While agricultural officials debated these important issues, the farm labor shortage intensified as farmers departed from rural America to don military uniforms or seek more lucrative work in war industries. The Bureau of Agricultural Economics reported that between April 1940 and July 1942 more than two million men left agricultural jobs. By the end of the war, the farm population had declined by six million persons, yet wartime food production had increased by an astounding 32 percent over the years 1935–1939.
Originally, many farmers were skeptical about using women for farm work. By the end of 1944, however, many had come to appreciate the WLA recruits.
The women who lived on the nation's six million farms readily accepted new responsibilities as they sought to alleviate the agricultural crisis, but the exigencies of war also required that new sources of farm labor be located.
Nearly 230,000 foreign workers from Mexico, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados, Newfoundland, and Canada were imported into the United States during World War II to perform farm jobs. Approximately 265,000 prisoners of war were involved in some stage of agricultural production between 1943 and 1945. Eight thousand military personnel were furloughed to do emergency farm work in North Dakota, Maine, and New York, and servicemen were also granted furloughs to work at planting and harvest time on their home farms. About sixty-two hundred conscientious objectors worked at either seasonal or full-time agricultural jobs during the war years, and some twenty-six thousand Americans of Japanese descent were used in seasonal jobs on a furlough basis from their relocation centers during 1942, 1943, and 1944. In addition, approximately 2.5 million young people between the ages of fourteen and seventeen worked as Victory Farm Volunteers during the war years. Most important of all, however, were the millions of American women who came forward and helped to plant, cultivate, and harvest the nation's crops.
Tidy statistics on the number of women who were employed in agricultural pursuits during the Second World War are difficult to ascertain. The Labor Information Bulletin estimated that three million women, or 27 percent of the entire agricultural labor force, worked on farms in June 1943. The US Women's Bureau reported that the percentage of women employed in agriculture rose from 8 percent in 1940 to 22.4 percent in 1945. The Extension Service of the USDA estimated that it had placed approximately 1.5 million nonfarm women in farm jobs between 1943 and 1945 and that an equal number of women had been recruited directly by farmers or found farm work on their own during the war years.
As early as May 1940, the Woman's National Farm and Garden Association, an organization of farm and garden club women that had played a prominent role in the establishment of the Woman's Land Army of America (WLAA) during the First World War, discussed the revival of the WLAA as one way to mobilize women for the impending agricultural labor crisis. The WLAA, modeled after the British Woman's Land Army of World War I, had been established in 1917 as a private organization with loose ties to the Department of Labor. At the height of the War, in 1918, more than 15,000 women from throughout the United States had been recruited for the WLAA.
By the spring of 1940, when the Woman's National Farm and Garden Association called for the revival of the WLAA, the British Women's Land Army (WLA) of World War II had been in operation for about a year. Drawing upon the success of the WLA in England, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her capacity as assistant director of volunteer service for the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), lent her support to the formation of a Women's Land Army when she announced in November 1941 that the OCD would recruit women to harvest the nation's crops.
The entry of the United States into the Second World War in December 1941 generated additional interest in the establishment of a Women's Land Army. Four months after Pearl Harbor, in April 1942, Farm Journal exhorted "women and children already on the farms of America" to be ready "to train small town and city women for summer, seasonal and vacation jobs in the poultry, truck and fruit farms of the country." In the same month, Independent Woman, the official journal of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, highlighted the accomplishments of the Woman's Land Army of World War I and posed the question: "Should we have a Women's Land Army to help produce that all-time record breaking crop which is being asked this year as American farmers' contribution toward winning the war?"
A report published in the April 27, 1942, issue of Time was even more emphatic about the agricultural labor shortage and the need for a land army when it concluded, "With crops growing green and men busy with war, the farmerette may come back. If the US [is] to feed the world, it must have a Land Army." By July 1942, support for some version of a Women's Land Army was great enough that Farm Journal reported that over 50 percent of five hundred farm women who were surveyed stated that they welcomed the establishment of such an organization.
Commentary about the demands of the 1942 crop season frequently appeared in the letters written by farm women to loved ones and friends in the service. For example, on July 1, 1942, Dawn Dyer of Sprague, Washington, wrote to her future husband, who was training with the Army Air Corps, and described the hard work of wartime gardening: "After breakfast yesterday we picked peas. [Mother] freezes them so it wasn't so hard. But I can feel the after affects of bending over. I've discovered some muscles I didn't know I had. They're sure making themselves known this morning." One month later, with the pressures of harvest time mounting, Dyer wrote, "I'm going to break down and have a good cry pretty soon if we have any more breakdowns during harvest. This morning they worked on the old Dodge truck for several hours and that held things up. Then this afternoon they broke the header on the combine and ran out of gas." Another young farm woman, Mardell [Smith?] of Anatone, Washington, wrote to a friend in the service in September 1942 and said, "I'm quite the farmer, Jack. You should see me — I ride the horse after the cows, drive hay trucks, and yesterday I even learned to drive the tractor."
Late in October 1942, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Grover B. Hill delivered an address to the National Home Demonstration Council in Kansas City, Missouri, in which he accentuated the important contributions which the women who lived on the nation's farms had made to the war effort during the previous crop season. He praised farm women for coming "to the nation's rescue" during the "past summer when the lack of farm labor became so critical that on many farms it appeared that a considerable amount of the bountiful harvest might be lost. . . . They streamlined their household tasks to the bare essentials and went into the fields to work shoulder to shoulder with husbands, sons, and brothers."
