Abstract
In the summer of 1915 British women took to the streets of London demanding the right to serve. This ‘Call to the Women’ of Britain was part of a larger campaign that encouraged women to support the war effort by entering the labour force and relieving men for military service. At the beginning of the war women flocked to factories and urban centres hoping to capitalise on the wartime market, but in the winter of 1916 there were rumours of food shortages in the capital and all groups involved in women’s farm labour agreed that a concerted effort was needed to bring more women to the land. While these volunteer organisations did much to encourage enlistment, offer training, and put women to work on British farms, they did not have the support of the Asquith government and lacked central organisation. To coordinate and effectively employ women in agriculture, Lord Selborne, who had been working independently to organise women’s farm labour since 1915, established the Women’s Branch in December 1916 before retiring from his post as minister of food with the Board of Agriculture. The Women’s Land Army was created in 1917 to serve as a central organisation for women’s farm labour and was intended to act as an umbrella for those volunteer organisations already in place. The lack of central coordination, the volunteer nature of early farm and horticulture organisations, the absence of government support, and the divergent tactics employed by the various groups involved undermined the success of these organisations and presented a number of obstacles and challenges for the organisers of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) after 1917.
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Notes
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© 2014 Bonnie White
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White, B. (2014). Answering the Call: The Formation of the Women’s Land Army. In: The Women’s Land Army in First World War Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363909_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363909_2
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