Harvesting Victory: A World War II Photoessay

Kristin Devine

Kristin has humbly retired as Ordinary Times' friendly neighborhood political whipping girl to focus on culture and gender issues. She lives in a wildlife refuge in rural Washington state with too many children and way too many animals. There's also a blog which most people would very much disapprove of https://atomicfeminist.com/

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8 Responses

  1. Doctor Jay says:

    I love the pictures.Report

  2. LeeEsq says:

    This is incidentally why I get annoyed when my side compares fighting a pandemic to World War II Homefront efforts. Homefront efforts like victory gardens are social. Since humans are social creatures, Homefront efforts take less of a psychological toll than pandemic fighting methods because these are things you do with other people rather than stay at home. People might hate the rationing but at least you aren’t asking them not to be social and stay away from other people.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

      We’re all in this together! Which is why you need to stay at home and only talk to other people over the phone and it’s selfish to go jogging.Report

    • Kristin Devine in reply to LeeEsq says:

      I think we’d probably all be better off just viewing issues we encounter as unique events rather than needing to compare them to anything people went through in other places and times.

      I would certainly never want to compare my experience psychologically to what anyone else went through in times I did not live through myself.Report

    • fillyjonk in reply to LeeEsq says:

      though I’ve also read that a lot of people found their ways around rationing. Kind of like how some of us are staying strictly home and yet there are others who are still eating in restaurants or planning big state dinners…Report

  3. fillyjonk says:

    I didn’t know the US had a Land Army! I had read a fair amount about the UK one, and there was a movie about it back in the 90s.

    And a lot of these things are great ideas but they also presuppose families where one adult (or maybe a teenager who is fairly capable and mature) is home most of the time to do all the work of gardening and canning. I try to have a small garden every year but it is rarely successful because the time to weed and also chase off pests is time I often don’t have. I’d starve if I had to grow the food to feed myself.

    My dad used to talk about “bean burgers” as a meatless replacement burger – he was a kid during WWII. Rather than seeing them as a deprivation or anything, he saw them as something new and different – that may have been how his parents “sold” it to him.

    My mom grew up poor and while she was a child during WWII she says she doesn’t remember rationing; probably the poor were on rations all the time and it was only the people who regularly had meat they didn’t hunt or raise themselves who saw it as a hardshipReport

    • I couldn’t agree more! So much of this stuff we have nostalgia for only works if there’s at least one party who has a fair bit of free time, or at the least a flexible schedule (I work 40 hours but I get to stay home, so I can do a lot more canning/gardening than the average working mom).

      Thanks for reading!Report