As you may remember from the post yesterday, the Women’s Land Army (WLA) was part of a national effort during WWII to supply desperately needed laborers to U.S. farms. During the war, farmers throughout the Pacific Northwest and the nation experienced a serious labor shortage. Farmers increased production to meet the demands of European allies and American troops. At the same time, many people who had been farm laborers were offered higher paying jobs in the national defense industry — building ships and airplanes for the war effort — or joined the military service.

Locally, the Oregon State College Extension Service established the Emergency Farm Labor Service to place women, children, and Mexican nationals on Oregon farms to thin and harvest crops. The state also paid Japanese American internees and German prisoners-of-war to work as farm laborers.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica article on the WLA:

“Radio stations and newspapers made urgent pleas for volunteers to help with the harvest. Women with little or no agricultural experience answered the call and, on an informal basis, saved countless crops from rotting in the fields. It soon became clear, however, that the situation required a more organized approach if the nation was to mobilize a reliable force of farmworkers. By 1943 the U.S. Congress had allocated funds for the Emergency Farm Labor Service, which included the recruitment, training, and placement of a female corps of farm laborers to be known as the Women’s Land Army, a subdivision of the United States Crop Corps. Recruits were not expected to have farming experience, but the WLA specified that applicants be physically fit and possess manual dexterity, patience, curiosity, and patriotism.

The WLA recruited more than a million female workers, drawn from the ranks of high-school and college students, beauticians, accountants, bank tellers, teachers , musicians, and many other occupations. The women worked long hours driving tractors, tending crops, and even shearing sheep. Most laborers received an unskilled worker’s wage—25 to 40 cents per hour—out of which they were to pay for their denim overall uniforms and their meals and lodging in temporary camps, summer cabins, and private homes. Most workers did not join the WLA to make money but wanted to contribute to the war effort. By the end of 1944, the WLA had more than proved itself as an indispensable brigade of hard workers, and farmers were eager to enlist their services in the upcoming season. Women continued to volunteer their services in the immediate postwar period (in Oregon through 1947).”

In 1943, more than 15,000 women worked as seasonal laborers on Oregon’s farms. Many Oregon women also found work in the shipbuilding companies in Portland and Vancouver, Washington.

• Oregon History Project: Women’s Land Army
• Oregon Encyclopedia Project: Women’s Land Army
• Encyclopedia Britannica Online: Women’s Land Army

We hear a lot about kitchen gardens these days, with calls in the US and UK for the President and Prime Minister to set up their own plots, but how much do we think back to the Victory Gardens or Emergency Farm Labor Service of WWII? While men fought overseas, there was a general call to service at home as well — in this case, support the troops and the war effort by working the land!

Oregon farmers were facing back to back bad crop years in 1941 and 1942, as well as a worker shortage after many Oregon men had left the workforce to fight in World War II. In the spring of 1942, state officials registered nearly 100,000 women who said they wanted to join a different kind of army — to work on Oregon farms. The greatest need was in the Willamette Valley, so the state recruited and trained women at Oregon State College (now OSU) in Corvallis and, from 1943 until 1945, worked with the Women’s Land Army (WLA) to place more than 78,000 women on Oregon farms. (Oregon Encyclopedia Project)

“The WLA was part of a World War II national effort to supply desperately needed laborers to U.S. farms. Locally, the Oregon State College Extension Service established the Emergency Farm Labor Service to place women, children, and Mexican nationals on Oregon farms to thin and harvest crops. The state also paid Japanese American internees and German prisoners-of-war to work as farm laborers.” (Oregon History Project)

Soon after passage of Public Law 45, statewide responsibility for the WLA was given to Mabel Mack, nutrition specialist for the OSC Extension Service. In order to enroll, applicants had to be at least eighteen years old and healthy. The pay wasn’t very good, in Oregon members of the WLA earned between sixty and ninety cents an hour, and the work was hard with women getting seasonal and permanent jobs weeding, harvesting, canning, and operating farm machinery.

“Most women worked on a ‘day haul’ basis, which meant they lived at home and were transported to farms by personal cars, growers’ trucks, or school buses. They hoed, weeded, thinned, and harvested crops of all kinds. Many supervised youth platoons, especially teachers out of school for the summer. A few worked year round, especially on poultry and dairy farms. Others worked in canneries or were leaders for recruiting other women. Nearly 135,000 placements of women were made in Oregon from 1943 through 1947.” (Oregon State Archives)

Born on November 27, 1884 in Macon, Missouri, Ava Milam Clark was one of five daughters of Ancil and Louisa Milam. She taught two years in a public school (1902-1904) and then spent three years teaching at Blees Military Academy in Macon, Missouri (1904-1907). Clark returned to school, this time as a student, obtaining her Ph.B. (1910) and A.M. degree (1911) from the University of Chicago. While working as an instructor of Foods and Nutrition at Iowa State College in the summer of 1911, she was hired to be a professor and head of the Department of Foods and Nutrition at Oregon Agricultural College (1911-1916).

