08/02/2024
In 1910, Mare Samuella Cromer, a rural schoolteacher in South Carolina, organized a girl's tomato club so females aged 9 to 20 could “not learn simply how to grow better and more perfect tomatoes, but how to grow better and more perfect women.” Soon, there were tomato clubs in a number of states. The idea was simple: Teach rural girls how to plant and grow tomatoes, then harvest and can them, and sell them for a profit. The only work the girls didn't do themselves was the plowing of their individual 1/10th acre plots.
In one notable example, a girl harvested 2,000 lbs. of tomatoes. After sales, she earned a profit of $78 (about $2,470 today). This was *real* money for girls who came from hardscrabble backgrounds.
In 1915, one tomato club girl was quoted as saying the work was “long and sometimes tiresome...It has been a way by which I could not only have my own spending money and pay my expenses at the Farm Camp, but I also have a bank account of sixty dollars." (About $1,881 today.)
