28 Rural living BONNIE SITTER, AN EXETER, ONTARIOBASED WRITER, PHOTOGRAPHER, AND HISTORIAN, remembers when she first found a small black and white photo while sorting through some of her husband’s belongings after he passed away in 2016. “I came to a tiny picture. It was just two inches by two and a half inches, so tiny compared to the four by sixes that we get in this day and age,” she says. “It had three girls dressed in farm-type clothes sitting on the running board of an old car. And I thought, oh, not his cousins. I wonder who these people are.” On the back of the photo was written ‘Farmerettes, around 1946’. “I thought, who are the Farmerettes? Nobody taught me about them. And I was kind of indignant in my own mind, thinking, I kind of pride myself in knowing some Ontario history. And I thought I don’t know this story. I need to know this. And that moment, I decided I was going to start doing research, and I was going to figure it out.” ADVENTURE CALLING The Farmerettes, Sitter learned, were young women who filled the labour gap on Ontario farms during World War II, with so many young men off to war. Started in 1941, the program, run by the Canadian government, enlisted high school-aged women, mainly from urban or non-farming areas, to spend their summers working on farms. With the promise of a wage, high school credit (the women left before the end of the school year), and adventure, thousands of young women embarked on a summer-long work experience that saw them planting crops and tending livestock – jobs that had formerly been the primary domain of men. “Girls from Northern Ontario made up a big portion of [the Farmerettes] because there were no jobs, no opportunities for them up there,” says Sitter. “The boys got work in the mills and the mines, but there was nothing for the girls.” “A lot of them had never been more than seven miles from home.” Sitter continues. “So this was adventure calling.” The women were paid 25 cents per hour, the going rate for farm work for men at the time, though they paid for their room and board from their earnings. It was hard work with a steep learning curve, especially for those who had no farm experience. “Within weeks, the girls were showing that they could do the work. I mean, the first two weeks were probably pretty brutal,” says Sitter. “They worked hard all day in the hot sun, and it was dirty. But by the end of the summer, the girls were in tears, not wanting to say goodbye to the new friends, and the farmer was saying, ‘I couldn’t have done it without you. I hope you’ll come again next year.’” Many of the women did just that, spending multiple summers in the program, which lasted until 1951. ONION SKINS AND PEACH FUZZ Shirleyan English was one of those Farmerettes; she had come from North Bay at age 16 to work on the Sitter farm near Remembering the Farmerettes SUPPORTING THE WAR EFFORT ON THE HOME FRONT Mary Feldskov
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