She was named Dean of Home Economics in 1917, the youngest dean in college history, and under her leadership the program became nationally known. In 1932, she was made Director of Home Economics for the Oregon State System of Higher Education.

Clark was known for her international travels, focusing on establishing home economics programs in Asia. In 1922, Clark went to China to help establish a home economics department at Yenching University (Peking), introducing the study of home economics to China. She left OSC for a year in 1931 to work as a consultant in home economics at various universities in Asia. In the summer of 1937, Clark returned to Asia with Alma Fritchoff, conducting a home economics tour of both China and Japan. For five months in 1948, she acted as a consultant in home economics colleges in Korea and China, making an educational survey in the Philippines for the Foreign Missions Conference of North America. Finally, from 1950 to 1952 Clark served as a home economics advisor to the governments of Syria and Iraq for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). She retired from OSC in 1950 and was made Dean Emeritus. In 1966, she received the Distinguished Service Award from OSU, two years later she received the same award from Yonsei University.

Clark wrote many articles for various professional magazines as well as two books: A Study of Student Homes of China (1930), and her autobiography, Adventures of a Home Economist, with Kenneth Munford (OSU Press, 1969). To see a more complete list of her publications, click this link to see the Open Library project site.

Ava Milam married J.C. Clark on November 1, 1952. Nearly 25 years later, on August 14, 1976, Clark passed away.

In 1915, a charming bungalow on Corvallis’ NW 26th Street was built for Clark. She remained in this house for over four decades, spanning her remarkable career. In her autobiography, Ava Milam Clark wrote this about her house: “Early in 1915, I decided to build a home of my own in which to live and entertain students, faculty, and other friends. When my parents came for an extended visit that summer, Father helped me choose a lot a few blocks from the campus. Mother helped me develop plans, while Father talked with the carpenter. In a time when large houses were the custom, many people thought I was building a doll’s house when I built one just large enough to accommodate myself, a college girl to live with me, and a guest or two from time to time” (p. 105). To learn more about the house and read more about its evolution, visit the City of Corvallis site to read the Oregon Inventory of Historic Properties form. To see some great pictures, especially of Clark when she was young, click here.

Margaret Comstock Snell was known as one of the truly great faculty members in the history of OSU. Respected and admired by everyone who knew her, Snell’s greatest contribution was the establishment of the first college of home economics in the West — and she did so with 24 students, no assistants, almost no budget, and a lone classroom on the third floor of Benton Hall.

She was born to Quaker parents near the town of Livingston, New York, in 1843, attended Cedar Grove Academy, and graduated from Grinnell College. After teaching in Iowa City from 1872 to 1879, Snell moved to Benicia, California, to establish a school for young women; she called it the Snell Seminary. Snell developed an interest in medicine and was admitted to the medical school at Boston University, where she graduated with honors in 1886, specializing in homeopathy or household economy. After returning to Oakland she was recruited North to Corvallis by Board of Regents member Wallis Nash and his wife Louisa.

Want to know more about her time at OSU? George Edmonston has written a fine article on Snell, full of details and great quotes!

Helen Margaret Gilkey epitomized the Pacific Northwestern botanist of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Born on March 6, 1886, in Montesanto, Washington, she and her family moved to Corvallis in 1903. She received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from OSC and completed her PhD, “A Revision of the Tuberales (truffle fungi) of California,” in 1915 with W.A. Setchell at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1915 until 1918, she worked as a scientific illustrator at Berkeley.

In 1918, she returned to Oregon State to work as the curator of the University’s herbarium, a position she held until 1951; she later became a professor of Botany. She had 44 publications to her credit, 10 on vascular plant taxonomy and 10 on Tuberales. According to the Oregon State University Mycological Collection, “She played an essential role in establishing Oregon State University as the center for taxonomic and systematic research of hypogeous fungi. Her collection is still actively used and serves as the foundation for systematic research of hypogeous fungi in North America.” The consummate academic, retirement didn’t slow her research; she remained active until her death in 1972.

To learn more about Dr. Gilkey, read our March 13th, 2007 blog post.

There is also a wonderful Oregon Encyclopedia article on her — well worth the read!

It’s true! But those of you who have been regular readers of this blog probably knew that after seeing this post in 2007.

Want to know more about the woman? Check the Wikipedia article on Mercedes Allison Bates.

Love the woman, but want to know more about the icon? Wikipedia has a great article on Betty Crocker, with wonderful links at the bottom!