Mother's cook stove cannot bear the strain of war economies.
Dropping their old segregation, women are going forth in fellowship with men to meet in new ways the pressing problems of a new world.
[XI
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.