Journalist Elaine F. Weiss was walking down Brattle Street in 1982 when a poster in a store window caught her eye. The poster, for a Schlesinger Library exhibition called One Half Our History, featured a photograph of seven women in a farm setting. Weiss’s friend Alice Holway was second from the left.

Weiss had just spent two years taking an oral history from this fascinating woman, recording her stories about how, during World War I, Holway had come to Vermont at age 17 to be a “farmerette” with the Woman’s Land Army, an experience that inspired her to work the land for the rest of her life. Weiss was intrigued by this Land Army, whose existence she couldn’t verify. She thought that perhaps a regional movement had inspired women to step out of their gardens and onto local farms to help grow food for the war effort.

Eventually, Weiss began to find answers about the Woman’s Land Army. “The real surprise, for me, was to find out how widespread the Land Army was,” she says. “These women had stupendous organizational abilities.”

Weiss has written the first history of the movement, Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of America in the Great War (Potomac Books, 2008), which she researched partly at the Schlesinger Library. And that history is, indeed, surprising. “Not only did the women of the Land Army organize—at the local level, at the state level, at the national level,” she says. “But they had very lofty ideas about what this Land Army should be.”

As she dug into archives and repositories across the United States, Weiss began to realize the full extent of the farmerettes’ significance. Originally conceived as a way for women to contribute to the war effort by helping with farm production—managing swine, growing potatoes, driving tractors—the Woman’s Land Army grew into a completely self-funded social movement, without the help of the government. Women recruits constructed their own camps and employed efficiency guru Frank Gilbreth to train them in the best way to do their work.

The women who organized the Land Army came from all walks of life, and many were leaders in other progressive social-reform movements. Some were interested in public health or labor issues, and there was tremendous crossover with the suffrage movement. They demanded a fair wage and an eight-hour workday from the farmers who employed them. Others simply saw the Land Army as a noble expression of patriotism. “One of the great social experiments which the Land Army wanted to undertake—and very explicitly—was to have wealthy women, working women, immigrant women, well-educated and not-so-well-educated women, all living and working together in the camps,” says Weiss. “This would be the same sort of democratizing experience that their brothers and sons were having in the military.”

The farmerette, in her smart uniform of jodhpurs and long, belted coat, became a cultural icon. Representations of her permeated the culture, from Life magazine to the Ziegfeld Follies. Which makes it all the more surprising that she has been virtually forgotten—a dramatic example of our short-term national memory, and one that greatly complicated Weiss’s research.

“This was like archaeology: It was so scattered and so buried that what I had to do was first locate it, then dig it up, then piece it together,” says Weiss. “There would be a document from California that would explain something that happened in New York.” At the Schlesinger Library—a place she calls “the mother ship” for women’s history—Weiss was able to find crucial fragments for her story: the institutional records of the Woman’s National Farm and Garden Association, one of the organizing groups; journal entries about the life of a farmerette; and a large collection of photographs.

Even now, after writing Fruits of Victory, Weiss finds pieces of the Land Army story. An elderly woman brought her father’s scrapbook to a recent talk, saying she’d never understood the snapshots. Weiss identified them immediately as being from the National Service School in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where the man had trained women to farm.

Findings like this spur Weiss on to continue unraveling the mystery of why the Woman’s Land Army was lost and to restore its history.

—Ivelisse Estrada
Writer/ Editor

Image of the Women's Land Army courtesy of the Woman’s National Farm and Garden Association Records, 1913–1980