The Federal Emergency Relief Association (FERA) camps, also called She-She-She Camps, were camps established in the United States to aid unemployed women by providing jobs and training. The camps were organized by Eleanor Roosevelt as a women-focused counterpart to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) programs, which catered solely to unemployed men. Roosevelt found that the CCC program's men-only focus left out young women willing to work in conservation and forestry and prepared to spend the six-month program living away from family and close support. Therefore, she lobbied for a sister organization to the CCC that would cater to young women. Roosevelt proposed that this program would consist of camps for jobless women and residential worker schools. The FERA camps, referred to as She-She-She camps by certain detractors, were funded by presidential order in 1933. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins championed one such camp after Roosevelt held a White House Conference for Unemployed Women on April 30, 1934, and subsequently Roosevelt's concept of a nationwide jobless women's camp was achieved. While the public largely supported New Deal programs such as the CCC, FERA camps reached a maximum of about 5,000 women annually by 1936 and served 8,500 women, thanks to Roosevelt's support. This compares to more than 3 million men who participated in the CCC.
History
President Franklin Roosevelt valued the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) because the organization was fueled both by his passion for rural life and the philosophy of William James. James deemed this sort of program the "moral equivalent of war," channeling the passion for combat into productive service. These "tree armies" kept the young male population occupied and engaged with conservation, fighting wildland fires, building dams and creating man-made lakes. However, because the CCC was only available to young men, these positions were not available to women who needed jobs to provide for themselves and their families. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was troubled by the plight of so many women, many of whom did not show up in the bread-lines but were relegated to living in subway tunnels and "tramping," foraging for subsistence outside urban areas. "As a group women have been neglected in comparison with others," the First Lady said, "and throughout this depression have had the hardest time of all." The number of women seeking jobs grew to two million by 1933. During the Great Depression, many employers still subscribed to the idea that women belonged in the home and therefore "were less likely to hire married women and more likely to dismiss those they already employed." Similarly, many New Deal programs that outwardly sought to increase employment were conversely "built on the assumption that men would serve as breadwinners and women as mothers, homemakers, and consumers," and therefore created fewer job opportunities for unemployed women. The feminist writer Meridel Le Sueur wrote that once out of work, women "will go for weeks verging on starvation, crawling in some hole, going through the streets ashamed, sitting in libraries, parks, going for days without speaking to a living soul like some exiled beast". In the middle of 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt met with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins to discuss the possibility of creating a woman-focused program of "camps" designed to provide relief for the unemployed. In May of the same year, President Roosevelt would go on to create the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), headed by statesman and advisor Harry Hopkins. Thanks to the persistence of the First Lady and Labor Secretary Perkins, over the course of the next months, Hopkins determined that FERA should intervene on behalf of women suffering from the Great Depression and unemployment crisis. Thus, in August 1933, he created a women's division of the FERA program, appointing Ellen Woodward as its director. One month later, Hilda Worthington Smith would join Woodward as FERA's Workers' Education Specialist. Worthington Smith went to work for President Roosevelt with a great deal of experience in her field, having established the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Working Women a few years earlier in 1921. On November 20, 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt and Ellen Woodward hosted a White House Conference regarding the urgent needs of women for jobs, food, and housing. It was at this conference that Worthington Smith suggested "the idea of a nationwide program of residential schools, where relief and recreation could be coupled with an educational program that instilled social responsibility." After receiving approval from director Harry Hopkins and collecting funding, Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins launched an initial, experimental camp for unemployed women, Camp TERA (Temporary Emergency Relief Administration).
Camp TERA
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