That Civilizing Spirit

The June brides of the Bicentennial year seemed so promising in Randolph County, North Carolina. 

The county seat, Asheboro, sits halfway between the honeymoon havens in the mountains of Gatlinburg, Tenn., and the long shores of Myrtle Beach. There are closer places endowed with scenic magnificence and abundant sunshine, but none where liquor flows legally. Besides, tradition requires that honeymoons be celebrated out of state. 

The June brides, 18 years old on the average, took their choice of honeymoon spots and then returned home to work and to save for a house and family. Their parents had every reason to be proud. 

The brides — or at least the large majority of them — had already finished high school in a county where most adults had not completed the tenth grade. And while thousands of young people in other parts of the nation sat idle and jobless, Randolph’s women went forth into the mill day and night. Proportionally, twice as many women were employed here as in the country as a whole. And more than half of these worked as operatives in textile, furniture and electrical equipment plants. 

They married boys from home, from hard-working, church-going families and they carried themselves in the community with all the proper pride and ceremony. They seemed so smart, so well educated, so anxious to settle down and pick up the threads of home and family. 

But to hear the older women tell it, something is amiss with these brides. It would seem, say highly placed sources within the Asheboro Council of Garden Clubs, that the youngsters have failed to lay claim to the civilized essence of their heritage. 

 

I 

A garden club is a fellowship, a gathering of the faithful. It is built on respect for the imperatives of nature and the subtleties of order; it aims for grace in community affairs, for a higher evidence of community purpose than the accomplishments of commerce. 

Asheboro is a city on a hill, spanking clean and astonishingly beautiful. The women of the garden clubs have seen to that. They have brought forth splashes of marigolds from clay strips between parking lots. They have shaded the entranceways to public buildings with dogwood clouds. They have gotten down on their knees and dug their fingernails into the dirt, all to reveal to Asheboro a glimpse of the creative potential of its civilization. They have worked in this manner for three generations. 

The fourth generation has declined to carry on. The women of the garden clubs now are generally in their fifties, often in their sixties or seventies; fewer than a dozen are thirty.

The leadership is worried. Has the spirit died? Why do the youngsters not feel the impulse to work with the elements, to create pleasant places from the chaos of muddy hillsides and weedy dooryards? 

Any woman can join a garden club, any woman who cares. There are clubs in almost every neighborhood, old or new, rich or poor, black or white. There are clubs in sections of town so far back up the hill that the city has not yet paved the roads or brought out the water lines. Only the clubwomen are there to see that things are presentable. There is something essentially middle-class behind the garden club spirit. But women from all social levels respond to its call. Each club is autonomous with a homogeneous membership and a program that best suits its needs. A club in the black neighborhood, for example, planted trees on the grounds of a day-care center while several white clubs were seeding flower beds at a historical site. 

But all the clubs send representatives to a city-wide council which operates a program called HANDS to coordinate beautification efforts. At the Bicentennial-Southern regional HANDS meeting in Charleston, S.C., Asheboro (population: 14,000) placed first among cities of its size on the basis of its comprehensive HANDS program. 

The Bicentennial year was an especially challenging one for the garden clubs; there was the state project which involved large-scale plantings of the official North Carolina Bicentennial trees, dogwood and crepe myrtle, plus the local historical project restoring the building and grounds of the century-old Female Academy. In addition, there was the ongoing work: Beauty Spot of the Month recognition, horticultural scholarship administration, clean-up campaigns, Blue Star highway marker plots, and all the rest. 

Young members or no young members, the clubwomen plunged ahead and laid their post-Bicentennial plans. At the top of the list was improving the grounds of the new Council on Aging office, located in a defunct convenience-store outlet, with a pocket-sized, multi-level, curbside garden, including shady and sunny places to sit. There would be different flowers blooming for different seasons, and the path from car to door would be set in old brick. It would take a long time to finish. 

Meanwhile, the clubwomen gather for their neighborhood club meetings. After a business session conducted by a string of officers and committee chairmen, they listen to a program planned months in advance; topics range from “Flowers of the Old South” to “Wildflowers of North Carolina” to “The Therapeutic Value of Gardening.” Occasionally the programs deal with the nuts-and-bolts of plant propagation or flower arranging, but transmission of specific skills is generally left to the informal network of family and neighbors. The clubs assume broader educational and moral responsibilities — the social and psychological examination of the gardening impulses, the commitment to transmit the concept of a civilized community. 

Perhaps for this reason the Council of Garden Clubs leaders, although busy as always, spoke of their Bicentennial accomplishments with an undertone of disappointment. There were no youngsters to teach, no one left who would sit and listen to the lessons. 

