A LAND ARMY

Great Britain, France and Germany have mobilized a land army of women; will the United States do less? Not if the farmer can be brought to have as much faith in American women as the women have in themselves. And why should they not have faith; the farm has already tested them out, and they have not been found wanting. In face of this fine accomplishment the minds of some men still entertain doubt, or worse, obliviousness, to the possible contribution of women to land service.

The farmer knows his need and has made clear statement of the national dilemma in the form of a memorial to the President of the United States. In part, it is as follows:

“If food is to win the war, as we are assured on every side, the farmers of America must produce more food in 1918 than they did in 1917. Under existing conditions we cannot equal the production of 1917, much less surpass it, and this for reasons over which the farmers have no control.

“The chief causes which will inevitably bring about a smaller crop next year, unless promptly removed by national action, are six in number, of which the first is the shortage of farm labor.

“Since the war began in 1914 and before the first draft was made there is reason to believe that more farm workers had left farms than there are men in our army and navy together. Those men were drawn away by the high wages paid in munition plants and other war industries, and their places remain unfilled. In spite of the new classification, future drafts will still further reduce the farm labor supply.”

With a million and a half men drawn out of the country and ten billion dollars to be expended on war material, making every ammunition factory a labor magnet, it seems like the smooth deceptions of prestidigitation to answer the cry of the farmer with suggestion that men rejected by the draft or high school boys be paroled to meet the exigency. The farm can’t be run with decrepit men or larking boys, nor the war won with less than its full quota of soldiers. Legislators, government officials and farm associations by sudden shifting of labor battalions cannot camouflage the fact that the front line trenches of the fighting army and labor force are undermanned.

Women can and will be the substitutes if the experiments already made are signs of the times.

Groups of women from colleges and seasonal trades have ploughed and harrowed, sowed and planted, weeded and cultivated, mowed and harvested, milked and churned, at Vassar, Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke, at Newburg and Milton, at Bedford Hills and Mahwah. It has been demonstrated that our girls from college and city trade can do farm work, and do it with a will. And still better, at the end of the season their health wins high approval from the doctors and their work golden opinions from the farmers.

Twelve crusaders were chosen from the thirty-three students who volunteered for dangerous service during a summer vacation on the Vassar College farm. The twelve ventured out on a new enterprise that meant aching muscles, sunburn and blisters, but not one of the twelve “ever lost a day” in their eight hours at hard labor, beginning at four-thirty each morning for eight weeks during one of our hottest summers. They ploughed with horses, they ploughed with tractors, they sowed the seed, they thinned and weeded the plants, they reaped, they raked, they pitched the hay, they did fencing and milking. The Vassar farm had bumper crops on its seven hundred and forty acres, and its superintendent, Mr. Louis P. Gillespie, said, “A very great amount of the work necessary for the large production was done by our students. They hoed and cultivated sixteen acres of field corn, ten acres of ensilage corn, five acres of beans, five acres of potatoes; carried sheaves of rye and wheat to the shocks and shocked them; and two of the students milked seven cows at each milking time. In the garden they laid out a strawberry bed of two thousand plants, helped to plant corn and beans, picked beans and other vegetables. They took great interest in the work and did the work just as well as the average man and made good far beyond the most sanguine expectations.”

At first the students were paid twenty-five cents an hour, the same rate as the male farm hands. The men objected, saying that the young women were beginners, but by the end of the summer the critics realized that “brains tell” and said the girls were worth the higher wage, though they had only been getting, in order to appease the masculine prejudice, seventeen and a half cents an hour. There is no pleasing some people! If women are paid less, they are unfair competitors, if they are paid equally they are being petted in short, fair competitors.

Mt. Holyoke and Bryn Mawr have made experiments, and, like Vassar, demonstrated not only that women can, and that satisfactorily, work on the land, but that they will, and that cheerfully. The groups were happy and they comprehended that they were doing transcendently important work, were rendering a patriotic service by filling up the places left vacant by the drafted men.

The Women’s Agricultural Camp, known popularly as the “Bedford Unit,” proved an experiment rich in practical suggestion. Barnard students, graduates of the Manhattan Trade School, and girls from seasonal trades formed the backbone of the group. They were housed in an old farmhouse, chaperoned by one of the Barnard professors, fed by student dietitians from the Household Arts Department of Teachers College, transported from farm to farm by seven chauffeurs, and coached in the arts of Ceres by an agricultural expert. The “day laborers” as well as the experts were all women.

In founding the camp Mrs. Charles W. Short, Jr., had three definite ideas in mind. First, she was convinced that young women could without ill-effect on their health, and should as a patriotic service, do all sorts of agricultural work. Second, that in the present crisis the opening up of new land with women as farm managers is not called for, but rather the supply of the labor-power on farms already under cultivation is the need. Third, that the women laborers must, in groups, have comfortable living conditions without being a burden on the farmer’s wife, must have adequate pay, and must have regulated hours of work.

With these sound ideas as its foundation the camp opened at Mt. Kisco, backed by the Committee on Agriculture of the Mayor’s Committee of Women on National Defense of New York City, under the chairmanship of Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College.

At its greatest enrolment the unit had seventy-three members. When the prejudice of the fanners was overcome, the demand for workers was greater than the camp could supply. Practically the same processes were carried through as at Vassar, and the verdict of the farmer on his new helpers was that “while less strong than men, they more than made up for this by superior conscientiousness and quickness.” Proof of the genuineness of his estimate was shown in his willingness to pay the management of the camp the regulation two dollars for an eight hour working day. And it indicated entire satisfaction with the experiment, rather than abstract faith in woman, that each farmer anxiously urged the captain of the group at the end of his first trial to “please bring the same young ladies tomorrow.” He was sure no others so good existed.

