Abstract
Following the armistice on 11 November 1918, Britain’s food situation remained uncertain. The shift from a wartime to a peacetime economy would be carried out piecemeal and the return of men from the theatres of war would take many months to complete. Even once the demobilisation process was under way, there was no guarantee that the men who left agricultural work for military service would return to their pre-war employment. The agricultural industry was in a state of uncertainty. The depletion of the labour force in the decades prior to the war and Britain’s growing dependence on overseas markets was temporarily reversed between 1914 and 1918 as the domestic food economy was revitalised, but it was quite possible that these changes were temporary and the reliance on homegrown food would diminish again once prewar markets were restored. In November 1918, neither Talbot nor the Board of Agriculture knew for certain what lay ahead for the Women’s Land Army. Organisers hoped for the Land Army’s lengthy continuation, but knew that the organisation faced potentially insurmountable obstacles. The difficulty was in making the wartime organisation — which had marketed itself as a temporary, albeit necessary, instrument in the nation’s successful prosecution of the war — vital after 1918. The government was not unsympathetic to the Land Girls’ efforts — although the WLA represented a small percentage of the agricultural labour force, the 27,000 women of the Land Army voluntarily left their homes to settle in an unfamiliar area of the country where they endured months or years of hard labour.
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Notes
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© 2014 Bonnie White
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White, B. (2014). Back to the Land: The Land Army after 1918. In: The Women’s Land Army in First World War Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363909_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363909_7
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