A Vacation for Victory

An Illustrated History of the Women's Land Army in Canada

Kelsey M. Lonie

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228027638
• Index: History

Serving not in uniforms or factories but in orchards, fields, and farms, the women and girls of Canada’s Women’s Land Army – the youngest of whom were known as “farmerettes” – planted, picked, and packed food that sustained the nation while men fought overseas.

A Vacation for Victory brings this fascinating Second World War history to life. Blending creative nonfiction with archival letters, newspaper clippings, interviews, and her own grandmother’s recollections, Kelsey Lonie portrays the working lives of women who formed Canada’s farm front. Their stories and photographs reveal how they understood both their labour and their changing place in society. Unlike other Allied countries, Canada did not create a national land army; instead, provinces took the lead. Ontario recruited thousands of women, while British Columbia’s program faltered until prairie women, eager for new experiences elsewhere, signed up. Patriotic duty, however, is only part of Lonie’s narrative: wealthy landowners expanded orchards, leaving the hardest, dirtiest jobs to marginalized workers, thus exposing how racism and capitalism shaped wartime farming industries.

Richly illustrated with photographs, postcards, and cultural ephemera, A Vacation for Victory offers powerful accounts of grit, inequity, and resilience, restoring women to the centre of Canada’s wartime effort.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Half-Title Page 1
• Introduction • Discovering Irene
• One An Apple a Day …
• Two Bring Out the Girls!
• Three A Garden of Eden … For Some
• Four War Reaches Eden
• Five The Volunteer Field Fighters
• Six “Even a Child Could Do It”
• Seven A Cry for Help Across the Plains
• Eight Vacation or Vocation?
• Nine A Forgotten Legacy
• Epilogue • A Legacy Discovered
• Figures
• Notes
• Index