett County 4-H Rifle Club in September of 1964, because I enjoy being outdoors and love to hunt. I enjoy marksmanship practice because the competition on local and district levels makes one work harder to achieve a higher team position. The trips to and from the District competition have been most enjoyable” (5). This time, Sarah does not reference the move directly; instead, she suggests that hunting and being outdoors are two of her primary areas of interest. In her summary of experiences for her Foods and Nutrition Record that year, she does not continue the focus on being outdoors, but she does reflect on her move away from the Rio Grande Valley.

Figure 14. 4-H Firearms Project Summary

This time, however, the reflection explains why she added another area of Junior Leadership to her participation: “When I lived in the Rio Grande Valley, the only cooking that I was exposed to what [sic] the cooking that my mother taught me [ . . . . ] When our family moved to Ozona in the fall of 1964, I helped some of the adult leaders to lead a group of girls in cooking and in nutrition” (8). Here Sarah seems to imply that the move and the needs of her new 4-H community called her to assume a more prominent leadership role in the club, and this is not the last time Sarah makes a passing reference to her time in south Texas. Even when she explains her experiences for her Soil and Water Conservation forms, Sarah reflects about living “on a farm in the Rio Grande Valley from 1953 to 1964.”

By 1967, Sarah had moved from District Reporter to District Secretary, and when the Senior 4-H Club was split into six smaller clubs by the county agent, she was named President of the Mustang 4-H Club, as well as President and Club Delegate of the newly organized County Council. Throughout this year, she traveled within the state of Texas, from Alpine to San Antonio to Fort Stockton. These traveling leadership roles were seminal to Sarah’s development, and when she reflected on them in her 4-H Story, the move to Ozona appears again:

My leadership responsibilities have stood me in good stead many times since I have been in high school. Being able to preside at a meeting, to talk before a group, to meet new people, to plan my time and my activities, to make decisions to leave off some social function in order to do some project, or to study are a few of the things 4-H has helped me to learn [. . . .] Learning to meet new people helped me move into a new community and adjust to a much larger high school. (7)

As a leader in a co-ed club, Sarah transgressed the gender regimes she first experienced in her 4-H club in south Texas by moving across gendered spheres and participating in masculine projects even as she expanded her leadership roles. When coupled with her move up the leadership ladder, her relocation to Ozona seems like a transitional moment that allowed Sarah the spatial and social freedom that would seem outside the anticipated behaviors and practices reinforced in the clothing record forms.

By highlighting her connections with different places in multiple forms and projects throughout her final year, Sarah constructs a rhetorical exigence for her final Record Book. She presents a situation in which a life-long 4-H member, one who began with clothing projects, added external, non-domestic projects to her 4-H participation because of a change in location. She explains her participation in projects outside the domestic sphere (beyond the sewing, cooking) by framing these new activities through a geographical interest. Her family’s 450-mile move allowed her to subtly push back against the gender regimes surveilled in the Girls' 4-H Clothing Record Form. Her new location and locale become a reason for her to explore shooting sports and meat animals: the projects are a way to understand her new place. Decontextualized from their context in the Record Book, these statements may be read simply as a reality she faced: her family moved. But when read as a layering of data, Sarah’s repeated statements about how a move affected what she wanted to learn offer a new way to read the gender regimes of her clothing projects.

Conclusions

The 4-H Pledge is simple: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking; / my heart to greater loyalty; / my hands to larger service; / and my health to better living; / for my club, my community, my country, and my world.” The record forms Sarah completed during her tenure within the organization dictated the development of her head, heart, health, and hands. Her participation in sewing and foods and nutrition, and later in home design, represent the material representation of the desired social order—to fit the female 4-Her for her position in the home. Rather than devaluing these feminine skills, the organization professionalized them and rewarded her participation. Housework and household duties were not simply idealized but rewarded with ribbons and honors, including publicity in local newspapers and monetary rewards. Her participation in gender regimes also kept her involved in the organization because she liked to win, which complicates any interrogation of its benefits after the fact. Without her continued participation in 4-H, Sarah may not have traveled as extensively, and it is unlikely would she have been able to operate in both the feminine and masculine spheres of the 1960s.

In reading Sarah's Record Book, and her Girls' 4-H Clothing Record forms, the layering and interwoven nature of place, gender, community, and power are revealed through the surveillance of women's bodies written into bureaucratic forms. The work of feminist geographers has advanced the principle that place and gender are interrelated: each is constructed as a culturally specific idea; there is an overlapping and interplaying of characteristics and connotations associated with each term. Neither location nor gender is neutral; instead, space and place are material constraints in the formation of identity, and, therefore, geography matters because of the intricate and profound “connection of space and place with gender and the construction of gender relations” (Massey 2). One central aim of feminist geography has been “to investigate, make visible and challenge the relationships between gender divisions and spatial divisions, to uncover their mutual constitution and problematize their apparent naturalness” (McDowell 12). Feminist geographers, therefore, examine the ways in which women and men experience place and space differently in order to demonstrate how these differences in experience are part of the “social constitution of gender as well as that of place” (McDowell 12); they also aim to demonstrate the ways in which gender relations are both reinforced and reflected in the spatial arrangements of society because there is a spatial division in the social construction of gender: public and private, inside and outside.

