Associated Country Women of the World Conference, 1936

From  the May 1936 “Country Life On BC” and written by Elizabeth Bailey Price an attendee at the  Associated Countrywomen of the World Conference in Washington, DC, this is a report on the activities at the Conference. The headline to the article is: “City Women Expect Too Much of Rural Areas”. The following four paragraphs explain the headline.

City Women expect too much from countrywomen. They expect them to raise a large supply of food and sell it to them cheaply. They should be willing to pay fair prices – knowing that by buying it from BC producers they get a fresher and better flavoured product, and more important, they contribute to their own welfare.

City women should refrain from littering beautiful country sides with picnic debris, from destroying trees and flowers and wildlife that countrywomen cherish, remembering that they pass on but countrywomen stay.

Countrywomen should shed their inferiority complex and assert the superiority of their standards of life as the foundation upon which civilization must henceforth be built.

Countrywomen take on the greater burden of child bearing, for statistics show that in many countries, city women do not reproduce themselves. City women should see that a fair proportion of money spent on education  should go to that of rural children. It also behooves a far-sighted government to give every possible service to the mothers and homemakers  of the larger number of the future generation.

E. B. Price called the ACWW Conference in Washington, DC, the greatest pilgrimage of peace the world has ever known. So great were the numbers attending that even the White House was unable to cope with the problem of serving refreshments to the largest crowd ever gathered there for a garden party. Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt extended the warmest of welcomes, saying, “I've been chuckling with glee that so many of you found it possible to come.” The staff of MacDonald College in Guelph arose to the emergency by releasing a home economics class  from examinations to make thousands of substantial sandwiches, which with hundreds of paper cups of ice cream, paper plates and saucerless china cups of tea, made a delicious lunch for 10,000 women. After the conference there were visits to farm houses in Virginia and Maryland, and a two day sojourn at Cornell University to observe the administration of home bureau services from that Institution.

There were, of course, resolutions and other activities also. In closing, Elizabeth Bailey Price wrote: “ I leave you the challenging words of that great champion of women's causes, Carrie Chapman Catt - “All women – city women, countrywomen, old women, young women must be crusaders for peace. Wherever you are – think peace, talk peace and WILL peace.”

Mrs. E. Price was on the BCWI Board as Director in 1936, as Secretary in 1938 and Vice President in 1940.

Yours For  Home and Country, Ruth Fenner, Provincial Historian, British Columbia Women's Institute