Resilient Farms and Families August Newsletter

August 9th is National Women’s Day and it is important to celebrate the role women play in agriculture. Did you know that women played a vital role in agriculture during World War I and World War II? As early as May of 1940, the Woman’s National Farm and Garden Association, a prominent player in establishing the Woman’s Land Army of America (WLAA) during World War I, started discussing the revival of the WLAA. The WLAA was modeled after the British Woman’s Land Army of World War I and was established in 1917 as a private organization with loose ties to the Department of Labor. At the height of World War I, more than 15,000 women throughout the U.S. had been recruited for the WLAA.

Eleanor Roosevelt, in her capacity as assistant director of volunteer services for the Office of the Civilian Defense, lent her support to the revival of the WLAA. In November 1941, the First Lady announced that the Office of the Civilian Defense would recruit women to harvest the nation’s crops while the men were across the ocean fighting for freedom. Many women took up plowing, planting, and cultivating most of the nation’s crops from 1942 - 1945. These women raised vegetables in New England, topped onions in Michigan, de-tasseled corn throughout the Midwest, shocked wheat in North Dakota, picked cotton in the South, planted potatoes in Maine, and harvested fruits and nuts on the West Coast. They also drove tractors, fed livestock, and performed work on dairy and poultry farms. Without these women working on our farms, food would have been more scarce than it was, and rationing would have been more severe.

The women who lived on the nation’s six million farms readily accepted new responsibilities as they sought to alleviate the agricultural crisis. The U.S. Women’s Bureau reported that the percentage of women employed in agriculture rose from 8% in 1940 to 22.4% 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.¹

The work done by these women during World War II aided in shifting the common perception that women should not work on farms. The WLAA supervisor from South Carolina reported at the end of the 1944 crop year that “in the past, there has been the feeling that white women should not do farm work, but that feeling is gradually changing and some of the best farms are now being operated by [white] women workers.”² W.S. Brown of Springfield, Colorado stated, “Last summer 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 tractors, etc. She was married this fall, and I would like to find another like her.”³

These women were not only instrumental in carrying on the agricultural activities during wartime but paving the way for future women that wanted to get into farming. The number of women farmers has steadily increased with each Census of Agriculture. The 2017 Census of Agriculture stated that there were approximately 1.2 million women farmers in the U.S. These women serve an important role in our society. Make sure you thank the woman in your life on August 9th for all that she does.

Heather Schlesser is a Dairy Agent with the Division of Extension, UW-Madison in Marathon County