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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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you don't want the people who have too many personal troubles that have to be taken care of. Once you get them in your barracks you've got to take care of their personal troubles. You've got to provide a place for their sick babies, and everything else. It's more trouble than it's worth, unless you come to the point where there isn't another hand to hoe or pick a cherry. Plenty of women came forward and did it, but they worked on a natural operation. Wages were good. They went with a traveling group that went from orchard to orchard picking fruit. They could be handled better than perfectly unskilled women taken from Chicago department stores, or New York City dress and waistmaker factories, and turned out onto the wheat and corn growing areas. The problem of teaching and supervising was great, in addition to the problem of providing for them.

That was not only true in regard to the Land Army, but in regard to all kinds of other duties - those that required volunteers and those that required hired hands. The hired hands came forward instantly the minute you announced good wages. Announce good wages and they were right there. They were also able to look out for themselves for the most part. Of course, you always had to have an extra battery of welfare people, police women, and things like that, when you had a great many young girls working at night, or a great many working in strange cities. The YWCAs and the various other welfare





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