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ChaPter five Hop to the Top with the Iowa Chop The Iowa Porkettes and Transformative Leadership in janUary 1964, when jan jaCksOn became the first president of the Iowa Porkettes, the women’s auxiliary of the Iowa Pork Producers Association (iPPa), she reflected on her own realization that women played a vital role in promoting pork consumption. During a visit by “city friends” to their farm near Lytton, Iowa, Jackson learned that they did not eat pork because of its reputation as unwholesome meat. When Jackson argued otherwise , one of her guests, a “professional man from the city,” challenged her to stand behind her husband’s products by serving pork while entertaining company. Jackson realized that she rarely did so, preferring chicken, roast beef, or turkey on special occasions. So, at dinner the following evening, Jackson served French-style green beans with bacon, scalloped potatoes with ham, and roast pork.The results were nothing short of miraculous. Her city friends began to eat pork several times each week, and Jackson wrote, “His wife told me not too long ago that whenever they have company they [cook] chops, outside weather permitting, and a lot of times he will do them in the carport.”1 Jackson’s success in marketing pork products was one small step toward the Iowa Porkettes’greaterobjectiveof cultivating new roles for farm women and integrating women into the male-dominated commercial marketplace. Over the course of twenty-eight years, between 1964 and 1991, members of the Iowa Porkettes promoted pork products in order to assert their roles as agricultural producers, eventually transforming a women’s auxiliary into a female-led commodity organization. Their story provides a key example of how women’s groups adapted to the changing nature of agriculture and utilized the rhetoric and strategies of the Second Wave. Although only a small minority of Iowa’s farm women actually joined the Porkettes (8,366 by the mid-1980s), their experiences offer insight into broader developments that enabled farm women’s organizations to renegotiate gendered divisions of labor, claim new public spaces for women, and demand greater recognition from male agricultural leaders. Founded in the mid-1960s, the Iowa Porkettes appeared at a key mo- 114 • ChaPter five ment in this process, as membership in locally based homemakers’ clubs declined and farm women created alternative activist outlets based not on local geography but on common interests in commodities or political issues. The Porkettes believed that, as women, they could increase pork consumption by teaching urban, female consumers about the healthfulness of pork and proper cooking methods. Doing this required that they leave their homes and local communities, the traditional sites of female activism, and work in the male-dominated field of retail sales and agribusiness. Rather than simply serving an organization, as did the other groups in this study, the Porkettes’ main focus was public outreach. This proved to be a difficult transition because , as Jan Jackson’s example demonstrated, they built upon organizational models employed by generations of farm women. Upon joining the Porkettes, members brought experiences gained through participation with homemakers clubs and auxiliary groups, where they had emphasized separate female groups and social action within a framework of domesticity. Within a few years of organizing, members of the Porkettes struggled to gain recognition and financial support from the iPPa and came to believe that gender limited their ability to act on behalf of the pork industry. They graduallyabandoned maternal and domestic frameworks and began to stress the economic value of their work on the farm and within the iPPa by portraying themselves as agribusiness professionals, instead of farm wives, and by leading large-scale marketing campaigns and fundraising efforts. Their strategy did not carry the same sense of urgency as did that of the women of the National Farmers Organization, but they shared a common rhetoric of stepping in and fulfilling the needs of an organization when men were unable or unavailable to do so. The Porkettes also benefitted from a blossoming farm women’s movement that gained momentum both in the United States and in Canada. In her studyof Ontario farm women, historian Monda Halpern found that after 1970 women increasingly favored “‘modern’ equity feminist principles of sexual sameness and integration” over “female specificity . . . women-centered rituals and domesticity.” Most members of the Porkettes did not identify as “feminist,” but in a 2001 oral history founding member Kathryn Louden recalled that by the time she served as president in 1969 and 1970, members...

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