In 1918, Chicago resident and University of Chicago freshman Florence Falkenau lied about her age to the recruiters for the Women’s Land Army of America (WLA). She told them she was eighteen years old. She was only seventeen. She then convinced her reluctant parents to let her spend three months working on a farm through the WLA in West Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, seven hundred miles away. In doing so, Florence, my grandmother and the daughter of a prominent Chicago building contractor and a suffragist mother, joined fifteen thousand young WLA members to plow, sow, harvest, slop pigs, drive tractors, repair farm machinery, and milk cows. Once a week, they prepared supper for their fellow farmerettes. These young ladies, most of them with no agricultural experience, took the place of farmers and their sons who had dropped their hoes and milk pails and leaped from their tractors to march off to the battlefields in Europe.
See full article here.