The unit plan seems a heaven-born solution of many of the knotty problems of the farm. In the first place, the farmer gets cheerful and handy helpers, and his over-worked wife does not find her domestic cares added to in the hot summer season. The new hands house and feed themselves. From the point of view of the worker, the advantage is that her food at the camp is prepared by trained hands and the proverbial farm isolation gives way to congenial companionship.

These separate experiments growing out of the need of food production and the shortage of labor have brought new blood to the farm, have turned the college girl on vacation and, what is more important, being a solution of an industrial problem, the unemployed in seasonal trades, into recruits for an agricultural army. And by concentrating workers in well-run camps there has been attracted to the land a higher order of helper.

One obstacle in the way of the immediate success of putting such women on the land is a wholly mistaken idea in the minds of many persons of influence in agricultural matters that the new labor can be diverted to domestic work in the farm house. This view is urged in the following letter to me from the head of one of our best agricultural colleges: “The farm labor shortage is much more acute than is generally understood and I have much confidence in the possibility of a great amount of useful work in food production being done by women who are physically strong enough and who can secure sufficient preliminary training to do this with some degree of efficiency. Probably the larger measure of service could be done by relieving women now on the farms of this State from the double burden of indoor work and the attempt to assist in farm operations and chores. If farm women would get satisfactory domestic assistance within the house they could add much to the success of field husbandry. Women who know farm conditions and who could largely take the place of men in the management of outdoor affairs can accomplish much more than will ever be possible by drafting city-bred women directly into garden or other forms of field work.”

The opinions expressed in this letter are as generally held as they are mistaken. In the first place, the theory that the country-bred woman in America is stronger and healthier than the city-bred has long since been exploded. The assumption cannot stand up under the facts. Statistics show that the death rate in the United States is lower in city than in farm communities, and if any added proof were needed to indicate that the stamina of city populations overbalances the country it was furnished by the draft records. Any group of college and Manhattan Trade School girls could be pitted against a group of women from the farms and win the laurels in staying powers. Nor must it be overlooked that we are not dealing here with uncertainties; the mettle of the girls has been proved.

In any case the fact must be faced that these agricultural units will not do domestic work. Nine-tenths of the farm houses in America are without modern conveniences. The well-appointed barn may have running water, but the house has not. To undertake work as a domestic helper on the average farm is to step back into quite primitive conditions. The farmer’s wife can attract no one from city life, where so much cooperation is enjoyed, to her extreme individualistic surroundings.

A second obstacle to the employment of this new labor-force is due to the government’s failure to see the possibility of saving most valuable labor-power and achieving an economic gain by dovetailing the idle months of young women in industrial life into the rush time of agriculture.

One department suggests excusing farm labor from the draft, as if we had already fulfilled our obligation in man-power to the battlefront of our Allies. The United States Senate discusses bringing in coolie and contract labor, as if we had not demonstrated our unfitness to deal with less advanced peoples, and as if a republic could live comfortably with a class of disfranchised workers. The Labor Department declares it will mobilize for the farm an army of a million boys, as if the wise saw, “boys will be boys,” did not apply with peculiar sharpness of flavor to the American vintage, God bless them, and as if it were not our plain duty at this world crisis to spur up rather than check civilizing agencies and keep our boys in school for the full term.

Refusing to be in the least crushed by government neglect, far-seeing women determined to organize widely and carefully their solution of the farm-labor problem. To this end the Women’s National Farm and Garden Association, the Garden Clubs of America, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Woman’s Suffrage Party, the New York Women’s University Club, and the Committee of the Women’s Agricultural Camp, met with representatives of the Grange, of the Cornell Agricultural College, and of the Farmingdale State School of Agriculture, and formed an advisory council, the object of which is to “stimulate the formation of a Land Army of Women to take the places on the farms of the men who are being drafted for active service.” This is to be on a nationwide scale.

The Council has put lecturers in the Granges to bring to the farmer by the spoken word and lantern slides the value of the labor of women, and is appealing to colleges, seasonal trades and village communities to form units for the Land Army. It is asking the cooeperation of the labor bureaus to act as media through which units may be placed where labor is most needed.

This mobilization of woman-power is not yet large or striking. The effort is entirely civil. But all the more is it praiseworthy. It shows on the part of women, clear-eyed recognition of facts as they exist and vision as to the future.

The mobilization of this fresh labor-power should of course be taken in hand by the government. Not only that, it should be led by women as in Great Britain and Germany. But the spirit in America today is the same as in England the first year of the war, a disposition to exclude women from full service.

But facts remain facts in spite of prejudice, and the Woman’s Land Army, with faith and enthusiasm in lieu of a national treasury, are endeavoring to bring woman-power and the untilled fields together. The proved achievement of the individual worker will win the employer, the unit plan with its solution of housing conditions and dreary isolation will overcome not only the opposition of the farmer’s wife, but that of the intelligent worker. When the seed time of the movement has been lived through by anxious and inspired women, the government may step in to reap the harvest of a nation’s gratitude.

The mobilization of woman-power on the farm is the need of the hour, and the wise and devoted women who are trying to answer the need, deserve an all-hail from the people of the United States and her Allies.