Twelve crusaders were chosen from the thirty-three students who
volunteered for dangerous service during a summer vacation on the Vassar
College farm. The twelve ventured out on a new enterprise that meant
aching muscles, sunburn and blisters, but not one of the twelve "ever
lost a day" in their eight hours at hard labor, beginning at four-thirty
each morning for eight weeks during one of our hottest summers. They
ploughed with horses, they ploughed with tractors, they sowed the seed,
they thinned and weeded the plants, they reaped, they raked, they
pitched the hay, they did fencing and milking. The Vassar farm had
bumper crops on its seven hundred and forty acres, and its
superintendent, Mr. Louis P. Gillespie, said, "A very great amount of
the work necessary for the large production was done by our students.
They hoed and cultivated sixteen acres of field corn, ten acres of
ensilage corn, five acres of beans, five acres of potatoes; carried
sheaves of rye and wheat to the shocks and shocked them; and two of the
students milked seven cows at each milking time. In the garden they laid
out a strawberry bed of two thousand plants, helped to plant corn and
beans, picked beans and other vegetables. They took great interest in
the work and did the work just as well as the average man and made good
far beyond the most sanguine expectations."

At first the students were paid twenty-five cents an hour, the same rate
as the male farm hands. The men objected, saying that the young women
were beginners, but by the end of the summer the critics realized that
"brains tell" and said the girls were worth the higher wage, though they
had only been getting, in order to appease the masculine prejudice,
seventeen and a half cents an hour. There is no pleasing some people! If
women are paid less, they are unfair competitors, if they are paid
equally they are being petted--in short, fair competitors.