A Splendid Piece of Work

The author considers present-day memories of home demonstration clubs to be an insult to the bright, shrewd, energetic, sometimes heroic young county agents who taught Arkansas's rural women to be self-sustaining through two world wars, devastating droughts, floods, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. And Arkansas's isolated farm women spread their wings as they took leadership roles and embraced their communities--especially hungry school children--and later manned canning centers to help neighbors slaughter and can starving livestock during the darkest days of the 1930s. As the history travels from decade to decade, it allows the reader to see nuanced changes taking place in Arkansas's rural women. A must-read for anyone who had an Arkansas grandmother or who loves women's history! Learn more about the book--and the Hills' adventures as they speak throughout Arkansas--by simply searching for "A Splendid Piece of Work" on the Internet (or by entering arkansasruralwomenshistory.com).
About the Author: Elizabeth Griffin Hill is an independent Arkansas women's historiographer who has become a cheerleader for our unsung rural women. After being offered the opportunity to write the one-hundred-year history of Arkansas's rural women, she and her husband, Richard, discovered an absolute treasure trove of at least 500,000 pages of Arkansas's Cooperative Extension Service narrative reports from 1911 to 1965 at the National Archives at Fort Worth. After she and Richard took 10,000 photos of documents while leaning over a a table--what she calls the equivalent of ironing all day on a too-low ironing board--Hill spent several months transcribing the old, carbon-copy reports from her laptop to her PC. During those months, she began to understand just what she and Richard had found. She compares it to going out into the deepest ocean, finding a sunken ship filled with nuggets of purest gold, and bringing the treasure back to the people of Arkansas! More recently, she was invited to write the women's chapter of a Butler Center Books anthology entitled To Can the Kaiser: Arkansans and the Great War. She was once again amazed at Arkansas's women on the home front as she penned her chapter, "A Service That Could Not be Purchased." Hill earned a BA and MA in professional and technical writing from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. While working on her master's, she focused on historical research and writing.