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ChaPter three Does Your Man Belong to the Farmers Union? Women and Cold War Politics in the Iowa FarmersUnion in marCh 1950 edna Untiedt of Dixon, Iowa, penned a letter to Fred Stover, the president of the Iowa Farmers Union (ifU), in which she lamented farm women’s declining interest in the organization. She found that, just as the women of the Iowa Farm Bureau had shifted their focus to leisure activities, few women attended local meetings. Instead, they formed social clubs devoted to handicrafts, gift exchanges, or simply “playing cards.” This was problematic because after 1945 the National Farmers Union (nfU) hoped to see its inclusive rhetoric carried out in practice, with women working alongside men in the main organization. At the behest of the national leadership, the ifU ladies auxiliary actually voted to dissolve the state organization in 1948.The following year, in keeping with directives from national leaders to foster and integrate women’s leadership, Untiedt became the lone female member of the state board of directors. Still, women’s attendance at regular meetings was dismal. Untiedt, a twenty-six-year member of the ifU, complained that farm wives “don’t believe in women getting ahead. They say that’s a man’s job.” Were it not for the demands of farm work, she would make more personal visits to women’s groups and “do more for the Farmers Union.”1 Drawing on decades of experience as a leader in the women’s auxiliary, Untiedt understood that managing the limitations of social feminisms and devising alternative strategies for women’s activism was a complicated process . Orders from the top down contained few specific recommendations and did little to erode prevailing social norms or justify women’s activity in traditionally male spaces. The story of women in the ifU during the 1950s illustrates the variable trajectories of social feminisms, how integrative strategies were often conditional and how, even as full members, women were still directed toward specific roles that limited their activities. As historian Roy Wortman has noted, a distinct woman’s voice in the nfU could only be attained if people were “willing to both listen and act on her counsel .” In other words the concept of inclusivity was not a sufficient motivator. Even modest attempts at integrating women could only be undertaken by a 60 • ChaPter three motivated membershipwith active male leaders who intentionallycultivated women’s voices.2 In the case of the ifU, the very survival of the organization was at stake. Untiedt hinted at some of the internal tensions in her letter of March 1950, when she jokingly counted herself among a number of “suspicious characters ” in the ifU. She related the storyof how, when she attended a state board meeting in Grinnell, Iowa, she had called home to her husband, Albert. A neighbor on the party line overheard the conversation and, upon her return home, asked Untiedt endless questions as to her whereabouts. Untiedt assured Stover that the inquisitive neighbor overheard nothing of significance and was “very likely still wondering” what had occurred at the meeting.3 After 1945 the liberalism that defined the ifU became inflammatory and dangerous in the context of the Cold War.The Farmers Union stood in stark contrast to the American Farm Bureau Federation by favoring centralized federal control over conservation and subsidy programs, the extension of wartime price supports, economic assistance for low-income and middling farmers, and policies that kept corporate agriculture at bay. They asserted that federal regulation was vital in helping farmers compete and thrive within a free-market economy. Yet these ideas, which were once popular under the New Deal during the 1930s, had lost theirappeal as anticommunist fervor guided national politics in the postwarera. Political conservatives cast subsidy and parity programs as thinly veiled, centralized economic planning schemes similar to those in the Soviet Union. Agricultural exports, as well as images of productive, mechanized family farms, were central to Truman’s doctrine of containing communism through economic development. In an era when Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson asserted “crop shortages can cause Communism,” fostering friendly trade and enabling production abroad seemed an obvious answer to the hunger and poverty that spurred revolution. From the perspective of conservative policy makers, then, limiting agricultural production through cash payments and subsidy programs and defending farmers who subsisted on the margins amounted to subversion of American democracy.4 By 1950, when the nfU had fewer than 300,000 members nationwide, president James Patton set out to...

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