Reflections of 40 years of women in FFA
janet Kubat Willette
Date Modified: 11/04/2009 3:00 PM
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Agri News staff writer
Forty years ago this fall, the National FFA organization voted to allow females to join what up until then had been an all-male organization.
It took two years to pass at the national convention, said Louise Worm of Lakefield. Worm and two of her classmates, Debbie Kocks and Elaine Sieber, were the first girls to join FFA in Minnesota.
Worm was also one of the first female agricultural education teachers and FFA advisers in the state.
Worm, Kocks and Sieber were juniors at Chaska Senior High School in the fall of 1969 and were eager to join FFA. Worm wanted to join FFA to show her sheep in another venue.
The trio had to wait until everything was official before they could join, Worm said. It was the third quarter of the school year when she paid her dues and became a member of the FFA.
Retired FFA adviser Richard Finger remembers the addition of girls as a positive move. Agricultural education programs were struggling with low enrollments and allowing girls to join FFA increased enrollment.
Some boys in FFA found it hard at first to accept girls, Finger said. But the girls performed well, in fact, a lot of times they outperformed the boys, he said. Supervision at conventions caused a little problem, but Finger said the girls he took to conventions were trustworthy and he never had any problems.
Wayne Nattress, executive director of the Iowa FFA Foundation, said allowing girls to join FFA was the best thing the organization ever did.
"If FFA hadn't let women in, many rural schools would no longer have vocational agriculture classes because they wouldn't have been able to keep the numbers up to justify the program with males alone," Nattress said. "Girls saved ag education and FFA."
Nationally, 40 percent of FFA members today are female.
Minnesota has 184 vo-ag programs and 172 FFA programs. Sixty-six of the 220 instructors are women. There are nearly 9,000 FFA members in the state.
Over the last 15 years, 56 of the 92 constitutional officers have been female.
Minnesota FFA executive secretary Jim Ertl said the FFA program would not be as strong as it is today without women.
"It (the 1969 vote) was fantastic and maybe long overdue at the time," Ertl said.
The diversity of FFA is a strength, said Gail Kiley Sanders, one of Minnesota's first female agricultural education teachers.
"There's nothing more boring than something that's too homogenous," she said.
Agri News senior staff writer Jean Caspers-Simmet contributed to this article.