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106 For Joan Snelling, life as a British “land girl” during the Second World War brought adventure, romance, and farming experiences she never forgot . Born in London in 1922, Joan learned of the outbreak of war while on holiday with her family in Norfolk. Fearing the air raids expected upon the urban areas of the country, her family split up after hearing the news. While her father returned to London to go back to work, Joan, her mother, her sister -in-law, and a niece stayed in a rented bungalow to wait the war out. Her family expected the war to be over by Christmas. It of course did not end that quickly, and at seventeen years of age Joan made herself useful to the household by gardening and acting as the household “handyman.” In 1941 however, England issued a Register for Employment Order for all women between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. At eighteen Joan decided to try out her newfound gardening skills and joined the British Women’s Land Army (WLA) in jChapter 5 “A Call to Farms” I am peeling carrots at the kitchen sink. Nothing unusual about that, but for the past sixty years, every time I do this job, my mind goes back to my first day as a farm labourer. It was in April 1941 and there were an awful lot of carrots, at least five acres of them. Because this was fiddling work, the local gang of women casual workers had been called in. We had to pick up the carrots as they were ploughed out, rub off any soil and put them into net sacks. There were also the six Land Army girls who were already employed on the farm before I arrived. The carrots were all shapes and sizes and some looked rather rude, as carrots do sometimes. This was the delight of the village women, who roared with laughter and made suggestive remarks and waved the carrots around, looking at us girls to see how we were taking it, especially at me, the newest recruit and a bit shy. Laughter is infectious and it was all good humored and when the long back-breaking day’s work finally ended, I pedaled my bike wearily eight miles home. —Joan Snelling, A Land Girl’s War, 1920 “a call to farms” 107 Norfolk where she remained an additional thirty years after her Land Army service.1 Though not all female agriculturalists during the Second World War claimed similar backgrounds or experiences, Joan Snelling’s story exemplifies many basic themes in the lives of those who worked in the fields of both England and the United States. Conflicting public attitudes, varied demographics , and hard labor are just some of the challenges shared by the female laborers. While WLA and national leaders espoused the sometimes conflicting rhetoric of women’s wartime roles and nationalism, women laborers faced competing opinions about how best to produce food for the nation and the world. Responding to the “call to farms,” these women of mostly urban backgrounds struggled successfully and occasionally unsuccessfully to increase the food supply of the Allies in the face of adversity. With the direction of new government leaders and old reformers alike, women forged new paths in agricultural labor. While political goals influenced women’s service in the WLAs less than it did during the First World War, government agencies of both nations used the political significance of the cultivation of food to brand national identity ironically for both creation and destruction. As the image of the female agricultural laborer emerged in the popular culture, American and British women faced food shortages with hard labor and a sense of adventure amid a world of political strife. The British Need The threat of a new war affected the British in distinctly different ways than the First World War did. Remembering the loss of nearly one million British lives and sacrifices made during the First World War and observing the geographic and economic destruction in the decade that followed, the British people feared the potential devastation of another global war.2 Whereas the air raid precautions of the First World War seemed like adventures and novelties to some Britons initially, the seriousness of the destruction of the first war prompted a markedly more somber attitude toward preparation for a second war. By importing nearly two-thirds of its food supply before the war, the threat of food shortage once again plagued England.3 As...

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