Evelyn Dunbar's 1943 painting “Harvest Season” and the Women's Land Army

Comrades at Work.

A painting by the British artist Evelyn Dunbar, Harvest Time, 1943.

The canvas documents the existence of a phenomenon known as the Women's Land Army, which first appeared in Great Britain during the First World War as a public organisation for assisting with agricultural labour. By the time of the Second World War, with its particularly acute shortage of food and of hands to work the land, the Women's Land Army took on special significance, and a Land Corps sprang up in various countries of the Commonwealth and in the USA. Its ranks numbered hundreds of thousands of women.

The organisation survived until 1949. Today the labour of the Land Army's volunteers is commemorated by a special badge, a monument in Scotland and a number of works of art, for instance the film Three Englishwomen in the Country.

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