Most Americans have heard of Rosie the Riveter, but few know about the women who stepped in to harvest crops and keep farms running.
By December 1942, over two million male farm workers had gone off to war, creating a severe labor shortage. By 1945, that number grew to six million. The Women’s Bureau and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture proposed the Women’s Land Army in 1941, but Congress didn’t approve it until 1943. Over three million workers were eventually employed by the WLA.
Florence Hall of Michigan was appointed director of the WLA and quickly secured agents to recruit women workers in 43 U.S. states. Hall had the perfect skill set. She was raised on a farm, and received her B.S. in home economics from Michigan State Agricultural College. She had also been employed as a federal government home demonstration agent and a lecturer for the Bureau of Dairy Industry, part of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.
Most farm families believed urban women would be useless. Opposition from farm wives appeared in the letters to the editor sections of rural newspapers:
“(Town women) are glamour girls (who won’t) get their hands soiled, or the polish off their nails or a curl out of place.”
“If we can get city women and girls who can live without bathrooms and nail polish, who can pump and carry water, work over a hot range all day, who can eat at a table with sweaty men in dirty overalls, we can use them in our homes.”
There were other problems. In 1943, WLA recruiters in South Carolina reported that there “was much antagonism to the very suggestion” of using white women as farm workers. State officials said, “it was thought best to start the Women’s Land Army in the state with white women only this year, as, if it became known first as a [N]egro program, it would have been impossible later on to interest white women in participating.” The 1944 Kentucky Annual Report stated “it is not in keeping with the southern tradition to think of [white] women as replacing [N]egroes.”
In spite of opposition, women and girls were eager to help and signed up in droves. A number of agricultural colleges and universities offered two to three-week training courses covering basic farm tasks, but most women learned on the job. Tractor companies such as International Harvester taught women tractor safety operation, gear loading, mechanical repair, and plow hitching. Some women who had day jobs took tractor classes so that they could work harvesting crops in the evening hours.
In a nationwide address on Farm Mobilization Day, January 12, 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “food is the lifeline of the forces that fight for freedom. Free people everywhere can be grateful to the farm families that are making victory possible.” The Office of War Information and the War Food Administration produced promotional materials stating that “raising food is a real war job” and “bread is ammunition as vital as bullets.”
Fifty years after the war ended, Mary Ross remembered what her dad, a North Carolina farmer who had depended upon WLA recruits, said, “Men may have fought to defend the land, but women toiled it. Women saved our heritage.”
Leslie Tresham of Hornick, Iowa, wrote about her experience in the WLA,
“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.”