 

II 

Randolph County is neither rich nor intellectually sophisticated; it is typical of the Piedmont Carolinas, founded economically on textiles and furniture, culturally on country churches and bootleg beer. 

The last time the census takers came around, they found only 900 women, out of 40,000, who had been to college. But Randolph has a library system, a proud one, and it took generations for the women to build it. 

The county government has now assumed a part of the responsibility for the libraries. People are proud of the system — 98 percent told state researchers their library facilities and services were outstanding — and much of the work is still carried on by volunteers. Unpaid women, Friends of the Library, come in each day to spell the small, paid staff, to raise funds for books, and to supervise and expand the local history and genealogy collections. Every morning, they place vases of fresh-cut flowers on the circulation desk. 

As these women age, it is possible, though not certain, that the burden of their work will shift to the larger body of taxpayers, who will hire public servants to take over what private volunteers once did. 

It’s a familiar pattern for rural areas like Randolph County. Once when families were hungry, they were fed by the women of the county and their churches. But during the recession of 1974 and 1975, so many people went hungry that a volunteer army of women working literally round the clock, and bolstered temporarily by an influx of unemployed men, fell months behind the job. Reluctantly latching onto federal grants, the county hired more personnel in its social services department and began a more or less serious attempt to enroll citizens for food stamps. 

Perhaps more significantly, the social services department hired a fulltime volunteer coordinator, someone who could keep the women working hard and thus keep the taxes down. 

 

III 

Out from Asheboro, in the tiny mill villages along Deep River and the farming communities between the ridges of the Uwharries, the work of civilizing society has fallen to the Extension Homemakers. 

In the spring of 1976, when some 200 Homemakers gathered for a Bicentennial festival, more than a dozen were honored for perfect meeting attendance records dating back before World War II. Dozens more had not missed a meeting since the 1950s. The Extension Homemakers are still holding on, still working fearsomely hard, but few of the members are young enough now to begin building such venerable attendance records. 

The Homemakers are mystics. They look into the depths of family life and see powerful forces to be mobilized for social order. For their Bicentennial project, they assumed responsibility for partial funding of Girls’ Haven of North Carolina, a private corporation organizing homes for the state’s homeless teenage girls. “If every mother were an Extension Homemaker,” they said, “there would be no need for a place like Girls’ Haven.” 

They made a quilt, every stitch pulled by hand with beeswax-strengthened thread, and offered chances on the quilt to everyone making donations to Girls’ Haven. 

But a quilt is not a raffle item plucked from a hat. Imagine, in the bygone days, a country nome where the beds are piled high with quilts. The homemaker knew each square as a quiet evening of needlework when a baby was on the way, or a stolen moment of stillness amid the clatter of small children. Or a long, dark night marked by the anguish of one or another episode from the history of family troubles. No outsider could read the story of a quilt; its tale was private and personal. 

The Homemakers’ 1976 quilt was different. It was conceived and executed outside the family, designed by 15 neighborhood clubs according to a self-revealing theme. A square with a redbird on a dogwood branch stood for North Carolina; a pillared mansion was the South; a Liberty Bell was the nation; a farmer and his wife symbolized the country hearth and home; and a double-wedding-ring patchwork pattern offered, as a touch of tradition, the unciphered calligraphy of the ancient quilt. 

The Homemakers’ quilt was programmatic. Nobody’s grandmother ever saw a quilt like that. But one fine September afternoon, the quilt was stretched across a century-old frame in the agriculture building next to the courthouse, with the clubwomen clustered round for the quilting bee. It was not an old-style bee; women from black clubs and white clubs throughout the county sat side by side, their needles darting under the watchful eye of the county home extension agent, Drue Trotter. Some of the women admitted they had not learned enough of quilting at their mothers’ knees, and had honed their skills from books and a night class at Randolph Tech. Some argued that the edges were finished incorrectly, not turned down in the old way but bound up according to an imported book-lesson. Nonetheless, the Homemakers made a quilt and raised $1500 from their raffle. 

Hundreds of homemakers, many of them grandmothers, are still firmly enmeshed in the extension clubs. In 1963, the state of North Carolina commissioned a study on the needs of women which predicted that home extension agents could lead the way toward the family of the future. The agents could show the poor how to eat better for less, how to stretch tight budgets still more tightly. They could link the state’s millions of rural families to the expanding resources and services of an industrializing world. Through the mechanisms of 4-H clubs and teen service organizations, the agents could open the larger world to children, especially to girls who might otherwise never picture what lay down the road beyond the local mill. 

