On the Trail of Victor Falkenau
Unearthing Falkenau letters yields insights into key period in America
For two years, every time I visited my mother in California, I cleaned out the closet in the den in her apartment. She had asked me to organize and discard the contents so as not to burden her three children once she was no longer with us. I sorted through postcards, maps, and brochures from my mother’s bicycle trip to Europe in 1954. I viewed water-stained photographs from a trip to Korea with my father in the 1970s. I rummaged through keepsakes from a trip to Russia my parents made in the winter in the 1980s when a journey in frigid temperatures was cheaper than any other time of year. She’d discover photographs and paraphernalia I’d thrown away and enter the room, waving them in her hand, saying, “How can you throw this away?” I had to put them back in a box.
Amidst this stuff, I pulled out of a box a manila envelope the letters my grandmother, Florence Falkenau, the youngest of Victor’s three daughters, had written in the summer of 1917. She had, several times a week, scrawled in pencil four, five, and six-page letters when she was a “farmerette” working on Media Farm, near Harper’s Ferry in the Shenandoah Valley in West Virginia. “Farmerette” was the name given to young women recruited to work on farms during the Great War when the men had trooped off to the front in France.
These documents―primary source material―are necessary for the book. Reading the letters, I heard my grandmother’s voice, humor, and passion for adventure. I saw her handwriting and spelling. “It was a circus climbing those strong old trees and looking out over the country for miles around,” she wrote to her family.
Though her father, Victor, owned a farm in Benton Harbor, Michigan where the family spent weekends and the summer, Florence brought few skills to Media Farm. She knew how to pet cows, dogs, horses, and cats and how to climb apple trees. However, at her family’s Rest-a-Bit Farm, she did not scale them to pick the fruit but to nestle in the boughs and read.
In the spring of 1917, not even through her freshman year at the University of Chicago, she joined the Women’s Land Army of America (WLLA) by fibbing to the university recruiters. She said she was eighteen years old, the age of eligibility for the program, when she was still seventeen. She had to convince her parents to let their spoiled, inexperienced youngest daughter leave home. “Boys my age are being sent overseas to do far more perilous work,” she pleaded. After school let out for the summer, Florence boarded a train from Chicago to Shenandoah Junction.
The WLLA, established the same year Florence joined, recruited single college coeds to work on farms to compensate for the shortage of laborers. The founders―garden clubs, suffrage societies, women’s colleges, civic groups, and the YWCA―based the organization on Britain’s Land Lassies. More than 20,000 women signed up. These ladies did the jobs of men, including ploughing, driving tractors, harvesting, picking, sorting, and, as my grandmother said, doing “those fool pails,” meaning milking the cows and cleaning the buckets.
WLLA gals put in an eight-hour day with a break for a midday meal, a rest that was unheard of before this time, especially for agricultural laborers. They wore pants, an unsightly shock to the mores of society ladies and gentlemen, or anyone for that matter. The organization required farmerettes to receive the same pay as male farmhands, twenty-five cents an hour, or the going rate for sewing piecework in the nearby town.
The letters revealed how quickly Florence adapted from crying of homesickness in the apple trees while picking red and green Baldwin, golden, or King David apples to thriving. “I am soaked with perspiration all the time,” she told her parents. “The temperature can be 110 in the shade (and there is no shade) or 120 degrees in the sun. It’s ridiculous to be neat and dainty here and I’m glad we didn’t spend all that money and time on uniforms.” She wrote she was having the time of her life and wanted to extend her stay.
“Farmerette” came from “suffragette,” though the WLLA founders knew the latter was a derogatory term. It was a well-known fact that females, other than farmwives, did not know anything about cultivating and harvesting crops and were incapable of backbreaking labor hunched over shovels and ploughs.
Women wanting to help the war effort who also signed up to drive trucks, operate heavy machinery, and assemble airplane motors. One hundred thousand ladies kept the trains running on time, sold tickets, repaired tracks, and cleaned cars. Twenty thousand nurses trained by the Red Cross worked across the country’s armed forces. They changed the bandages of the sick and wounded, meted out anesthesia in the operating theater, triaged bloody soldiers in the trenches, and worked on shock teams to care for soldiers who had their faces blown apart. Eight million female Red Cross volunteers dished out food on mess trays in canteens and provided recreational services and physical therapy to soldiers and sailors. They made surgical dressings, masks, and gowns. Women made up the majority of the twelve-thousand drivers for the Red Cross’ Motor Service, providing transportation to canteens, hospitals, and camps. Most had their own vehicles, and many were trained mechanics. Over a thousand library workers at home and in Europe directed the construction of thirty-six camp libraries and distributed ten million books and magazines to service men. Over two hundred near the front lines fielded calls and relayed urgent messages. Women’s place was no longer just in the home.
Florence had a lot to learn at Media Farm. On the first night of her housekeeper job when she had to make dinner for the eight famished farmerettes and the Media Farm family, she faced pounds of string beans piled in front of her on the kitchen table. She carefully split open each thin bean to pluck out the tiny pods. Here she learned the difference between string beans and peas.
Toward the end of a summer ploughing fields, shucking corn, picking and sorting apples, peaches, and other crops, slopping pigs, painting a silo, and milking cows, Florence wrote to her parents, “I’m developing the most intense passion for girly clothes and pretty underwear.”
The folks from nearby Shenandoah Junction, Charles Town, and Harpers Ferry told Florence and her companions that they had always wanted to see a real live farmerette. Florence wrote, “It simply kills us, this ‘brave’ stuff for not one of us has had a better time in our lives.”
Florence’s and millions of other women’s Great War contributions eventually encouraged President Wilson to sign the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.
Victor, his wife, and three daughters each took up the war effort. Millions of Americans did. Victor became a “Dollar-a-Year” man, a businessman who “worked” for the U.S. Government for an annual salary of a dollar, since the government could not accept volunteers. He applied his engineering skills to expedite the production and shipping of steel across the country to manufacture weapons.
These letters provide a rich source of material to hear my grandmother’s experience during the Great War, an effort that contributed to overcoming entrenched prejudices about women working outside the home and to giving women the right to vote. They help me write a chapter full of details, quotations, and family and historical facts. Readers will gain an appreciation of the Falkenau family and this important time in history.
They also make me ponder the ability and willingness of Americans today to sacrifice for a global cause, such as fighting for freedom and democracy or against climate change. I hope this chapter helps readers question similar issues.
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On another note, a publishing and social media guru recommended that I split Discovering Trails Passed which covers Snippets from Spain and writing a book about Victor Falkenau into two Substacks. She advised that if I want to get the attention of potential readers and Chicago experts and enthusiasts, I need to direct the Substack page to them and facilitate their finding it. The next blog about the book will come out as another Substack page. Snippets from Spain will be just that and continue to land in your inbox on Fridays. I’ll let you know about the sign-up process for the Victor Falkenau page in another post.
I truly hope all you lovely readers will continue to read both. I appreciate and learn from your comments and feedback. They’re a big help in so many ways. Thank you.
I had never heard of the farmerettes. Of course women were recruited to do this work.
I’ll look for your new substack! Fascinating reading through the eyes of you and your (similarly adventure-seeking and communicative) grandmother. Coincidence for me that I have also just started reading Jaqueline Winspear’s early detective novels addressing the Great War from a British perspective and just completed reading Robert Sapolsky’s more academic work considering the war from the anchor of neurobiology and human behavior. I agree with you. Readers have much to gain from enlightening their own choices through such a past/present and multifaceted prism. Thank you for your contribution.