Jean Stillman Long was born on January 6, 1891, at Canadice, New York, was educated in Milwaukee and New York state, taught school in rural Montana, and became a farmer's wife following her marriage to a Downsville (Dunn County) dairyman, Clifford Y. (Cy) Long. After spending about a decade of doing almost exclusively tasks expected of a farm wife in the 1920s, she began to get involved in helping local organizations of the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of America, Wisconsin Division (Wisconsin Farmers Union) stage fund-raising pageants. Later in the 1930s she was certified as a recreation leader by the Works Progress Administration; from the late-1930s to the early-1960s she served as educational leader of the Central Cooperative Wholesale (CCW), Superior, and the Wisconsin Farmers Union respectively. She remains faithful to the idea of farmer cooperatives (especially those started and sustained by Farmers Union members), and a loyal political liberal. As late as the fall of 1976 Jean Long, having removed by then from her home near Downsville to Boyceville worked long hours at the Menomonie headquarters of the Dunn County Democratic Party.
Jean Long is a most remarkable woman. I [interviewer Dale Treleven of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin] first met her in August 1967 while assisting the State Historical Society's director of research conduct an interview with former state Farmers Union president Kenneth W. Hones, at Hones' cottage home near Lake Wissota. I visited with her several times at Madison between 1967 and 1971; shortly after my appointment as the Society's oral history coordinator I decided that Jean Long, if she was willing, would be my first interviewee. Only in July of 1974 did I learn that she had been near death in the early-1970s, had had major surgery, and made an exceptional recovery.
