The Government also invited women to join the ranks of the Women's Land Army, an organisation that offered cheap female labour to farmers not always keen to employ women. The 260,000 volunteers that made up the WLA were given little more than a uniform and orders to work hard as the fuel restrictions made a return to manual agricultural labour unavoidable; unless, that is, the Government used this as an excuse, counting on these women's cheerful acceptance of any hardship to make working the land as cheap as possible.