Tens of thousands of young women from across Ontario worked on farms during and after the Second World War as part of a little-known government program.
Their story is now the subject of a new documentary, We Lend A Hand, which premieres Friday at the Junction North Film Festival in Sudbury.
The film, directed by Colin Field, dives into the experiences of the Farmerettes — teenage girls who took on agricultural work to support Canada’s war effort by participating in the Ontario Farm Service Force.
From the early 1940s until the early 1950s, an estimated 40,000 young women worked the fields, many coming from northern Ontario and urban areas with no prior farming experience.
“It’s a story that most people don’t know in Ontario and they’re surprised to hear,” Field said.
“These women are now mostly in their 90s. Two of them are over 100. I found 20 of them and interviewed them over the past couple of years.”
Field said his 50-minute documentary explores how these young women became an essential part of the agricultural workforce during and after the Second World War.
“A lot of them talked about how they had signed up just for fun and to get away from their, you know, their parents, and to go and have an adventure,” Field explained.
“But really, while they were there, they kind of appreciated the work and learned how to work hard and had all these opportunities and this freedom to meet other young women from different religions, different provinces.”
The inspiration for We Lend A Hand came from Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: Memories of Ontario Farmerettes, a book co-authored by Bonnie Sitter and Shirleyan English.
English, a former Farmerette herself, recalls first hearing about the program as a 16-year-old girl living in North Bay in 1952.
“The people who were part of the provincial government, they came around to the various schools, and they had posters and things and things like that. So my girlfriend and I at the time, we decided we’d like to do that,” English said.
English explained that during the summer, girls had few job opportunities compared to boys. Babysitting was essentially the only option available, and neither she or her friend had work lined up.
“They were looking for girls who would come and work, because the young men were all getting ready to sign up for the war, and some of them were already working in jobs like we were,” she said.
English said that after applying, the government contacted them and offered to cover their travel expenses for the farm program, with the condition that they stay for 13 weeks. In return, they were exempt from writing final exams that year.
“Of course, that was a real come-on for you know, any girl to get out of their exams — that would be fabulous. So we signed up, and we were accepted and early in June, we got on the train and set off,” she said.
English recalled that after being accepted, she travelled by train to Toronto in early June. There, provincial representatives — mostly women — welcomed the recruits and assigned them to farms across Lambton County in southwestern Ontario. English was sent to the village of Thedford.
The accommodations were dormitory-style, providing both meals and sleeping quarters. Each morning, the girls were transported to their work sites in large trucks.
English said they were assigned to two main crops: onions and peppermint. Their work involved switching between hoeing onions and tending to the peppermint fields.
“It was a lot of hard labour out in the fields,” she recalled. “A lot of it we did on hands and knees.”
English said she learned a lot about farming and called it a wonderful experience. She said she would have enrolled the following year if the program hadn’t shut down.
After the war, more than 157,000 refugees came to Canada and the government helped integrate these newcomers into farming communities, replacing the teenage Farmerettes.
“I learned a lot about farming, and I always think that that experience led to me liking gardening, plants and flowers and things like that,” English said.
She wants to be remembered not just as a teenage farm worker, but as part of a generation of young women who stepped up when their country needed them.
“The boys who were off doing something, they all got recognized… but there was nothing on the Farmerettes. Nobody had ever heard of them, so we thought we should be recognized too,” she said.
We Lend A Hand premieres at the Junction North Film Festival on Friday afternoon.
