Mobilizing Woman-Power

by Harriot Stanton Blatch

The unit plan seems a heaven-born solution of many of the knotty problems of the farm. In the first place, the farmer gets cheerful and handy helpers, and his over-worked wife does not find her domestic cares added to in the hot summer season. The new hands house and feed themselves. From the point of view of the worker, the advantage is that her food at the camp is prepared by trained hands and the proverbial farm isolation gives way to congenial companionship.

These separate experiments growing out of the need of food production and the shortage of labor have brought new blood to the farm, have turned the college girl on vacation and, what is more important, being a solution of an industrial problem, the unemployed in seasonal trades, into recruits for an agricultural army. And by concentrating workers in well-run camps there has been attracted to the land a higher order of helper.

One obstacle in the way of the immediate success of putting such women on the land is a wholly mistaken idea in the minds of many persons of influence in agricultural matters that the new labor can be diverted to domestic work in the farm house. This view is urged in the following letter to me from the head of one of our best agricultural colleges: "The farm labor shortage is much more acute than is generally understood and I have much confidence in the possibility of a great amount of useful work in food production being done by women who are physically strong enough and who can secure sufficient preliminary training to do this with some degree of efficiency. Probably the larger measure of service could be done by relieving women now on the farms of this State from the double burden of indoor work and the attempt to assist in farm operations and chores. If farm women would get satisfactory domestic assistance within the house they could add much to the success of field husbandry. Women who know farm conditions and who could largely take the place of men in the management of outdoor affairs can accomplish much more than will ever be possible by drafting city-bred women directly into garden or other forms of field work."

The opinions expressed in this letter are as generally held as they are mistaken. In the first place, the theory that the country-bred woman in America is stronger and healthier than the city-bred has long since been exploded. The assumption cannot stand up under the facts. Statistics show that the death rate in the United States is lower in city than in farm communities, and if any added proof were needed to indicate that the stamina of city populations overbalances the country it was furnished by the draft records. Any group of college and Manhattan Trade School girls could be pitted against a group of women from the farms and win the laurels in staying powers. Nor must it be overlooked that we are not dealing here with uncertainties; the mettle of the girls has been proved.

In any case the fact must be faced that these agricultural units will not do domestic work. Nine-tenths of the farm houses in America are without modern conveniences. The well-appointed barn may have running water, but the house has not. To undertake work as a domestic helper on the average farm is to step back into quite primitive conditions. The farmer's wife can attract no one from city life, where so much cooperation is enjoyed, to her extreme individualistic surroundings.

A second obstacle to the employment of this new labor-force is due to the government's failure to see the possibility of saving most valuable labor-power and achieving an economic gain by dovetailing the idle months of young women in industrial life into the rush time of agriculture.

One department suggests excusing farm labor from the draft, as if we had already fulfilled our obligation in man-power to the battlefront of our Allies. The United States Senate discusses bringing in coolie and contract labor, as if we had not demonstrated our unfitness to deal with less advanced peoples, and as if a republic could live comfortably with a class of disfranchised workers. The Labor Department declares it will mobilize for the farm an army of a million boys, as if the wise saw, "boys will be boys," did not apply with peculiar sharpness of flavor to the American vintage, God bless them, and as if it were not our plain duty at this world crisis to spur up rather than check civilizing agencies and keep our boys in school for the full term.

Refusing to be in the least crushed by government neglect, far-seeing women determined to organize widely and carefully their solution of the farm-labor problem. To this end the Women's National Farm and Garden Association, the Garden Clubs of America, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Woman's Suffrage Party, the New York Women's University Club, and the Committee of the Women's Agricultural Camp, met with representatives of the Grange, of the Cornell Agricultural College, and of the Farmingdale State School of Agriculture, and formed an advisory council, the object of which is to "stimulate the formation of a Land Army of Women to take the places on the farms of the men who are being drafted for active service." This is to be on a nationwide scale.

The Council has put lecturers in the Granges to bring to the farmer by the spoken word and lantern slides the value of the labor of women, and is appealing to colleges, seasonal trades and village communities to form units for the Land Army. It is asking the coöperation of the labor bureaus to act as media through which units may be placed where labor is most needed.

This mobilization of woman-power is not yet large or striking. The effort is entirely civil. But all the more is it praiseworthy. It shows on the part of women, clear-eyed recognition of facts as they exist and vision as to the future.