Women and War Work — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Women and War Work
John Stuart Mill · en
The Corps still organizes the supply of temporary workers for seasonal
jobs such as potato dropping, hoeing, harvesting, fruitpicking, potato
and root lifting, etc., done by groups under leaders. The work of
organizing in the Counties is carried out by the appointment of a
woman as District representative. She is responsible for a general
supervision of the work in all the villages in her district. Each
village has a woman to act as Registrar and her duty (with assistants,
if necessary) is to canvass all the village women and girls for
volunteers for whole and part time work, and for training, and to
canvass the farmer to find out what labour he needs, and in the
beginning they had to induce him to use women. She puts the farmer and
the women suitable for his needs in her own district, in touch with
each other, and passes to the District Representative and to the
Employment Exchanges the names of all women qualified to help and not
placed, and of those willing to train.
All these committees, registrars and representatives are honorary
workers. The Board of Agriculture appoints to each County for work
with the committee a woman Organizing Secretary, and assistant also
if necessary.
The Board of Agriculture, working through the Employment Exchanges
and under the direction of their women heads, arranged a series of
meetings and work of propaganda by posters and leaflets throughout
the whole country early in 1916.
The Representatives and Registrars organized the meetings to which
the farmers and the women were invited, and the whole scheme was
explained. These were very frequently held in the market towns on
market day and the farmer and his wife came in to hear after the
sales. We had to assail the prejudices of some of our farmers pretty
vigorously and of the women, too. We found the women who volunteered
best for land work were in the class above the industrial worker, and
that the comfortable and well educated woman stood its work admirably.
The farmers were stiff to move in some cases and especially disliked
the idea of having to train the women. "They weren't going to run
after women all day--they had too much to do to go messing round with
girls!" This objection was met by the Board of Agriculture arranging
training centres in every county. Some of the training was done at the
Women's Agricultural Colleges and among places that arranged training
very early were the Harper Adam's College in Shropshire (Swanley);
Garford (Leeds); Sparsholt (Winchester); The Midland Agricultural
Training College (Kingston), and Aberystwith.
The Women's Agricultural Committee have arranged a great many training
centres at big farms and on the Home farms of some of our estates.
The girls volunteering for training must be eighteen years of age.
They are interviewed as to suitability and references by the Selection
Committee. They must have a medical certificate filled in by their own
doctor or by one of the committee's doctors.