The photograph caught my eye. It was accompanying Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “New Day for Women” article in the June 5, 1918, Missouri Ruralist, and showed a group of women, all wearing overalls. Being rather fond of overalls, I read the article, only to find out that it wasn’t about new fashion crazes at all. It was about all the jobs women were doing during wartime (that would be World War I), but only the photo caption mentioned the Woman’s Land Army in America.
My grandmother served in the Woman’s Land Army. She’s one of the ladies in the photograph above. Born ten years after Rose Wilder, my grandmother was part of a group that traveled from Georgia to Virginia to pick peaches. Although a lot of the women in the Land Army wore overalls, my grandmother doesn’t seem to have been one of them. Here she is washing out some of her clothes in a washtub; she’s the one at right. I can’t even begin to imagine doing farmwork in a skirt and blouse.
I’m not being asked to pick peaches, go meatless or wheatless, gather scrap metal, or to plant a victory garden. I’m not asked to knit hats or socks or roll bandages. It makes me a little sad to be living in a time when I don’t feel like I am being asked to muster my wits and Do Something to help in the war effort (that would be the War in Iraq).
