Thinking About Women’s History, or Herstory if You Prefer
It is the time of year when I spend even more time than usual thinking about women’s history: What does it look like? What does it mean? How do we incorporate women into public history with the goal of making it so mainstream that it no longer needs a qualifier? Who is doing interesting work in the field?
For many of you, March is far away. For those of us who are plotting planning Women’s History Month content, it is practically tomorrow. As long-time readers know, every March I run mini-interviews four days a week with people doing interesting work related to women’s history in a varied of fields and forms. I started the list of people to invite earlier this year. But as always at this point in the year, it is not quite long enough and not as varied as I would like.* That means I have my antenna up for people I might want to invite and cool stuff I might want to share.
Which brings me the Remedial Herstory Project.** I’ve been aware of their work for several years now. The short version is that they work to help school teachers incorporate women’s history into their history curriculum, not just in March but throughout the year. I recently discovered this Tedx talk in which the women at the helm of RHP discuss what that could look like, using what Kelsie Brooke Eckert has dubbed “the Eckert test”.*** If I had more self-discipline I would save it for March. But I don’t.
https://youtu.be/qfGQzJg3NLM?si=KlHjYhW4WO4iVERH
* Suggestions welcome. Particularly suggestions of people working on women who are not middle or upper class white Americans from the mid-19th to mid 20th centuries.
**In the spirit of full disclosure, and blatant self promotion, I recently recorded a podcast episode for RHP. You can find it here:
***Think a more challenging relative of the Bechdel test, designed for history curricula.
The War Magician
I was well into David Fisher’s The War Magician: How an Illusionist Changed the Course of World War II before I realized that it was a novel based on a true story rather than a work of historical non-fiction. The confusion was mine. The cover clearly states that the story is “based on an extraordinary true story,” which would have given me a clue if I hadn’t been reading it on my Kindle.* My bad.
That said, The War Magician is a fascinating story based on the experiences of Jasper Maskelyne, a famous British stage magician who used his talents at building illusions on behalf of the British army in North Africa. He was the commander of the small “Camouflage Experimental Section,” more popularly known as “the Magic Gang.” Fisher describes how they created the illusion of tanks (and submarines) where there were none and camouflaged naval vessels as pleasure boats and fishing scows. On one occasion, they concealed the entire city of Alexandria from German bombers. On another, their tour de force, they convinced German Field Marshal Rommel that the British planned to attack from the south when in fact they planned to attack from the north, contributing to the British victory at Alamein. I’m not going to give you details, because half the fun of the book is following along as Maskelyne plans his illusions and his crew scrapes together material to create them.
Once I realized that I was reading a novel, I spend some time down the rabbit hole trying to decide just how accurate Fisher’s account is. It isn’t clear. Fisher doesn’t provide a reader’s note discussing his sources.** Ever since the publication of Maskelyne’s 1949 memoir, Magic ,Top Secret, critics have suggested that he exaggerated his importance, though that is hard to prove either way. Exaggerated or not, there is no doubt that Maskelyne and the Magic Gang played a role in the war in North Africa.
The War Magician is worth a read if you’re interested in World War II or stage magicians.
*I seldom read narrative non-fiction on my Kindle because it doesn’t allow me to hold a conversation with the author in the margins and it is difficult to go back and forth between the text and the notes. (Another clue I should have caught: no notes. )
**Or at least he doesn’t in the edition I read, which was released in 2023. The book originally came out in 1983.
“Farmerettes” Fed the Nation at War
In the fall of 1917, manpower was short in the fields of America. When the United States entered the Great War, millions of men had left farm work to join the army or do other war-related jobs. Even with farm labor wages skyrocketing, farmers faced difficulties hiring men to harvest the crops that were needed at home and in a starving Europe. The federal government did not help when it ignored farmers’ pleas to exempt farm workers from the draft.
While federal and state governments dithered to find solutions, a consortium of women’s organizations—including garden clubs, women’s colleges, civic groups, the YWCA, the DAR, women’s trade unionists, the Girl Scouts and suffrage societies—stepped up to form the Women’s Land Army of America (WLAA), inspired by Britain’s “Land Girls.” More than 20,000 women from American cities and towns, most of whom had never worked on a farm before, learned to tend and harvest crops in training programs organized by the WLAA . Known as “farmerettes,” a term intended to evoke the suffragist movement, they were paid the same wages as male farm workers and were protected by an eight-hour workday—an unknown luxury on many farms then and now. They wore practical uniforms featuring pants (or at least bloomers), initially shocking to the rural communities in which they worked.
Farmers were at first wary about hiring the women. Some of the reasons will sound familiar. Farmers claimed women didn’t have the strength to do the job and didn’t have the necessary skills. One concern was particular to the farmerettes. Farm hands typically were housed on the farm and fed by the farmer’s wife. Farmers were afraid that housing and feeding strange young women would cause domestic upsets. The WLAA solved the problem by housing and feeding “units” of farmerettes in communal camps away from individual farms and transporting them to their jobs each morning.
Wary farmers, and a watching public, were soon convinced as the young women leaned into the work. By the summer of 1918, farmerettes were on the job in thirty-three states, and the subject of poetry, songs, cinema news reels, and acts in the Ziegfield follies.
The organization was resurrected during World War II, this time as an official government effort under the auspices of the US Department of Agriculture’s United States Crop Corps.