The Woman’s Land Army of America, numbering 15,000 members, was composed of women who had previously done little or no farm work and who enlisted in it primarily for the sake of doing something of consequence to help win the war. It was organized in seventeen states, the state organizations uniting under the national organization and each one forming and training its own farm units. In one state, New York, there were forty of these land units, each established at a camp under a woman supervisor. They lived at the camp, boarding themselves, and were carried in their own auto-truck to and fro between the camp and the farms where they worked by the eight hour day. They were carefully selected from volunteers for the work on the basis of physical qualification and probable morale and among their numbers were represented teachers, college girls, art students, telephone operators, stenographers, women of leisure. They planted, plowed and hoed, aided in the harvesting, drove horses and tractors, gathered fruit, did dairy work, cared for poultry and stock and proved themselves equal to all the usual work of truck, dairy and general farming. There were, altogether, one hundred and twenty-seven units, ranging from twenty to one hundred and fifty members each. Farmers who employed them found them capable and efficient and their labor proved to be a welcome factor in solving the problem of increasing farm production when farm help had been seriously depleted by the draft and the munition factories. So successful was the Woman’s Land Army during the first year of its existence that in the autumn of 1918 an enthusiastic campaign was started for increasing its numbers the following year and plans were laid for courses of training during the winter.
In the conservation of food women everywhere coöperated with the Government in many ways. They enthusiastically supported the requests of the Food Administration, their organizations sent out food experts, dieticians, conservation instructors through country districts, into villages and towns and among the women of the poorer quarters in cities to give free instruction in the economical but efficient use of foods and in the best ways of canning, preserving and dehydrating fruits and vegetables.
In the financing of the war the women of the country gave noteworthy help. The National Woman’s Liberty Loan Committee was organized by the Secretary of the Treasury in May, 1917, as an independent bureau of the Treasury Department, the first and thus far the only executive committee of women in the Government of the United States. It was created too late to give much assistance in the first Liberty Loan, but it was active in all the succeeding ones and was thoroughly organized all over the country, for the greater part by states, with county organizations under the state or the district. It had 3,200 county chairmen and under these, reaching out into every community, 49,500 associate chairmen, while 800,000 women were engaged in its work. They organized meetings, engaged speakers and secured booths and workers for the sale of bonds, but the greater part of the work of the organization was done by canvassing from house to house.
This they did in cities, towns, villages, country districts, on foot, on horse-back, by carriage. They did not stop for rain, or sun, or wind, for dust, or mud. If it was planting time and all the horses of the farm were in use, the chairman of a rural committee walked miles upon miles to cover her territory. In two or three counties of the southern mountain region famous for their bloody feuds women rode on horseback up and down the mountain sides day after day canvassing for the Liberty Loans and carrying the counties over the top triumphantly with subscriptions above their quotas early in the course of each campaign. In these counties so many men had enlisted in the army before the draft went into effect that the burden of taking care of the loans fell to women.
In state after state the Woman’s Committee raised from one-third to one-half the quotas of the entire state and in the three Liberty Loans in which it worked it sold $3,500,000,000 worth of bonds. It was equally active in the campaigns for the sale of War Savings Stamps and its aid proved so important that in several of the Federal Reserve Districts it was asked to take over the entire work.
The importance of the aid American women gave to the Red Cross was beyond computation and was so varied in kind and enormous in quantity that anything more than the merest outline of it is impossible. Volunteer women workers, nearly all of them doing the work at odd moments in addition to their home or other duties, knitted and sewed so busily that they made nearly 300,000,000 articles, valued at $60,000,000, for the Red Cross, to be used in training camps, by our fighting forces, in hospitals at home and abroad and by the refugees and sufferers in the war ridden countries of Europe.
Many thousands of women worked in canteens, poured coffee, tea and chocolate and carried baskets of cakes and cigarettes for the refreshment of soldiers as their troop trains stopped at stations on their way to and from cantonments or poured into and out of ports of embarkation. More than a million and a half of the soldiers of America as they boarded their transports had their last touch of home at the hands of Red Cross women who, no matter what the hour of day or night, were ready at the piers with buns and cigarettes and cans of steaming hot drinks.
Many other thousands enlisted for the Red Cross Home Defense work and in its offices or as home visitors gave advice, aid, comfort to the families of soldiers and sailors, helped them to meet their problems, material, financial, spiritual, and procured for them, when necessary, professional advice and assistance, thus aiding morale at the front by upholding that of the family at home. Other thousands of women wearing the Red Cross insignia worked in the hospitals overseas and in convalescent homes on both sides of the ocean. No less than 8,000,000 women, and probably more, were actively working for the Red Cross throughout the war, organizing, directing and aiding the work of its chapters and making hospital bandages, sweaters and other knitted articles, clothing for refugees, and repairing soldiers’ garments.
More than 16,000 trained nurses enlisted in war service and worked in hospitals at home and overseas and 10,000 more had enrolled for service at the end of hostilities. The organization of the American Women’s Hospitals of the Red Cross recruited, organized and sent to France several units, each consisting of ten women physicians and as many aids, with the necessary hospital equipment.
Several hundred women entered the navy as yeomen and gave capable and efficient service. Others joined the Signal Corps of the army, 233 of these going to France, where their work as telephone and telegraph operators received high praise from army officers.