In recognition of the continuing agricultural labor crisis, women enlisted in the WLA in large numbers during the spring of 1944. New York City veterans of the 1943 land army held a reunion in late April and adopted the name, "The Winter Soldiers of the Women's Land Army." Prospective employers were invited to this meeting so that they could begin their summer hiring. Among those who were present was the Broadway and Hollywood star Will Geer, whose crop on his Hudson River Valley farm had been harvested entirely by WLA members. In a May 17 article that underscored the need for additional WLA recruits, the New York Times published a University of Michigan student's letter: "My fiance was killed in this war and I feel that perhaps that I, by helping to produce the food so vitally needed by our soldiers, can in part make up for the loss of at least one fighting man." The WLA prepared posters and pamphlets exhorting women to come forward during the 1944 crop year, and the popular press continued to publish laudatory articles about the Women's Land Army.
In an effort to assuage the concerns of potential enlistees about low farm wages, the WLA included information about payment and compensation in its 1944 recruitment pamphlets. Women were assured that they would be paid "the prevailing wage in the area in which they work[ed]." The WLA reported that year-round wages averaged between twenty-five and fifty dollars a month, with room and board furnished, while hourly rates for seasonal workers ranged from twenty-five to fifty cents. In addition, land army members had the option of purchasing a personal-accident insurance policy for $1.50 a month. However, the WLA conceded that "farm wages do not provide the strongest incentive for doing farm work in wartime" and cited the chief motivating factor for joining the land army as the "desire to perform patriotic service."
Nora Stern, seen "soloing," organized a class of tractorettes, which trained on her husband's 260-acre farm.
Although some farmers remained skeptical about using women as agricultural workers, many others came to appreciate the contributions of WLA recruits. By the end of the 1944 crop year, at least some white farmers in the South approved of the use of white women in the fields. As an example, the WLA supervisor from South Carolina reported that "in the past there has been the feeling that white women should not do farm work, but this feeling is gradually changing and some of the best farms are now being operated by [white] women workers." Across the nation, farmers expressed support for the work of the Women's Land Army. Comments, such as "WLA workers rate high with us. Don't know what we'd have done without them!" and "Fine help. Couldn't ask for better," were often reprinted in the Women's Land Army Newsletter.The annual reports issued by state WLA supervisors concurred with this judgment. The sentiments expressed by W. S. Brown of Springfield, Colorado, which were reprinted in the "1944 Colorado Annual Report," were shared by many farmers throughout the United States. "Last summer," remarked Brown, "a 19 year old girl from Oklahoma worked on my ranch. I have never had a hired man who was as efficient in farm work, milking cows, driving a tractor, etc. She was married this fall, and I would like to find another like her."
The number of states that offered training courses for WLA recruits rose from nine in 1943 to forty-four in 1944. Of special significance were the many tractor training courses offered in Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Maine. In Maine, for example, three hundred women received tractor training to work as "shift crew" harrowing potato fields during the late afternoon and early evening hours. In this way, women who were homemakers or who were employed during the day could also join in agricultural work.
The shortage of day-care facilities continued to pose dilemmas for WLA mothers. With the help of Lanham Act funds, 3,100 federal day-care centers were established throughout the United States during World War II, but many more were needed. Insufficient child care services for land army recruits, as well as other working mothers, during World War II created problems that were never adequately resolved.
Land army recruits expressed concerns that WLA camps were poorly managed and that sanitary facilities were inadequate. In New York State, where twenty-five camps housed three thousand recruits, WLA workers complained to the U.S. Employment Service that living and working conditions at some of the sites were substandard. Frances Valentine reported that "few" of the camps in the eight midwestern states she investigated in 1944 had "adequate facilities for bathing or for washing clothes, and some had an inadequate number of toilets."
These problems notwithstanding, the list of WLA accomplishments for 1944 is quite long. Approximately 175 Smith College students worked throughout the summer on New England farms. Nearly two hundred Sweetbriar College students promptly responded to a call to help save Virginia's apple crop. In one county in Oregon, five hundred homemakers were credited with saving the state's bean crop. They boarded the "Housewives' Special" each day at 8:30 a.m., worked until mid afternoon, and returned home at 3 p.m. in time to market and prepare supper. Women drove trucks to grain elevators in the Midwest, chopped cotton in the South, organized a central harvest agency in Oklahoma where farmers could telephone their labor needs which were then broadcast over the local radio, hoed potatoes in Colorado, and established community canning centers across the nation. In all, 774,000 nonfarm women were placed in farm jobs during 1944.
Plans for the 1945 crop year were developed at five regional conferences during December 1944, but before these plans could be fully implemented, the Second World War had ended. Yet the end of the war did not eliminate the need for agricultural labor, and Florence Hall reminded the nation that "this year's farm labor situation is still serious."
Recruiting efforts for 1945 were similar to those of the previous two crop years. More than two thousand "Winter Soldiers of the Women's Land Army" attended rallies held in New York City during the early months of 1945. When addressing the WLA veterans, the state agricultural commissioner of New York declared, "The farmers want the girls back." In an article published in the July 1945 issue of Independent Woman, Florence Hall reiterated the need for farm labor by relating the story of a midwestern farm woman who drove a tractor from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. each day before beginning her farm chores and regular housework.
