| Less Solitary |
| More Comfortable |
| More Attractive |
| Freer from Drudgery |
| Happier and |
| Fuller of Opportunity |
For the 21,000,000 girls and women on the farms and in the villages!
It brings to the girls in the country and small towns
These girls give back to their community
The Young Women's Christian Association feels that it is its "privilege to reach the Country Girls in terms of their own environment, helping them to help themselves and to become active social forces in their own communities."
Pursuing this thought, the wonderful idea was hit upon of using the available energy of the Country Girl that goes away to college as she returns to her home full of inspiration for a "career." The career of being a good angel to her home community is offered to her.
Carrying out this purpose with energy and great enthusiasm, as they do everything they take up, the Y. W. C.A. instituted a special section of their work which they called the "Eight Weeks Club." Under this scheme, in the late winter or early spring, trained secretaries who are able to give time and strength to the work and who are touched with the flame of that character-contagion, are sent out to the colleges. Preparation classes are formed among these girls, schemes are marked out for the summer, and a suggested plan of study printed for them in the Association Monthly is gone over. In the summer of 1914 about nine hundred names of Country Girls in college who were willing to embark for the summer's work were received. They came from one hundred and fifty-eight different colleges. Not all of these were eventually able to lead clubs; some were prevented by sickness, by family reasons, etc., after they got home. But there were one hundred and seventy-two who reported promptly that they did actually lead Eight Weeks Clubs, and about 2800 girls were enrolled in these clubs. The clubs represented thirty-one States, Pennsylvania leading with twenty-two, Iowa having nineteen, South Dakota ten, Wisconsin twelve.[2]
If you think that there is not much that you, a lone, single girl without any help can do, listen to this story which one of the Christian Association secretaries tells of the experience of one college girl who went to teach in a small town. "The first Sunday I was in town," she said, "I went to Sunday School. There were eight people there and they were all old. On the next Sunday there were five and one of them was blind; and what do you think? They asked me to take the superintendency." Did she take it? The secretary says she held her breath for the answer, for on just such a turning-point as this hangs the solution of the whole country problem. "I did; and when I went away in the spring, there were ninety-three in that Sunday School and none of them was blind."
If one lone Country Girl can do so much as that, what might not be accomplished if all the girls in the community were as one heart and mind to work together for the Sunday School, for the Church, for the Christian Endeavor and the Epworth League, and for all the causes that seek higher things in the community? A young woman may never know what emergency she may be training for when she begins to teach a Sunday School class.
It is the hope of the Y. W. C. A. that the Eight Weeks Club for the summer may ultimately be developed into an all-round-the-year Y. W. C. A., to go on indefinitely. The desire of the secretaries is to organize the young women of country and village life on the basis of the county. A County Secretary, trained for the work, should be placed in charge and should seek to reach every girl within "team-haul" or street-car riding distance with the invitation to meetings, where music, books, and pictures are found, together with wholesome social guidance and direct religious inspiration, and above all the companionship that forms a channel for the effectiveness of those good and uplifting influences. "The County Secretary," says one of their leaflets, "must not only know country life but student life and city life and industrial life. She must be an expert in educational, physical, religious and civic questions and she must be able to lead and to organize so that clubs and groups may be produced which shall meet needs extending all the way from athletics and recreation through social and general community life up to distinctly religious and devotional service. She must be able to use volunteer leaders and to mold them into a sympathetic cooperation for the bearing of one another's burdens which ultimately will lead them to share one another's successes. The County Young Women's Christian Association ... is bound to come into its heritage of success and to transform the girlhood of the country and village life of our land."
