Back To The Land
2011
“When this silly war is over, oh how happy I shall be. When I get my civvy clothes on, no more land army for me. No more digging up potatoes, no more threshing out the corn. We will make that bossy foreman regret the day he was born.”

  The women’s land army is associated as the ‘forgotten army’. We over look that thousands of women spend years harvesting and bringing in food for Britain when it was going through both World War I and II. Women were required to do the work that men would be carrying out; ploughing the fields, working the farming machinery, threshing the hay and tending to the livestock are just some examples. In 1917 there were 20,000 women working on the land and in 1944 there were 80,000 women who had joined up to form the women’s land army. This body of work intends to explore the life style and conditions that these women choose to work in. It explores how their bodies, spirits and energy were used to help the country pull through and win the war. But it also asks the questions of, would we have won the war without the women’s land army? Why are they considered the ‘forgotten army’? And how did the roll of a land girl change the way that women were accepted?