Bringing electricity to the countryside changed everything -- particularly for women.

FDR didn't just bring people jobs. He completely changed rural life. This past weekend, New Deal 2.0 Editor Lynn Parramore spoke at a panel at the FDR presidential library in Hyde Park, New York on the WPA and its role in rural electrification. Her connection to this topic is highly personal -- she starts out with a story about her grandfather, a North Carolina tobacco farmer. He was "austere in his habits and conservative in his politics," she notes, but even so was an "FDR man." And why? Parramore explains that "if you asked him why, he would name two things that FDR did for him: electricity and a two-seater." (A two-seater being a CCC-built outhouse to combat hookworm.)

Indeed, electricity "changed things forever," Parramore recalls. And not just for men -- importantly, electrification had huge consequences for the women of the household. Electricity meant that women could cook more easily with electric stoves and wash clothes in washing machines rather than wood-fired pots. But it also meant that the outside world was brought into the home via the radio. This ended up being huge for women, as Parramore explains:

Before electricity they worked during the week, went to church on Sunday, and that was about it. ...The radio let them know what was happening in the city...and that lead to a convergence of values between the city and the country, including a tendency to reduce the number of children.

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Add to that the fact that electrification simplified farming and families no longer needed large numbers of children to do farm work, and the number of children per family dropped. This meant that "southern women in particular didn't have to spend so much of their lives making babies," Parramore remarks. "Rural electrification broke the gap between the city and the country, allowing the whole economy to expand. FDR...brought rural folks in."

Flash forward: how are rural communities doing today? We're back where we started. "Just as it was then, the rural economy is weak and more volatile than the urban economy," she notes. "Again we have the forgotten Americans." The answer? A modern-day WPA to put people to work and bring rural areas what they need: broadband, better roads, better schools, better drinking water, access to child care and family planning. She concludes: "History shows that the time to act is now."

You can find the full video of her panel here (click on "The Works Progress Administration and the Rural Electrification Administration" in the left-hand menu.)