The 1942 farm labor crisis was further eased by the many nonfarm women who joined in the agricultural war effort. Throughout the United States, programs to recruit and train women for farm work were spontaneously launched. The University of Maryland instituted special four-week courses for women in gardening, poultry raising, and dairying. Home economist Katherine L. Potter organized a Women's Emergency Farm Service (WEFS) in Maine. Corinne Alsop, with the aid of the University of Connecticut, created a Connecticut Land Army.
In Vermont, Dorothy Thompson, the well-known journalist, organized a Volunteer Land Corps of city girls and boys who were placed on New England farms. Hundreds of young women were recruited from schools and colleges in New York City to help harvest the crops of the Hudson River Valley. A "Volunteer Land Army" of Hunter College students who were "bent on out-producing Hitler" went to Vermont to raise crops and conduct rural sociological studies. Another three thousand New York City emergency volunteers organized a "Land Army" to pick asparagus and other truck crops in New York and New Jersey. The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) undertook substantial recruitment work among its members, and a spokeswoman for the YWCA told potential recruits of how the women of Mississippi had saved that state's crops, "southern chivalry notwithstanding." In California, the American Women's Voluntary Services located one thousand women to help harvest the state's fruit and vegetable crops.
A supervisor of a Portland, Oregon, nursery teaches a student to thin and transplant tomato seedlings. Tomatoes were an important farm and victory garden crop during the war
Following the successful 1942 harvest, a young woman who had devoted her summer to emergency farm work wrote a letter to the New York Times in which she emphasized the crucial role to be played by women in wartime agricultural production: "We can drive tractors. We can milk cows. We want to join up quickly in the farm production army. We are waiting to go. But we will not wait long, because there is too much to be done and we will find farms for ourselves. Let us get together and organize a Women's Land Army. Let us get together right away." Late in 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt again promoted the idea of a Women's Land Army in the United States during a nationwide radio address in which she offered extensive comments on the importance of the Women's Land Army in England.
Articles in the popular press praised America's "amateur" farmers for coming to the aid of American agriculture. In summarizing these efforts, Independent Woman asserted that any report of the 1942 farm picture "would be incomplete without special mention of the gallant service of women — a service which may well be the decisive factor in America's food production campaign."
Although publicity about the 1942 agricultural accomplishments of both farm and nonfarm women was widespread, Secretary of Agriculture Wickard was reluctant to support a Women's Land Army. During testimony before the House Committee on Agriculture in September 1942, Wickard acknowledged the severity of the labor crisis when he stated: "Unless we can find some way to deal with the farm labor problem and other problems of farm production satisfactorily, we must find some way, in the not too distant future, to deal with a shortage of food. Food is just as much a weapon in this war as guns. I hope that we come to this realization in time to prevent still another instance of `too little and too late.'" Nonetheless, when President Roosevelt prodded the secretary to consider the use of women and children during the farm emergency, Wickard expressed only lukewarm support for this suggestion.
Despite the initial reluctance of Secretary Wickard to advocate the use of women and children as agricultural workers, high-ranking officials within the Department of Agriculture began to move ahead with plans for the creation of a Women's Land Army. In November 1942 M. L. Wilson, the director of extension work and the person in the USDA primarily responsible for devising plans to meet the farm labor crisis, reported that prospective labor shortages for 1943 had stimulated considerable interest in the use of city women on farms. The following month, on December 28, Wilson appointed a special three-person committee of home economists to consider using nonfarm women for farm work. Mary A. Rokahr chaired the committee, and Grace E. Frysinger and Florence L. Hall were the other members.
With the appointment of the Rokahr committee, the Department of Agriculture began to devote serious consideration to the establishment of a Women's Land Army. On January 8–9, 1943, M. L. Wilson invited thirty-five people representing twenty organizations to a conference in New York City to outline the "basic principles to guide the development" of a Land Army. A month later, on February 4–5, a national conference on Emergency Farm Labor Problems was held in Washington, DC. The conference, which was divided into six workshops, issued a WLA workshop report that served as the blueprint for the proposed organization. On February 17 Secretary Wickard voiced his approval for the creation of a Women's Land Army when he requested that the Extension Service and state agricultural colleges develop and supervise a "program for the organized recruitment and utilization of nonfarm women for appropriate types of farm work" as part of their emergency farm labor responsibilities. At the end of February, Meredith C. Wilson, the chief of field studies and training at the USDA, reiterated the department's support for a Women's Land Army in an article, "Feminine Land Army," which he prepared for the New York Times. Wilson reminded the nation that "manpower for agriculture is of equal importance with manpower to produce combat weapons for our fighting forces. Like industry, agriculture is looking to the woman power to help solve its manpower problems."
In March a revised and expanded version of the Women's Land Army workshop report of February was distributed to USDA officials. On March 20, in anticipation of congressional approval of the Emergency Farm Labor Program, M. L. Wilson circulated a memorandum stating that senior home economist Florence L. Hall had been "temporarily" assigned responsibility for the Women's Land Army.
