First Lady of the Farm: Iowa Time Machine October 4, 1918

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On October 4, 1918, Ruth Buxton married Raymond Sayre and moved toward a life she had never lived: work on an Iowa farm. Sayre came to be called the “First Lady of the Farm,” a name earned through her efforts to improve life for rural women in Iowa and, eventually, around the world.

Born in Indianola in 1896, Sayre grew up in a family of bankers and graduated from Simpson College during World War I. She had studied German, but wartime hostility toward the language made teaching jobs difficult to find. Marriage brought a different education. On the Sayre family farm, she encountered daily work without running water or electricity, at a time when farm women’s labor was often treated as a private household matter rather than a concern worthy of public attention.

Sayre helped Raymond make hay, shock oats, and drive horses. She later recalled doing nearly everything except milking the cows. Her adjustment was neither effortless nor abstract: she experienced the demands of farm life firsthand before asking other women what they needed from their communities. In the early 1920s, she began organizing women through the Farm Bureau, driving rural roads in a Model T Ford with her young children along.

Sayre carried those conversations into state, national, and international leadership. She pressed for better rural schools, libraries, and health care, and in 1947 became president of the Associated Country Women of the World. The organization continues to work with rural women on education, health, agriculture, and community-led projects. #Iowa #OTD #History #Farm #Advocacy