Sowing the Seeds of Victory by Rose Hayden-Smith

Author:Rose Hayden-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2014-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Endings

Like the school garden, city garden and garden city movements, Ambler was a product of its historical environment. It was strongly influenced by a number of impulses, including varying reform agendas, European models, woman’s rights, and avid interest in educational opportunities for women and trends of professionalization and agricultural specialization. Federal legislation also influenced the development of Ambler, as did Progressive Era philosophies. The various gardening movements feeding into national gardening programs during World War I were shaped by these impulses, and in turn, added something to each of them.

The imprint of the Progressive Era is easily seen in Ambler, with its emphasis on scientific management, technical training, and highly ordered existence. For example, Ambler’s literature is replete with schedules, and highly specific detail about coursework, the arrangement of living quarters, conduct, etc. While Ambler represented a typical prescriptive Progressive Era program in many ways, it was a bit different. Unlike the other movements of school gardens and community gardens found more than a century ago, which have persisted and are even experiencing a major resurgence today, the experiment of woman’s horticultural schools such as Ambler has not survived. But by its very existence, Ambler provided a new and different meaning for woman’s work in agriculture and horticulture.

As the WLAA did during World War I, Ambler strongly challenged stereotypes about the proper role of women in the labor force and their role in the agricultural sector in particular. The success of the Ambler “farmerettes” (as the WLAA participants came to be called in World War I) defied deeply held beliefs about the potential of middle and upper-class urban women to be successful at hard physical labor and the appropriateness of a certain class of urban females working outside of the domestic sphere. A further challenge was the residential nature of Ambler’s degree program; women lived and worked with other women, freed from the authority of men.

All of these elements were replicated in the WLAA program during World War I; in fact, the WLAA was born of Ambler, a school that took for its formative mission “agriculture as a means of livelihood for women.” The theme of woman’s rights is threaded through the Ambler experience. It is not the primary theme perhaps, but it resonates and echoes in many ways. As women sought increased political, educational, social, and economic opportunities, schools such as Ambler provided places of accommodation and advancement. Ambler enabled women to live together in community, and to direct their own affairs. It provided opportunities for women to study science and for other women to serve as faculty and in leadership roles. It enabled women to challenge widely held stereotypes about their physical limitations and to work with their hands. It prepared several generations of women for new occupations, for self-employment, and for more lucrative work.

By nearly every measure, Ambler was an extraordinary success. But as women gained greater equality and more opportunities, they simply outgrew the need for such institutions. The presence of these institutions at a critical

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