A Vacation for Victory

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.