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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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other women's enterprises, some times with pretty good results, sometimes with poor results--but with better results than as though they hadn't done it, you know. They had more food. They had more things to eat, and undoubtedly it was a good scheme. But many of the women in the Women's Land Army (Britain) were farm women anyhow. They were women raised in in the country, brought up in the country, and knowing how to handle a cow. The country is small. They didn't have to go so far. They were just organized to distribute their labor.

But that was only one of the many problems. Smith saw everybody with his job assigned, and he saw priorities given, and he thought that a study could be made about what different types could do, and fit the type to the job. He agitated for--I think he gave it the name--a War Manpower Commission. Now, the word “manpower” always annoyed me very much indeed-- the mere phrase “manpower”. If we have reduced our population to being mere manpower, we've gone a long way towards copying the totalitarians.

At any rate, we fought quite a battle, and it lasted for months. Smith made a convert here and a convert there, and I made a convert here and a convert there. One group would talk the President into the idea, and the other group would get busy and talk him out of the idea of having a War Manpower Commission.





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