100 years ago in The Record
Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1918
Rensselaer County needs an “army of women” to make wartime food conservation efforts effective, a state leader in home economics tells a meeting in the board of supervisors’ chamber today.
Clara Belle Nye’s immediate priority is to get the county to provide $350 to cover travel and other expenses for Alice J. Bunce, the government-appointed food conservation expert. Representing Cornell Agricultural College, Nye predicts that the need for food conservation will grow more urgent during the second year of the U.S. war against Germany.
“We are in possession of information that leaves no doubt that the year just begun is going to be one of trial and hardship,” Nye says, “and it is up to every man and woman to help meet the test.
“We need at least 1,000 women in the food conservation campaign in this county. We have had an executive committee of seven women so far, but there is not evidence that more than two have been of service to the county agent in her work, the work of spreading the federal and state propaganda for saving food in every way possible.”
The government pays Bunce’s salary, but not her expenses. $350 is equivalent to just over $6,100 in 2018 money.
“The amount of money asked to retain the services of the agent here is insignif- icant compared with the big work in which we are engaged – the work of not only producing but saving food to win the war,” Nye argues, “If we do not get the money in some way we will simply have to withdraw the agent.”
Since the supervisors won’t meet again until April, and are unlikely to hold a special session for this purpose, attendees at today’s conference agree raise the money for Bunce privately, or provide her with a guarantee enabling her to travel on credit until the board reconvenes.
New citizens
“At length you have the vote!” state senator George B. Wellington tells the Woman’s Suffrage Party tonight, “I congratulate you women that you have become at last voting stockholders, so to speak.”
Wellington’s address is part of the suffrage party’s lecture series held at Troy High School. “A sovereign state has most of the attributes of a corporation,” he says, “but it has no money capital and so, of course, it has no stockholders.
“But by analogy the citizens are interested in the corporation, as stockholders are interested in a business corporation….They have a financial interest, for they have to pay taxes, and, in addition to that, they have a living interest, for the state affects them in all of their human relationships.”