Throughout the United States, women again heeded the "call to farms" as they helped to weed, thin, prune, harvest, and preserve the 1945 crops. In Kansas, ten thousand town women helped farm women with cooking, housework, child care, gardening, and trucking wheat to elevators. Twenty-eight hundred workers in two Oregon counties devoted 21,431 "man" days to harvesting over 2.5 million pounds of fruits and vegetables. Georgia's farm labor supervisor reported that it was "a common sight to see women behind the planters and distributors, behind the plows driving tractors, or hoeing." Acknowledging the varied work experiences of land army recruits, Hall noted that the WLA roster included "accountants, actresses, artists, bank clerks and tellers, beauticians, entertainers, buyers, nurses, dietitians, designers editors, electrical crane operators, ferry command pilots, government employees, . . . policewomen, research chemists, translators . . . and women from many other vocations." In total, approximately one-half million nonfarm women participated in WLA activities during the victory year.
As the largely forgotten rural counterpart of Rosie the Riveter, land army recruits performed crucial agricultural work that had not been readily available to them in times of peace. For many of the 1.5 million nonfarm women who joined the ranks of the WLA during World War II, the experience proved invaluable. In assessing her summer as a land army worker, one young woman remarked: "[It was] one of the best summers in health gained, new friends made, and perhaps most important of all, a conscience eased by doing some useful work." Another enlistee commented: "I would not have been happy had I not done this work or something like it. . . . We had long hours to work, but I was glad of that because it made me feel like I was helping the war effort that much more."
The winning essay in a General Federation of Women's Clubs contest on the topic, "My Experience Doing Wartime Farm Work," written by Mrs. Leslie Tresham of Hornick, Iowa, highlighted the significance of agricultural work for American women:
It was with a feeling of pride and uncertainty that I started my day as a farm helper. I had promised a farmer, whose only son had enlisted in the Marines, to haul corn from a picker to the elevator. . . . I managed to put through without mishap. . . . When the last ear had tumbled out of the wagon I was so relieved. . . . As I swung the empty wagon alongside of the picker . . . the farmer shouted, "Have any trouble?" "Not a bit," I lied, "It was easy." And, so it went, load after load, day after day, until I have now hauled over 10,000 bushels of corn. Tired? Of course, I get tired, but so does that boy in the foxhole. That boy, whose place I'm trying so hard to fill.
Yet the Women's Land Army was much larger than an organization that recruited 1.5 million nonfarm women for wartime farm jobs. Characterized in State Extension reports as "the keystone in the arch of workers built by the Emergency Farm Labor Program in Michigan" and "a mighty force, marching across Ohio in the food production battle," the Women's Land Army was, in actuality, a movement which touched the lives of women and men throughout the United States.
Legions of American women from a variety of voluntary associations contributed to the success of the WLA by organizing recruitment campaigns as well as by working on farms. Home demonstration agents, faced with much of the responsibility for mobilizing the WLA at the state and local levels, accepted this momentous challenge and put the lessons they learned from their work to good use during the postwar years. From the many "unsung heroines of the food front" to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, American women helped to ensure that the nation's wartime food production goals were met.
Grateful farmers across the nation now recognized that women were capable of performing "practically any type of work to be done on the farm." A Midwestern farmer who had relied upon the help of WLA recruits spoke for many Americans when he said: "I will say that they were eminently successful and helped me get the job done. . . . They drove tractors for me on side rake, pick-up baler, rotary hoe and trucks to pick up hay in the field. . . . The boys in the armed forces should know the remarkable work done by these women and farmer's wives."
Women from towns and cities gained a new appreciation of the meaning of farm work and "the dignity of farm labor." One urban recruit who worked on a dairy farm during the war fittingly commented, "A bottle of milk will never be just a bottle of milk to me again." At the same time, the WLA provided recognition and visibility to the wartime contributions of the many farm women who planted Victory Gardens, drove tractors, tended livestock, and cultivated the fields while continuing to perform their regular chores.
In her last Women's Land Army Newsletter, written on December 10, 1945, Florence Hall concluded that her work with the WLA had been "an enriching experience." Throughout the life of the WLA, Hall's colleagues and co-workers had been eager to provide testimonials about the value of wartime work on farms. In the spring of 1945, one recruit poignantly summarized the meaning of the WLA experience: "No matter how heavy the hay we pitched, how our backs ached from weeding, or how stubborn the team we were driving, we always had the secret joy that we were helping the war effort."
At the end of the Second World War, there was little question but that the women of the United States had successfully come "to the rescue of the crops." Looking back at her WLA experiences from the perspective of nearly fifty years, Mary Ross recalled the remarks of her father, a North Carolina farmer who had depended upon Land Army recruits: "Men may have fought to defend the land but women toiled it. Women saved our heritage."
Judy Barrett Litoff is professor of history at Bryant College, Smithfield, Rhode Island. David C. Smith is Bird and Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine. They have written three books based on the wartime correspondence of American women and are preparing a fourth, We're In This War, Too: World War II Letters from American Women in Uniform. They are co-editors of a forthcoming seventy-reel microfilm edition entitled The World War II Letters of United States Women. © 1993 by Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith
