The South Carolina Home in Black and White: Race, Gender, and Power in Home Demonstration Work

This essay examines the intersectional experience of African American home demonstration agents in South Carolina between 1910 and 1968. It investigates how gender created common experiences and how white supremacy complicated those commonalities. Both black and white women in South Carolina played prominent roles in the development of national home demonstration service, each serving as agents to help women of their own race improve rural life. It reveals that the state's white and black female agents shared a commitment to improving farm women's lives and that they both experienced the institutional discrimination inherent in being female professionals in a male-dominated organization. Gender and race dictated different emphases in program structure, salaries, and services available to clients. While white agents experienced gender discrimination, black agents experienced the "double discrimination" of race and gender. Race prevented the development of an equal professional sisterhood. Examining the divergence of women's experiences in South Carolina illustrates a pattern of cooperation across gender lines and friction across racial ones.