In the fall of 1917, manpower was short in the fields of America. When the United States entered the Great War, millions of men had left farm work to join the army or do other war-related jobs. Even with farm labor wages skyrocketing, farmers faced difficulties hiring men to harvest the crops that were needed at home and in a starving Europe. The federal government did not help when it ignored farmers’ pleas to exempt farm workers from the draft.

While federal and state governments dithered to find solutions, a consortium of women’s organizations—including garden clubs, women’s colleges, civic groups, the YWCA, the DAR, women’s trade unionists, the Girl Scouts and suffrage societies—stepped up to form the Women’s Land Army of America (WLAA), inspired by Britain’s “Land Girls.” More than 20,000 women from American cities and towns, most of whom had never worked on a farm before, learned to tend and harvest crops in training programs organized by the WLAA . Known as “farmerettes,” a term intended to evoke the suffragist movement, they were paid the same wages as male farm workers and were protected by an eight-hour workday—an unknown luxury on many farms then and now. They wore practical uniforms featuring pants (or at least bloomers), initially shocking to the rural communities in which they worked.

Farmers were at first wary about hiring the women. Some of the reasons will sound familiar. Farmers claimed women didn’t have the strength to do the job and didn’t have the necessary skills. One concern was particular to the farmerettes. Farm hands typically were housed on the farm and fed by the farmer’s wife. Farmers were afraid that housing and feeding strange young women would cause domestic upsets. The WLAA solved the problem by housing and feeding “units” of farmerettes in communal camps away from individual farms and transporting them to their jobs each morning.

Wary farmers, and a watching public, were soon convinced as the young women leaned into the work. By the summer of 1918, farmerettes were on the job in thirty-three states, and the subject of poetry, songs, cinema news reels, and acts in the Ziegfield follies.

The organization was resurrected during World War II, this time as an official government effort under the auspices of the US Department of Agriculture’s United States Crop Corps.