Pitch in and help! Join the Women's Land Army of the U.S. Crop Corps, WWII Poster, 1944

During the First World War, the United States government created the Women's Land Army of America (WLAA) to provide essential labor to American farms and farmers while young men who had worked in agriculture left to serve in the military or find better jobs working for the government and the burgeoning defense industry. The director of the WLAA was Harriet Stanton Blatch, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton who was a leader of the suffrage movement. 

During World War II, the government reinstituted the program, for the same reason—to provide agricultural labor on the homefront. Established in April 1943 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Women's Land Army of America was overseen by Florence Hall and operated under the United States Crop Corps, which had responsibility for ensuring that crops were successfully harvested. From 1943 to 1945 the Women's Land Army recruited, trained, and placed women on American farms, where they planted, cultivated, and harvested much of the nation's crops. Women were recruited from everywhere, and included students, urban workers, and anyone who could spare time to participate in harvests. In the southern states, recruitment sometimes excluded Black women and some white women were reluctant to participate because field labor was traditionally done by Black men and women. The Land Army members worked seasonally, often living together in camps when they lived too far from sites to commute. In 1944, the Virginia Agricultural Extension Service reported that 753 WLAA members helped harvest crops in the state that year. More than a million women served their nation during World War II by joining the WLAA.  

Inspirational, informative, instructive, imploring—posters were a major part of the war effort. Virginians would have seen many of these posters. The most common place to see such posters in Virginia would have been in train stations and other areas of transportation. Other types of posters in the period encouraged saving scrap materials, following restricted diets, contacting servicemen, and supporting the war effort through war bonds.

Citation: Hubert Morley, Pitch in and Help!: Join the Women's Land Army of the U.S. Crop Corps, 1944, World War II Poster Collection, Special Collections, Library of Virginia.


Find more posters in the Library of Virginia's World War II Poster Digital Collection.

Preview Activity

Look at It: Look at the way the women are depicted in the poster. Why do you think the women portrayed in this image look the way they do? What are they doing?

Post Activities

Analyze: Women were not encouraged to work outside of the home before the war, but they became a critical part of the workforce during the war. Why would women, particularly those in college, choose to receive training in agriculture? What did they hope to gain?

Social Media Spin: Create a social media post in which you encourage women to be trained in agriculture to support the war effort. Be sure to include references to the Women's Land Army of America and its mission.

Form an Opinion: Write a journal entry in which you describe how you would have felt if you were a woman recruited from the city to move to a rural agricultural community. What challenges might you face?