A great, in depth history of the women’s land army in ww1. Some great, unknown (to me) facts that I really enjoyed learning. The author has unearthed some interesting stories and really done her research.

A thorough overview of the Women's Land Army during WWI, but does get a bit dry for the general reader. Recommended if you have a big interest in the topic.

A history of Britain's woman's land army is a must read for all world war 1 history and woman's history readers.

Very interesting informative a look at what women did on the home front during the war.This is a subject I find really interesting and I learned from&enjoyed this book,#netgalley#penn&sword

Most of us have heard of the Land Girls of the Second World War, who heroically took to trousers and ploughs to feed the nation during a time of serious food shortages. Not quite so many of us know about the Land Girls of the First World War, though, the ones who paved the way for their successors a couple of decades later. Their story is fascinatingly and engagingly told by Caroline Scott in Holding the Home Front.

The first third of the book tells of the beginning of the war, as more and more young men were called up, and the growing realisation that women were going to need to be recruited to work on the land. This is by far the most frustrating portion of the book, not through any fault of the author, but because the attitudes of everybody, but most particularly (and unsurprisingly) the men involved were so ANNOYING! Like, who cares if the nation starves as long as women don’t lose their femininity by working on the land!

And yes, it was a different time, attitudes have changed in the last century and so on. I don’t care. It’s still ridiculous and infuriating and I was so irritated! It seems like things really changed around 1916, as more men died and fewer could be spared from their training during harvests. After that point, it’s much less annoying to read about, though some of the farmers were still clearly douchwidgeons, again unsurprisingly.

I thought Holding the Home Front presented a well-rounded picture of the whole situation, though. Caroline Scott traces official decision-making through the First World War, detailing how the attitudes of the men in power changed as the situation did, but she also uses lots of first hand accounts from the people involved, from those (particularly women) campaigning for more women to work on the land, to the women who volunteered to do so, and occasionally from the farmers whose farms they worked on. It was quite fascinating to see the disparity between these groups, especially towards the beginning of the war, and how it began to be overcome.

Also, I really appreciated that Caroline Scott took the time to acknowledge the fact that while she did a ton of research and used as many first-hand sources as she could find, there are whole groups whom she could hardly touch. In particular, many of the Land Girls reported that the working class women who worked on or lived in the vicinity of the farms they were assigned to were hostile to them. It’s easy to speculate about the reasons for this – not least the fact that these exact women had been forced off the land in the previous decades by men who told them that hard physical work was degrading and unfeminine. But the bottom line is that there are almost no records that come directly from those working class women, partly because they were accustomed to hard work and wouldn’t have felt the need to write about it, as the middle- and upper-class women did, and also because they didn’t have the same level of education which would have made such a thing easy.

I enjoyed Holding the Home Front without reservation. It was an easy, engaging read which seemed well-researched, and I liked that the author had obviously thought beyond the evidence that was in front of her to acknowledge that there was additional evidence that was lost. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the Land Girls of the First World War. Thanks to Netgalley for the advance reading copy; the book is published on the 19th July 2020 (it does also appear to have been published previously in 2017, so I guess this is a reissue).

Such an informative and well-researched book. The formatting, at times, was hard to read, and the photos didn't show up on my Kindle, but the facts of the book were interesting and I found the book very enlightening to what those women did during the WWI.

Found the book interesting but also I got bored. Maybe it was the type of book in not use to reading