The Girl on the Land Serves the Nation's Need - Edward Penfield

Penfield's The Girl on the Land Serves the Nation's Need (1918) is a First World War poster promoting the Woman's Land Army of America. It shows a young woman in work clothes standing in an agricultural setting, with the text urging women to apply to their state agricultural committees for farm work.

Historical context

The Woman's Land Army of America was established in 1917 to address the labour shortage caused by military conscription. Modelled on Britain's Women's Land Army, the programme placed women on farms to maintain food production. By 1918, roughly 20,000 women were working as "farmerettes" across the country, planting, harvesting, and tending livestock. Most were college-educated women from cities who had no prior farming experience; they trained for several weeks before being assigned to farms.

Penfield's poster is a recruiting tool with a practical structure. Unlike his more stylised commercial work, this design is relatively straightforward: one figure, a clear instruction, and an institutional framework (the state agricultural committees) for taking action. The poster tells women exactly where to apply, making it more functional than many propaganda posters of the period, which aimed to stir emotion without providing next steps.

The colour scheme is muted compared to his Every Girl Pulling for Victory from the same year, reflecting the practical, no-nonsense tone of agricultural propaganda versus the more idealistic naval imagery of the other poster. The "farmerette" programme, while small in scale, helped establish the principle that women could do physically demanding agricultural work, a precedent that would be drawn on again during the Second World War.

About Edward Penfield (1866–1925)

Often called the father of the American poster, Penfield served as art director of Harper's Magazine from 1890 to 1901, producing over 100 cover designs during that period. His style drew on Japanese woodblock printing and the French affiche tradition: flat areas of colour, bold outlines, and minimal detail. He became one of the most recognised illustrators of the American Art Nouveau movement, and his wartime posters remain some of the most widely studied examples of early 20th-century graphic propaganda.

This fine art reproduction is printed on museum-grade stock, faithful to the original's bold colours and graphic simplicity.