If there is no college girl to come "back home" to take the lead in forming an Eight Weeks Club, and no other means at hand to carry out a plan for organization in the mind of any young woman in some rural region, the best thing to do is to write—and get as many other girls as you can to write also—to the Y. W. C. A., 600 Lexington Avenue, New York City, and tell them of the desire, and then see what happens. They will be likely to send in good time a State or County Secretary to come and look over the field and give advice. She will probably hold a conference with the leading people of the county, calling together the pastors and their wives, teachers, bankers, alumnæ, and others interested. There will be parlor conferences, speeches and addresses, and personal interviews. Giving of the necessary funds will surely follow all this education of the mind of the community, and a place will be chosen or built for the home of the new association.
Whatever institutions already exist in the community, either social or religious, the Y. W. C. A. will not retard them but will give them aid and new inspiration. By the elastic articulation of its secretaries and departments, the Young Women's Christian Association cooperates with many organizations: with the church in training leaders for Bible study courses and teachers for Sunday Schools, in directing social life, and in encouraging federation and unity among denominations; with the school, by athletic leagues, field days, play festivals, contests in public speaking and choral singing; with teachers and farmers' institutes, Chautauquas, and the Grange, giving programs for girls and women; with agricultural extension courses, adapting them to the needs of girls; with State and County fairs, providing exhibits, contests, camps, rest rooms; with library commissions, making out reading lists and using traveling libraries.
There is not an organization for betterment beside which the Young Women's Christian Association will not stand, taking from it whatever it can use for the welfare of young women and girls, and putting its own spiritual meaning into the endeavor.
There is that quiet in her face
That comes to all who toil.
She moves through all the sheaves with grace
A daughter of the soil.
There is that beauty in her hands,
That glory in her hair,
That adds a warmth to sun-brown lands
When Autumn cools the air.
There is that gladness in her eyes,
As one who finds the dust
A lovely path to Paradise,
And common things august
There is that reverence in her mood,
That patience sweet and broad,
As one who in the solitude
Yet walks the fields with God!
—Edward Wilbur Mason.
The Young Women's Christian Association will frequently be found working in harmony with a sister organization called "The Camp Fire Girls," which is also a national association with many local groups called "Camp Fires."
The purpose of this organization, to quote from one of their booklets, "is to show that the common things of daily life are the chief means of beauty, romance and adventure; to aid in the forming of habits making for health and vigor, the out-of-door habit and the out-of-door spirit; to devise ways of measuring and creating standards of women's work; to give girls the opportunity to learn how to 'keep step,' to learn team work through doing it; to help girls and women to serve the community, the larger home, in the same ways that they have always served the individual home; to give status and social recognition to the knowledge of the mothers and thus restore the intimate relationship of mothers and daughters to each other."
The field of endeavor in this organization is seen to be a wide one. It is interesting to learn how they have worked this fine ideal out into practical form.
In planning and building up this association the picturesque field of American Indian life has been drawn upon for an elaborate and fascinating system of ceremonial, that masks some very definite psychological principles and ideals for future development in character and customs. What seemed attractive in Indian life to the founders of this society has evidently been the out-of-doors aspect that our Amerindian predecessors' way of living always suggests. Then the primitive industries were taken into account, and perhaps the fact that the mother was among the Indians the center of the community, the chief laborer, the owner of all the property and the giver of the family name, may have had influence in the choice of their thoughts and ways of symbolism. The picture writing, the delicate craft of bead embroidery and bead weaving had a strong appeal. There was much about Indian lore and Indian craft that could beckon modern girls along a path of adventure, poetry and romance into the realms of industry, service and patriotism.
Indian symbolisms are used in the prettiest manner. There is a Camp Fire costume cut and fringed so as to look like that of an Indian maiden. There are many attractive signs filled with mystic meanings. The watchword is "Wohelo," a word that sounds like an Indian name, but really is made out of the first letters of three good American words: work, health, and love. Each member is expected to choose a name for herself; it must be something that shall express her own wish and desire. For instance, the girl whose aspiration was to sing and to grow, chose for herself the name "Songrow." Then the member is expected to weave this name into the bead band she is allowed to wear about her forehead in the supposed fashion of Indian women. Around her throat she wears a necklace, and on this sacred ornament each bead represents some achievement she has made, the color of the bead indicating the class of service that has been performed by her. All this is most fascinating to the story-book quality in the mind of every young girl.
