Nostalgia, Gender, and the Countryside: Placing the ‘Land Girl’ in First World War Britain

Abstract

In December 1917, an article in the Daily Chronicle, entitled ‘The New Land Lady’, stated that:One of the good things which may issue from this war is a revival of the old English countryside.The happy village may be born again.If this reformation should come, it will be the work of the women.The nostalgia evident in this call for women's wartime ‘return’ to the land to restore a lost, pastoral idyll during an event more usually associated with modernity raises several questions. What meanings can be attached to the ways in which women agricultural workers were seen as the key to a ‘rural revival’ and thus as crucial to a revitalized nation during the First World War? And what are we to make of the seemingly contradictory appeal to women radically to leave their presumably urban and suburban homes and conservatively to restore the countryside?As Raymond Williams pointed out, this emblematic English countryside has always been placed in a more ideal past, and the desires to return to or to preserve the allegedly unchanging patterns of land and the lives attached to it are integral to the problem of modernization itself. More recently, Alun Howkins has argued that the ideology and ‘ideal’ of England and Englishness have remained essentially ‘rural,’ and that in 1914 this was the vision of Englishness that ‘went into battle'. However, one might certainly be forgiven for assuming that the creation of the Women's Land Army and the resulting appearance of urban women in trousers, breeches and puttees in villages throughout Britain would herald something more like a ‘transformation’ than a ‘revival’.

‘We Cows are in a Very Serious Predicament’: Constructions of Land Girls and Cattle in Britain in the Second World War

“…18 The advent of the Land Girl during and after the Second World War was represented as novel and exceptional, just as it had been in the First World War. 19 But women had, of course, worked on farms before both wars even though their presence has been largely overlooked in both historical literature and official statistics. Nicola Verdon argues that national census data under-recorded women agricultural workers for three main reasons: their work was often casual and seasonal; their jobs did not correspond with the occupational definitions used in the census, which, for example, ignored the crossover between domestic and farm service; and women farm workers were frequently members of the farmer's family.…”

Home Fronts, Gender War and Conflict

“…It was during the First World War that the term 'home front' first entered the English language, 13 as civilians encountered warships shelling their homes and bombing during zeppelin raids. It was the conflict in which rationing, blackouts and war pensions were first introduced into Britain as the mobilisation of men, industry and agriculture in the first mechanised war to be fought on a truly global scale disrupted and disturbed the lives of many non-combatants.…”

Providing places for structures of feeling and hierarchical complementarity in urban theory: Re-reading Williams’The Country and the City

“…Goodwin, 1999; Molotch et al, 2000; Neumann, 1996; Phillips, 1998; Samuel, 2000). Unsurprisingly, gender themes, by comparison, were in the past and are still less widely discussed in research with reference to The Country and the City (Grayzel, 1999; Little and Austin, 1996). Recent discourses on gender work that cite the book refer to arguments such as asymmetric gender roles (Driscoll, 2013) and masculine domination in farm labour associated with rural life (Ekers, 2012).…”