Excerpt from "They're Getting In the Crops "

Reprinted from Independent Woman.

Published July 1943.

"This year millions of farm women and girls will be doing farm work to help meet the wartime goals. But this will not be enough. They must have help from their sisters in the towns and cities."

By mid-1942 there was an acute shortage of workers on U.S. farms. Millions of farmers and their hired hands left the land to join the military or to take war industry jobs. Agriculture officials predicted that 75 percent of farmers would incur severe labor shortages by 1943. However, women willingly stepped forward to fill the need for workers, just as they had in the war industries. Wives, daughters, and sisters of farmers jumped...