‘The Land Girl’ Covers: March

Isobel Mount, member of the Scottish WLA, drew this special design for the final edition of The Land Girl magazine, published in March 1947. This was the end of an era for the publication, with the editor noting how the magazine originated from the time when ‘the Land Army had just begun to show a rather sceptical world what it could do’. During the seven years of its publication, The Land Girl included many drawings from Land Girls, showing ‘there was no reason whatever why cows and culture should not go together’. This design was one of the only drawings which did not explicitly include a reference to agriculture, instead enshrining the closing of the book, as a woman puts down her quill for the last time. It is thus a very classical representation of a form of women’s writing, even though it brought women together into a community which was far from classical in the way it challenged the conventional gender roles assigned to women. From June 1947, The Land Army News, published information on the WLA until 1950, when the government officially disbanded the civilian organisation.

The front page illustration of The Land Girl by Isobel Mount, published in March 1947.

The Land Girl had previously drawn on Isobel Mount’s talents; she designed the front page of the December 1944 edition. Mount also wrote the regular series Miss Baxter and I.