Behind divisions of knowledge and the organization of social institutions, there is an “idea that women have a particular place,” and this idea can only have credence if people and places are gendered (McDowell 12). So just as the female body is sexed, so are places, and the gendering of place results in the idea that women should “know their place” (56). Knowing their place means that women also understand the social construction of divisions between place, boundaries, and memberships (McDowell 31)—divisions that are intertwined with gender constructions. Each sphere is deemed more appropriate for one gender or the other, and social-spatial relationships reinforce the construction of modes of rule through the segregation of the sexes and the gendering of hierarchies of power (56).

For Sarah, the 4-H organization constructed her understanding of gender and gender relations and set the parameters for the divisions of gendered places, in part, through their written documents; by using an inventory of practices and behaviors to track her progress in clothing projects, the organization had a local means of controlling the kind of female 4-Her it was producing. Reading her Record Book, I cannot separate the layering of place and gender and power because each element, at least as she experienced them, depends on the other. The 4-H clubs are organized and participated in local communities, and depending on where she lived, Sarah had a different set of available project options. The gender regime of the organization was embedded in the bureaucratic forms, but the enforcement and maintenance of this data was likely felt by her in daily life (though there is no way to test this theory against her archive). For all that Sarah’s project has to reveal about how place and gender can be experienced at the discursive level, there is another lesson written by her. No relationship between participant and organization or participant and institution is uncomplicated.

Sarah’s documented participation in 4-H involves both restrictive gendered regimes and self-selected leadership positions as well as non-domestic projects. When reading her forms and reflections, I am struck by her ability to straddle two different sets of expectations for whom she should be as a 4-her: a future homemaker or future leader. I also find myself returning to her words (and swayed by the image I had of her as my own 4-H leader). Even as she reflects on how place allowed her to subvert the discursive gender constructions of the 4-H forms, Sarah’s 4-H Story also reinforces her relationship with domestic places, grounding her in family and community. She opens her story with a narrative about learning to talk freely and make decisions without influence:

1. I have been in 4-H for nine years and have learned much through the training I have received. I feel that leadership is one of the most important qualities I have gained in 4-H. I have learned to talk freely around people and to make my own decisions without the influence of others.
   

I find this statement compelling because I would argue that her decisions are influenced and controlled by gendered and spatial expectations—there is a clear gender regime inherent in Sarah’s place and the 4-H organization—which undercut the self-assertion she makes in the next sentence, in which she highlights her three most valuable (and overtly gendered) interests: “being able to accept responsibility, to sew, and to cook.” In her own words, she demonstrates how she was successfully groomed for participation in a home. She seems to accept her responsibility as the caretaker of the home and family by grooming herself to be a young woman who gives back to the community, and in turn, shapes and forms the identities of the women that she guides and leads. This complex relationship tells me that more work needs to be done on how organizations, particularly rural organizations, supported and structured and dictated the gender regimes of women even as they empowered them to be engaged and full members of their communities. This statement also reminds me that Sarah was and is in control of her own rhetorical situation; writing herself into and out of expectations, even mine.

Figure 15. Identity Collage composed of Sarah Norris' photographs in her 4-H Record Book

Works Cited

NOTE: All 4-H documents, including photographs, were photocopied by the author from Sarah Norris' private archive, which has been digitized. Like most 4-H Record Books, these materials are held privately by authors.

Bowers, William L. The Country Life Movement in America, 1900-1920. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974. Print.

Diem, Keith G. and Annette Devitt. “Shifting the Focus of 4-H Record-Keeping from Competition and Subject Matter to Youth Development and Life Skills.” Journal of Extension 41.6 (2003). Web. 27 Mar. 2009.

Donehower, Kim, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell. Rural Literacies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Print.

Keathley, Clarence R. and Donna M. Ham. “4-H Club Work in Missouri.” Missouri Historical Review 71.2 (1977): 193-203. Print.

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press,               1994. Print.

McCracken, I. Moriah. “‘I Pledge My Head to Clearer Thinking’: The Hybrid Literacy of 4-H Record Books.” Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy. Eds. Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell. MS.

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Williams, L. Susan. “Trying on Gender, Gender Regimes, and the Process of Becoming Women.” Gender & Society 16.1 (2002): 29-52. Print.