In order to become a Camp Fire girl the applicant must repeat "The Wood Gatherer's Desire." In this she testifies to her desire to obey "The Law of the Camp Fire," which is to
"Seek beauty
Give service
Pursue knowledge
Be trustworthy
Hold on to health
Glorify work
Be happy."
These seven laws of the Camp Fire she promises that she will strive to follow. Later on she may receive a higher title, that of Fire Maker. To do this she must learn by heart and repeat "The Fire Maker's Desire."
"As fuel is brought to the fire,
So I purpose to bring
My strength,
My ambition,
My heart's desire,
My joy,
And my sorrow,
To the fire
Of humankind
For I will tend
As my fathers have tended
And my fathers' fathers
Since time began,
The fire that is called
The love of man for man,
The love of man for God."
But in order to win the honor of becoming a Fire Maker, she must do much more than merely to recite a short poem. She must also perform a service of a housewifely sort, such as the purchase and preparation of a meal; must be able to darn stockings, keep her own cash account, tie a square knot, sleep with open windows, take a half hour's outing daily, refrain from chewing gum, from candy, sundaes, sodas and commercially manufactured beverages for at least a month, report on a study of infant mortality, on the rudiments of first aid, and of personal hygiene, including the right use of baths, a nice care of the hands and of the feet, exquisite cleanliness of hair, shiny whiteness of teeth, perfect sweetness of breath, care in regard to eyesight, sleeping, and exercise; she must know by heart some one poem twenty-five lines long and the whole of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," and the career of some woman who has done much for the country or State. Besides all this the candidates must present twenty elective honors; but to learn what these may be a prospective Fire Maker will have to consult the long and elaborate lists in the Camp Fire Girls' book of specifications, where she will find them covering eight pages of fine print, arranged under various heads.
Here is where the brightly colored beads come in. It is no meaningless honor—that necklace of many-colored beads! Let us briefly run over this list of possible honors.
The red beads are for honors in Health Craft; and this represents attainment in a special knowledge of First Aid to the Injured, in personal conquest over colds for a certain length of time, regularity in attendance at school, proper diet, sleeping outdoors or with windows open wide, a certain time spent in playing games, attainments in swimming, rowing, canoeing, sailing, skating, coasting, snow-shoeing, riding, mountain climbing, tramping, bicycling, automobiling or folk dancing. It is plain to see that the ideal of the Camp Fire Girls in regard to health and vigor is to be sought with determination and to be gained specially through the good out-of-doors.
The flame-colored bead represents Home Craft. Here a large variety of activities are grouped under the heads of cooking, marketing, laundering, housekeeping, a term used here to include all departments of scientific house-cleaning, making beds for baby and for grown folks, care of baby and making toys for the little ones, care of waste and garbage, washing dishes, storing clothes for the winter, and care of domestic animals. To this formidable array is added the devising of some invention that shall be useful in the household. Then comes some non-professional instruction in the care of the sick; and the wide field of entertainment follows, such as song, playing some musical instrument, reciting poetry, getting up a dialogue or play, writing a story or working out a program of some sort, giving a pantomime, telling stories, or adapting them to dramatic representation, and giving these forms of entertainment at some home, hospital, or settlement where there are sick people to be helped to forget their suffering.
Next come the blue honors. The bead of this color is given for attainments in Nature Lore—knowledge of trees, flowers, ferns, grasses, mosses, birds, bees, butterflies, moths, stars. If the girl knows the planets and seven constellations and their stories, she may wear the blue bead. Also if she does a certain amount of work in a flower or vegetable garden of her own, raises a crop of something and cans, pickles or preserves her product, or if she carries on an experimental garden, planting, for instance, one plot with pedigreed and one with unpedigreed seeds and recording the results, she wins the blue bead. This is but a faint sketch, of course, of the interests in this department.
