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the idea of drafting women for a while, but it kept cropping up again. Roosevelt never really stopped thinking about it, although I could always talk him out of it. I would tell him what a nuisance they'd be, what a lot of trouble they would be, how they always would be on your back and you'd have more of them than you'd know what to do with - all that kind of thing. I explained to him the kind of women who would volunteer and how you'd have to hire a whole corps of women to tell the volunteers why they shouldn't volunteer. Roosevelt wanted a Women's Land Army. I kept saying, “That's ridiculous. You don't want that. Use women when you need them.”

Roosevelt got a lot of these ideas from other people. There was always someone who would pop up with a new idea. We had used a Women's Land Army in the First World War briefly and it proved to be very good in a very limited way, but it worked out from the regular employment offices. They were taken from the great cities and worked in a brigade, were on the farms and had special quarters assigned to them. Our farms are very far from our residues of labor. You can't just turn them loose on the farms. You've got to provide transporation. You've got to provide barracks. You've got to provide food. You've got to provide medical aid. You've got a great problem on your hands.

If you offer wages sufficient enough to attract them, they'll come if they're free to come. As a matter of fact,