Mrs. Trotter, like dozens of other agents in dozens of other counties, has taken her mission seriously. She has done everything possible to keep the new generation involved in regenerating the extension spirit. It’s not her fault if the potential seems to be slipping further away. 

In 1976, one of her 4-H students, Kathy Kearns, went off to a state university with a scholarship she won in a statewide clothing competition. After nine years of learning about fabrics and fashions and wardrobes and budgets, Miss Kearns spent the summer before college sharing her skills, on a volunteer basis, with the Randolph County community. She taught sewing courses to youngsters, fixed bulletin boards on clothing repair, wrote newspaper articles on making clothes and wearing them proudly, led workshops for the housing authority on how children can learn to sew on buttons and dress respectably. 

But after college, Miss Kearns probably will not be available as a community resource in the same way. She plans to use her scholarship not to learn home economics or fashion design but to study textile chemistry. Like Kathy Kearns, the brightest, most dedicated young women trained by the 4-H/home extension system are being won for the future by the nation’s industry and lost to the personalized, women-centered system which raised them. 

Another Randolph County home agent, human development specialist Lynn Qualls, says most young women are simply too busy to work closely with the extension agents and their service projects. “You look at the families with young children,” Mrs. Qualls said, “the ones who are right there at the beginning of the life cycle, teaching the littlest children half of what they’ll ever know. They’re all at work, both the mother and the father, and either they’re working second shift or third shift, the husband on one and the wife on another, or else the children are in nursery school all day. These are the homemakers we have to reach today, and there’s no way they can make a commitment to any of our ongoing programs. Where can they find the time?” 

At the county’s Bicentennial festival in October, the home agents held open house and distributed pamphlets encouraging young wives and mothers to join the Extension Homemakers clubs to learn the secrets of upgraded family life and the skills for community leadership. But Mrs. Qualls wasn’t putting much stock in the success of the pamphlets; her project for 1977 is a monthly newsletter for parents of pre-schoolers, conveying the secrets to the new generation by mail, providing easy access in living-room comfort, and making little demand on their time and energy. 

The younger women are growing up with different sets of skills for a different world. They have learned far more than their grandmothers from the public schools. TV and the generalized popular culture have taught them differently. The new Miss Randolph County, for example, won her title by singing in the style of a quintessentially New York rock group, Manhattan Transfer. Last year’s Miss Randolph, a home economics graduate of Western Carolina University, sees little opportunity at home for utilizing her skills; she is seeking a career in boutique merchandising, hoping to work in a larger population center. Failing that, she says, she may try a stint as a stewardess. 

Winners of the annual Miss Randolph competition can, of course, set their sights higher than most. But there are other ways out of the mill open to those with less outstanding accomplishments. It is possible, for example, to get second-shift work as a toe sewer in a hosiery mill and study practical nursing for a couple of years at Randolph Tech. In nearby counties, there are technical institutes teaching dental hygiene, keypunch operation, bookkeeping, medical secretary skills, even operating room technology. Almost all these programs are filled to overflowing, with long waiting lists. Almost all the students are working while they study, and women students, more often than men, are working in mills. 

Two other escapes from the mill are available to women with certain backgrounds and inclinations. Some can go to college. And some can enter trades traditionally left to men. Debbie Allen, for example, recently graduated seventh in her class from truck-driving school and became a long-distance driver for Klopman Mills. But marriage- and-family is not often an escape, not in 1977. The cost of living is far too steep for a man to bear alone. 

The June brides and all the other young women, enrolled in school and already on the job, are pulling for themselves. Their work has little to do with the group accomplishments and mutual recognition of Extension Homemakers or garden clubs. They are putting in long hours at work, at school, cleaning up the house, running after children. They’re becoming a little like men, too busy to trim shrubbery around the entrance to the library. They’d rather pay their taxes, be left alone and let someone else take care of the city’s beauty. 

Besides, the Bicentennial youngsters still have the older women around to carry on the volunteer work. The effort has not been abandoned. Not yet.  

 

Sidebar 

RANDOLPH COUNTY'S WORKING WOMEN 

A century ago, Randolph County, North Carolina, looked the way the New South was supposed to look. Dozens of new brick factories were clustered along the banks of Deep River, spinning cotton for the first great wave of piedmont Carolina industrialists. Surrounding each plant was a dusty mill village; sprawling back from the villages were small farms, and then forests, already staked out for the growing furniture industry. Over the generations since, Randolph has remained in the mainstream of the Southern textile-furniture economy, never really urbanizing or growing rich or developing the wide range of industries and services associated with other industrialized regions. But change did come to the county, and no one was affected more by the change than the women of Randolph. 

The old cotton mills closed down one by one or were converted to more sophisticated operations specializing in synthetic fibers or the final stages of textile processing, such as knitting, hosiery and apparel. The textile giants, Burlington and J.P. Stevens, built modern, mechanized plants in the county, and other national firms, such as General Electric and Union Carbide, moved in to produce small electrical items like hair dryers and batteries. Randolph’s industrial base widened slightly, but more importantly it shifted from heavy labor involving raw materials to lighter production tasks handled more and more frequently by women. 

The proportion of the textile labor force who are women grew slowly from 1910 to 1960; then in the decade of the 60s it jumped from 52 percent to 60 percent. In 1970, only 20 percent of Randolph’s working women were in clerical work (far below the national average of 35 percent). Men still dominated the skilled production trades, along with managerial positions and the professions, but women kept the mills going. 

In May, 1976, the Randolph Committee on the Status of Women issued a report which combines statistics with interviews to create a profile of women’s lives in a piedmont county. It finds that married women with young children are more than twice as likely to work as are such women generally (58 percent to 28.5 percent). Childcare services are expensive and inadequate, and these working women carry a double burden: in the words of one respondent, the major problem they face is “operating a home and doing a full-time job. ” 

In addition, the Committee reported that men in Randolph earn more than women in virtually every line of work, at every educational level. The typical male worker earned $5,777 in 1970, while the typical female made only $3,795. Randolph, like other piedmont counties, is at the very bottom of the industrial wage structure. Only by going to work along with their husbands have the county’s women spared their families the worst exigencies of poverty. At the same time that they carry home their necessary wages, they also provide the caretaking function in the home that makes family survival possible. 

 

 Sidebar 

THE WANING OF THE PERSONAL TOUCH 

Mrs. Jones - which is not her real name - turned 70 last winter and came down with a pretty bad illness. She doesn’t like to dwell on what specifically went wrong with her body, but she readily admits it was a terrible winter and she finally had to retire. Mrs. Jones’ retirement is a relative matter. True, she no longer goes into her real estate office every morning to work until late at night. Her daughter Louise has taken over most of that responsibility. But Mrs. Jones was always much more than just a hard-working, independent businesswoman. She has also been a ferociously dedicated clubwoman, and she’s not about to give up that. 

When the warm weather came, Mrs. Jones seemed to perk up a little and get around better. She still has days when she just can’t make it to meetings. She’s had to resign from several officerships, but what she’s lost in the range of her activities she has more than made up for in intensity. “I’m not one of those people who feels like the world owes me a living, ” she says. “I feel like I owe the world everything I’ve got left. ” 

Louise is as proud of her mother as a daughter can be. She is proud of the real estate office her mother built up from nothing over thirty years of widowhood. She is proud of the plaques and silver bowls and certificates of appreciation that clubs have presented Mrs. Jones; everything is on display in the office, right by the door. Louise is working hard to keep that business going - she’s come out of a rough marriage and has two children to feed - but the work means more than a living. 

“Back when my mother started this office, business was a lot harder for a woman than it is now,” she says. “People didn’t want to do business with a woman. She had to build up their respect year by year, little by little, and she did it. And now that things are in my hands, I’m not about to throw all that away. When people have faith in you, you’ve got yourself an awful big responsibility right there. ” 

But Louise doesn’t talk with as much confidence about the other side of her mother’s responsibilities - the volunteer work and club life, the years of small projects raising money for needy children, coordinating blood drives and visiting with orphans and getting a piano for the school. Louise hasn’t been able to find it in herself to take up these sorts of activities. She’s not sure why.“My mother is one of the most dedicated people you can imagine, ” she says. “I just wish I were more like her in a lot of ways. Sometimes I just look at her and shake my head, and I think to myself, ‘Where does she get all that energy? How does she do it?’ ” 

Mrs. Jones sees it differently. “Louise doesn’t exactly have what you’d call an easy life. She’s got those two little boys to raise all by herself, and she’s got more than enough work here for one woman.” But what goes unsaid tells the story: didn’t Mrs. Jones herself raise Louise without a father, and didn’t she too work day and night putting together that business? 

“My mother’s had it much harder than I have, ” Louise says. “She made this business work, she made people come to her about real estate because she sort of carried things an extra step. She cared about them personally, I think that was the main thing. And it showed. She followed up on people - if somebody died in their family, she kept up with what was happening to them, and people appreciated it. Nowadays, the main thing is to know your business - my mother always did that, too. I try and keep up with the personal touch, but I guess Asheboro’s gotten a little bit larger. You can’t do it any more to the same extent. And people don’t want the same degree of attention; they don’t expect the same spirit. ”