WOMEN ON THE LAND.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 January 1918, Page 6

WOMEN ON THE LAND.

BUITISH EXPERIENCE BREAKING DOWN PREJUDICE. London, Nov. ISO. I Hiring tile past two years, IHMMV women have registered themselves as land workers. A proportion of these may be said to have been more or less associated with farm and country life, in a small way, for years. l!ut then Jhe work they did was chiefly a matter of their environment, a normal part of their everyday round. Now it is a matter of *tern necessity. With them are associated the members of the Women's Land Army—voluntary workers—whose origin dates back only as far as March, 1917. Its members have probably never previously been in the habit of going on the land at all. ' This week the Kent Women's Agricultural Committee (issued invitations for a demonstration of women's farm work near .Maidstone. Competitors —all women workers—came, fyom Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire, as well es from local farms fo the number of nearly 200. Competitions started early in the morning, and lasted till nightfall, and the tests included every branch of duty associated with land work—tilling, planting, hoeing, pruning, fruit-spraying, grading and packing, milking, thatching, and all the other details connected with a healthy and useful country life. Mr. A. D. 'Hull, F.R.S., secretary to the Board of Agriculture, plainly told those assembled that in a gTeat measure the future of "England rests in the hands of the farmers. The country is dependent on the farmer for the food that will he needed during the next few years, and the farmer is dependent on the women to enable him to carry on the increased ,n mount of work necessary. At present there are serious difficulties in the matter of food-supply. If is not merely a question of the submarine cutting off number? of our ships. It is the question of a real deficiency of food all over the Western world, for none of the allies has in sight the amount of wheat that is expected in normal years, and the outlook is more serious as there are no reserves to draw upon. We have to trust to a large extent to what each nation produces from its own soil in order to carry on. Every man in France who is fit Is fighting, and the farm labor has been carried on by the greybeards and by the women. In England we have to get more out of the soil than ever before, and woman is the only reserve before the farmer by which it can be done. The farmers of the country did not take the proposition of women labor seriously enough in the early days of t!he war;

many of them turned their faces against tin: iika of bringing in the women to work on the land, and tln>y did not put themselves out at all to make conditions suitable for women labor ; instead, the.v had continued to go on holding back the iiii-n. Fortunately that prejudice had now passed away, and farmers alt over tile country realise that women can do an honest day's work. At first tho jjirla w'ho came out from the towns and started duty as farm laborers did not receive the support to which tliev were entitled by virtue of their courage. But now they have proved their quality all over the coutnry, and the farmers are greatly appreciative of the valuable help they are getting from these town girls, as well as from the local county women. England's safety in the next two or three years hangs on the farmer: the results he gets will depend on the labor available—woman labor—and whether lie will make the fullest use of in on his land. Miss Meriel Talbot, formerly secretary of the Victoria League, 'but now director of the women's branch of the Food Production Department under the Board of Agriculture, said eyes had been openeil to the capacity of women for doing such work as they lhave been called upon to do in farming. ''We have been up against a number of stiff old English prejudices." said Miss Talbot, "stiff as the Kentish clay, but we arc going to get the better of them all. Women are going to do still better work than in the past, and there must be no more room for prejudices of any kind, either on the part of the farmer or of the women. Farmers are going to find that women's labor is better a. good deal than they thought it was going to be."