How Prairie women helped the Second World War effort as 'farmerettes' in B.C.

Eighty years ago, British Columbia faced an agricultural labour shortage driven by the Second World War.

It made a call to Prairie women for help.

The program, known as the Women's Land Army, recruited women to work in orchards and on farms, to replace the shortage caused by men shipping off to Europe.

Hundreds of women participated during and just after the war. Some of the food they were picking was even sent to help Canada's soldiers and allies in Europe.

Kelsey Lonie, a University of Regina historian, wrote her master's thesis on this chapter of history and her own grandmother's experience travelling from Saskatchewan to take part in the program.

Lonie said the Great Depression, and its effect on agriculture in Saskatchewan, may have made women more eager to follow opportunity in B.C.

"These girls and women were probably already doing agricultural labour on their own farms, and so to be able to do it with pay somewhere that is much more beautiful, after the Great Depression, really appealed to them," Lonie told Stefani Langenegger, host of CBC Saskatchewan's Morning Edition.

Ads in newspapers and on the radio called on Saskatchewan and Alberta women to go work in B.C.

It was an opportunity to be paid for work they would normally do for free on their own family farms, plus an opportunity to travel to a new province.

The call was a success. Within a day of the ads going out, B.C. had all the women it needed, Lonie said.

Women left small rural towns and farms, got on trains to B.C. and were placed on farms, especially in the Okanagan where fresh fruit needed to be picked.

The press of the time called them "farmerettes."

Lonie said she heard her grandmother tell stories of working on orchards in B.C., but at the time didn't know anything about the Women's Land Army. 

"She had a really great experience. She said she had never been on a train in her life. She was from just north of Prince Albert, and so she and her sister got on the train," Lonie said. "It was just literally like a vacation for them." 

She heard about a Women's Land Army program in Ontario and put together the pieces.

"I thought that sounds really familiar to what my grandmother did in British Columbia," said Lonie.

Lonie wanted to know more about it and dug deeper, eventually leading to her thesis.

She said the living conditions for the women weren't great, but were most likely similar to what they already had on the Prairies. There was no indoor plumbing, no electricity, just a few girls living together in cabins in remote areas of B.C.

Lonie said they worked 10 hours a day for 10 weeks, then went back home.

Other countries such as the U.K., the U.S. and Australia had similar programs and now share this great history of women pitching into the war effort.

Lonie said she hopes to get more stories from people who had family participate in this program and include them in a book she is writing on the topic.