‘Respectable Women’: The Land Army in Scotland

Abstract

The number of women employed in Scottish agriculture between 1914 and 1919 remained constant at 22,000, but the introduction of the Women’s Land Army in January 1917 sought to reassert and reconstitute women’s value and role in the industry. Although women had traditionally made up a greater portion of the Scottish labour force than was the case in England or Wales, between 1861 and 1911 female wage earners in Scotland had been reduced by half due to the nature of pay and harsh working conditions that increasingly prevented women from seeking employment in agriculture. The introduction of the Scottish Women’s Land Army (SWLA) had to compete less with the perception that women were not suited to farm work, and more with the undesirability of the work. In order to attract women to the land, organisers elected to create a new category of female worker — the respectable farm-woman. Certainly, the English model wished to recruit women of ‘good character’, but the organisation never rejected agricultural workers as a group. The SWLA boldly stated its preference for respectable educated women, alienating potential recruits and creating more pronounced divisions within the Scottish agricultural labour force.