Verdon Nicola
20 Century Br Hist. 2016;27(1):1-25. doi: 10.1093/tcbh/hwv039.
The Women’s Land Army (WLA), formed in 1917, has featured prominently in recent academic and popular account of First World War Britain. This interest reflects the attention the WLA drew from politicians, government reporters and contemporary commentators during and immediately after the war itself. Yet, the WLA, which at its peak had 16,000 women working on the land, was just one strand of wartime female agricultural labour, an auxiliary to the thousands of village women who worked throughout the war. Whilst the WLA received numerous plaudits for their participation, village women were ‘left out in the cold’, as one correspondent to The Times put it, in recognition of their wartime service. This article will place the rural woman worker back to centre stage. It will revisit the often-contradictory wartime estimates of the number of women working in agriculture in England and Wales before moving on to examine how regional farming structures and seasonal demands for labour shaped the use of women workers. It will show that even at the very local level, here utilizing records from the Bedfordshire Women’s War Agricultural Committee, demand and supply issues produced a fractured pattern. It will show that concentrating exclusively on the WLA leads to a distorted picture of women’s work on the land during the First World War.
妇女土地军（WLA）成立于1917年，在近期关于第一次世界大战时期英国的学术著作和通俗读物中占据显著地位。这种关注反映了妇女土地军在战争期间及战后不久所受到的政治家、政府记者和当代评论家的关注。然而，妇女土地军在鼎盛时期有16000名女性从事农业工作，它只是战时女性农业劳动力的一部分，是成千上万在整个战争期间都在工作的乡村女性的辅助力量。尽管妇女土地军因其参与而获得众多赞誉，但正如《泰晤士报》的一位记者所说，乡村女性却“被冷落一旁”，尽管她们也在战时服役。本文将把农村女工重新置于中心舞台。在继续探讨地区农业结构和季节性劳动力需求如何影响女工的使用之前，本文将重新审视关于英格兰和威尔士从事农业工作的女性数量的那些往往相互矛盾的战时估计。本文将表明，即使在非常地方的层面，这里利用贝德福德郡妇女战争农业委员会的记录，供需问题也产生了一种碎片化的模式。本文将表明，仅仅关注妇女土地军会导致对第一次世界大战期间女性在土地上工作情况的扭曲认识。
