Archive Awareness: Dig for Victory!
Posters encouraging young women to join the Women's Land Army sported healthy young girls set against an idyllic countryside. In England and Wales, the WLA was mobilised before the war started. By the outbreak of war in September 1939, 17,000 women were enrolled.
left: Women's Land Army recruitment poster, 1940s, issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Labour and National Service. Photograph courtesy the Museum of English Rural Life, The University of Reading. Reference D83/2.
"For a healthy, happy job: Join the WOMEN'S LAND ARMY. For details APPLY TO NEAREST W.L.A. COUNTY OFFICE OR TO W.L.A. HEADQUARTERS."
Suggested reading
Links are provided to records on Copac for these items. Copac is the free, web based national union catalogue, containing the holdings of many of the major university and National Libraries in UK and Ireland plus a number of special libraries. For more information about accessing items see the FAQs on the Copac website.
- Vita Sackville-West The Women's Land Army with a new introduction by E.M. Jean Procter. Poems of the Land Army : an anthology of verse by members of the Women's Land Army with a foreward by V. Sackville-West (1997, originally published in 1944, with the poems published in 1940). Records on Copac
- Bob Powell & Nigel Westacott The Women's Land Army (1997) .Records on Copac
- Marjorie M. Dean The Women's Land Army and me (1995). Records on Copac
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