Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food

CHAPTER THREE: Canning Tomatoes: Growing “Better and More Perfect Women”

Canning Tomatoes Shortly after JaneMcKimmonbegandemonstratingbreadmakingon the margins of farmers’ institutes in North Carolina, Marie Samuella Cromer sat in the audience at a 1909 teachers’ meeting in South Carolina. A rural schoolteacher in the western South Carolina town of Aiken, Cromer heard a speech about Dr. Seaman A. Knapp’s boys’ corn clubs that were transforming southern crop yields. According to her own retelling, Cromer raised her hand to ask, “But what are we doing for the farm girls?” She was not the first audience member across the South to ask such a question; but what made Cromer different was what she did next. She headed back home and, by 1910, had organized a girls’ tomato club so that “girls will not learn simply how to grow better and more perfect tomatoes, but how to grow better and more perfect women.”1 Before long, more than five hundred thousand girls across the nation were in tomato clubs, mostly in the South; they wrote songs (like theoneabove),designedlabels,adoptedmottoes,createduniforms,wonscholarships , traveled to conferences, and made hundreds of thousands of dollars Tomato Club. Tomato Club. See how we can. See how we can. Give us tomatoes and a good sharp knife— This is the place to get a good wife. Did ever you see such girls in your life— As the Tomato Club? chapter three Growing “Better and More Perfect Women” U 84 chapter three in total profits. Although short in duration, the tomato club movement was long on potential; the South really had never before seen “such girls in your life—as the Tomato Club.” Fromthefirst,Cromerhadbotheconomicandeducationalgoalsinmindfor the tomato-club girls. Writing in an undated newspaper clipping preserved in herscrapbook,Cromersuggestedtheclubswouldgivegirlsacourseinreading, science,publicspeaking,andsocializing;inshort,theywouldprovide“lessons economic and lessons ethical.” While Cromer may have had her focus almost exclusively on the girls, Knapp, who had been debating such a plan for a while, was looking also to the women who were the girls’ mothers or who the girls would become. Cromer’s colleague, Susie V. Powell, who was appointed by Knapp the following year to pioneer tomato clubs in Mississippi, remembered him arguing, “Canning the tomatoes will give us entrance to the farm kitchen. Tomatoes, fresh and canned, will be a valuable supplement to the family diet. The sale of the tomatoes will provide an income for the girls.”2 McKimmon quicklyjoinedCromerandPowell,leavingbreadbehindandbecomingNorth Carolina’s tomato club organizer. The tomato clubs and the women who organized them, then, intended from the first to use food to transform social hierarchies and practices—but not from the top down. Rather, by targeting girls, arguably the most disenfranchised family members, the tomato club movement explicitly worked up from the grass—or garden—roots. Far from being threatened by women and girls with money, far from being worried as the moonshine literature was about Lucy McElroy’s independent Juletty, the canning movement made putting money in girls’ hands one of its explicit goals. It did not propose girls had to leave rural communities as Sis did in Joel Chandler Harris’s “At Teague Poteet’s.” The tomato clubs suggested communities help themselves, giving concrete form to Sal’s pledge at the end of Martha Gielow’s Old Andy, the Moonshiner: to stay in the mountains and help her own people. The tomato club movement had faith that capitalism and consumerism could work for girls from rural backgrounds; they were not worried about how money might tempt girls into underground economies as it did a couple of decades later in Sherwood Anderson’s Kit Brandon. Even canning tomatoes 85 more importantly, resistance to tomato club work did not come from the girls themselves feeling judged or forced to learn things they already knew, as the girls pushing back against beaten biscuits occasionally did. Instead, the canning movement pulled girls’ economic earning abilities out of the illicit background and into the center of a national conversation about southern food and gender, valuing their abilities and intelligence in the process. FromtheirbeginningsinSouthCarolinain1910,thetomatoclubshadtheir heydayfrom1911untiltheeveofWorldWarI.Theywereunderthepioneering direction of five white, southern women: Cromer in South Carolina, McKimmon in North Carolina, Powell in Mississippi, Ella G. Agnew in Virginia, and Virginia Moore in Tennessee. In that short decade, the girls’ canning club movement swept the southern United States.3 In this chapter, Cromer, McKimmon, Powell, and the girls with whom they work take center stage as representatives of the larger movement. The tomato story takes us beyond the...