must have adequate pay, and must have regulated hours
of work.

With these sound ideas as its foundation the camp opened at Mt. Kisco,
backed by the Committee on Agriculture of the Mayor's Committee of Women
on National Defense of New York City, under the chairmanship of Virginia
Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College.

At its greatest enrolment the unit had seventy-three members. When the
prejudice of the fanners was overcome, the demand for workers was
greater than the camp could supply. Practically the same processes were
carried through as at Vassar, and the verdict of the farmer on his new
helpers was that "while less strong than men, they more than made up for
this by superior conscientiousness and quickness." Proof of the
genuineness of his estimate was shown in his willingness to pay the
management of the camp the regulation two dollars for an eight hour
working day. And it indicated entire satisfaction with the experiment,
rather than abstract faith in woman, that each farmer anxiously urged
the captain of the group at the end of his first trial to "please bring
the same young ladies tomorrow." He was sure no others so good existed.

The unit plan seems a heaven-born solution of many of the knotty
problems of the farm. In the first place, the farmer gets cheerful and
handy helpers, and his over-worked wife does not find her domestic cares
added to in the hot summer season. The new hands house and feed
themselves. From the point of view of the worker, the advantage is that
her food at the camp is prepared by trained hands and the proverbial
farm isolation gives way to congenial companionship.

These separate experiments growing out of the need of food production
and the shortage of labor have brought new blood to the farm, have
turned the college girl on vacation and, what is more important, being a
solution of an industrial problem, the unemployed in seasonal trades,
into recruits for an agricultural army. And by concentrating workers in
well-run camps there has been attracted to the land a higher order
of helper.

One obstacle in the way of the immediate success of putting such women
on the land is a wholly mistaken idea in the minds of many persons of
influence in agricultural matters that the new labor can be diverted to
domestic work in the farm house. This view is urged in the following
letter to me from the head of one of our best agricultural colleges:
"The farm labor shortage is much more acute than