Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 2 (2014), p. 368

In their striking uniforms of khaki breeches, overcoats and boots, the appearance of Land Girls in the latter part of the First World War aroused much contemporary comment, some amusement, and a large degree of consternation. The Women’s Land Army has also been well-served by historians. Peter Dewey’s research in the 1980s sought to calculate the contribution of the WLA to First World War agriculture vis-à-vis other forms of substitute labour. Other work, by Pamela Horn, Susan Grayzel, Gill Clarke and Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant, has seen the WLA as a symbol, amongst other things, of wartime patriotism, personal liberation and rural rejuvenation. Is there anything else to be said about an organization that figures so heavily in public and academic consciousness? Bonnie White’s new book shows that the answer is a resounding yes.

The Women’s Land Army in First World War Britain is the most comprehensive history of the origins and development of the organization to date. It is based upon an extensive trawl of the national archives housed at Kew and Edinburgh, of personal testimonies found in the Imperial War Museum, and local records deposited in repositories around the country. The sheer breath of research, and a critical reading of the sources, permits a rather different history of the WLA to emerge. It was a body whose inception was far from smooth. Emerging from a patchwork of organizations that were set up to encourage women into land work, the WLA was formed against a backdrop of administrative mismanagement, lack of co-ordination and initial government indifference. From its formal inception at the beginning of 1917 the WLA was not an independent body and the different layers of bureaucracy led to operational confusion at both the local and national level. The WLA was therefore distinguished by a degree of conflict and tension, which hindered its efficiency in recruiting, training and placing women into farm work. By July 1917 the organization had placed only 2000 additional women on farms, with 2200 in training centres. Although a national organization, the WLA in Scotland differed in its orientation, operation and outlook from the WLA in England and Wales, highlighting the importance of understanding regional variations.

The book also critically explores a number of other important themes. What motivated women to join the WLA? Traditionally it has been painted as a patriotic act, to assist the war effort, but here we are shown that this argument is incomplete. Individual motivations differed. Sometimes women joined to experience new work opportunities, and many cited working outdoors and with animals as key. Others believed they were taking part in a scheme of national importance. Some young women, stymied by the restrictions of domestic service, saw that the WLA offered a degree of freedom. Thus although the initial vision of the WLA was of a body of well-trained, educated, disciplined middle-class women from towns and cities, the reality was more complex. Recruits increasingly came from a variety of social, economic and educational backgrounds, and the training they received was mixed and often rudimentary. How did women fare once placed on farms? Again, the picture is complicated. The Land Girls had to negotiate several relationships, with farmers, farmers’ wives, other farm workers, Group Leaders, Welfare Officers and other Land Girls. All could be fraught. Some girls took their work more seriously than others. Some farmers were critical of the abilities of women, others were more welcoming. Male labourers could sneer at the work performed by women, but they were also won over by their perseverance. The challenges faced by Land Girls were therefore not simply due to prejudice, but were also connected to local farming practices, fears over conscription if women were used as substitute labour, and concerns of national and local leaders to convey a particular image of women agricultural workers that allayed concerns over gender and class relations.

In terms of the organizational history of the WLA I doubt if this book could be bettered. Individual readers may find some gaps. For me, Chapter 4 on the WLA in England and Wales would have benefited from greater assessment of local and regional demands within and between these nations. The use of personal testimony in this chapter, whilst illuminating in many respects, also caused some confusion as some of the women quoted, like Edith Airey, who worked on a farm in her native Suffolk for the first six months of the war, are discussed as being members of the WLA, when the organization did not yet exist. This might sound niggardly, but it raises questions about whether non-WLA workers experienced similar or different conditions. Some further investigation of the available statistical data would also have helped to assess the significance of WLA in terms of the broader history of agriculture and women’s work in the early twentieth century. These criticisms should not detract from the success of the book, however. It is by far the most thorough and critically refreshing account of the WLA in the First World War and should be read by anyone with an interest in the Great War, women’s work and agricultural labour.