Mobilizing Woman-Power

by Harriot Stanton Blatch

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.

An agricultural unit, in the uniform approved by the Woman's Land Army of America.

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.