In the garden they laid
out a strawberry bed of two thousand plants, helped to plant corn and
beans, picked beans and other vegetables. They took great interest in
the work and did the work just as well as the average man and made good
far beyond the most sanguine expectations."

At first the students were paid twenty-five cents an hour, the same rate
as the male farm hands. The men objected, saying that the young women
were beginners, but by the end of the summer the critics realized that
"brains tell" and said the girls were worth the higher wage, though they
had only been getting, in order to appease the masculine prejudice,
seventeen and a half cents an hour. There is no pleasing some people! If
women are paid less, they are unfair competitors, if they are paid
equally they are being petted--in short, fair competitors.

Mt. Holyoke and Bryn Mawr have made experiments, and, like Vassar,
demonstrated not only that women can, and that satisfactorily, work on
the land, but that they will, and that cheerfully. The groups were happy
and they comprehended that they were doing transcendently important
work, were rendering a patriotic service by filling up the places left
vacant by the drafted men.

The Women's Agricultural Camp, known popularly as the "Bedford Unit,"
proved an experiment rich in practical suggestion. Barnard students,
graduates of the Manhattan Trade School, and girls from seasonal trades
formed the backbone of the group. They were housed in an old farmhouse,
chaperoned by one of the Barnard professors, fed by student dietitians
from the Household Arts Department of Teachers College, transported from
farm to farm by seven chauffeurs, and coached in the arts of Ceres by an
agricultural expert. The "day laborers" as well as the experts were
all women.

[Illustration: An agricultural unit, in the uniform approved by the Woman's
Land Army of America.]

In founding the camp Mrs. Charles W. Short, Jr., had three definite
ideas in mind. First, she was convinced that young women could without
ill-effect on their health, and should as a patriotic service, do all
sorts of agricultural work. Second, that in the present crisis the
opening up of new land with women as farm managers is not called for,
but rather the supply of the labor-power on farms already under
cultivation is the need. Third, that the women laborers must, in groups,
have comfortable living conditions without being a burden on the
farmer's wife,