A wood-brown bead is given for Camp Craft. Here there are tent craft, wood craft, fire lore, camp cookery, weather lore, camp packing, and all kinds of knot tying. Added to this is an attractive group called Indian craft. Under this head the member may win a wood-brown bead if she knows six Indian legends or twenty-five signs of the Indian sign language, or six blazes. Is there any one who does not know what the word "blaze" means? It is the mark you cut on the tree with your hatchet by which when you are on the trail you may tell your way back home again. The applicant for this brown bead honor may know three Indian ways of testing the eyesight, or how to make a totem, an Indian bed, an Indian tepee, or a bead band eight inches long. Any one of these achievements wins the wood-brown bead.
Then come the green honors. Here the artist in the young member of the society has a chance for development. If the girl chooses she may win this bead by work in clay modeling, or in brass or silver work; in basketry, wood carving, carpentry, dyeing, leather work, stenciling, sewing, photography, hat trimming, original designs in embroidering, and many other kinds of beautiful expression through the arts.
Yellow honors are given for any sort of business positions, earning certain sums for an accomplishment worthy of the yellow bead, keeping accurate accounts, saving a definite amount, making budgets for the family, and so forth.
Then come the red-white-and-blue honors, which includes helping in the celebration of some historical day, the national birthdays, or some day connected with the history of the town in which the member lives, like a pageant or an historical tableau. Knowledge of the customs and laws of our country come under this head, and service to the community in any way, helping about keeping the town clean and about making it a better and more healthful place for all. This bead may be won by a knowledge of what the great ones of the past have done for the public good, such as religious leaders, missionaries, educators, great women, statesmen, scientists. A sketch of the life of that great woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or of that other wonderful woman, Frances E. Willard, would take this honor; and the ability to repeat from memory a certain number of verses from the Bible or a number of the world's greatest hymns, would be equally valued among these achievements.
It would certainly seem as if a girl who could win honor beads enough to string a necklace for herself might be forgiven for some slight tinge of vanity. But there is not much excuse for any girl in the land to fail to be worthy of acceptance in this honorable company, for the requirements cover so wide a range and the girls of America are so ingenious in taking hold of new ideas and moreover are already so filled with activities in all the realms touched by these inspiring suggestions, that the Camp Fire spirit ought to become a household interest in every State of the Union.
When a member has gained the precious testimonials of her attainments in these artistic and household and community services, she procures the leather cord that is essential in the proper Indian method for stringing beads, and in some shape that her original fancy shall dictate she arranges a necklace to suit her own taste. The beads are of good size; they are colored in delicate, unstaring tints, and the hole in the bead is large enough for the leather to pass easily through.
More and more honors may be worked for and won as time goes on, and the bead string may be made more and more beautiful; the wearer may thus become more of an inspiration to her friends and associates.
There is a still higher rank than Fire Maker; it is that of Torch Bearer. The one who reaches this rank by special study and work, is an assistant to the Guardian, who is the leader of the society and is a person of maturity and of training for the work of guide to the younger ones. The Camp Fire Girls as an association is especially adapted to charm and interest the girls of from twelve years old to sixteen, while it is good also for older girls.
It is evident that the useful activities that lie back of the attainment of these varied beads in the Camp Fire Girls' necklace will influence every girl that undertakes them in the direction of the aims and purposes of the society. The camp craft and wood craft will awaken the outdoor spirit, and the health craft will help to establish habits making for health and vigor. The same red bead brings games and exercises that will teach girls how to do team work, how to work together to gain the power of quick decision, to take defeat casually, to acknowledge the rights of others, to perceive justice when its laws are thrust upon one in fair play. When the red-white-and-blue bead is gained, a service to the community has been emphasized; and throughout all the list the emerging standardization of women's work is seen. In this respect the Camp Fire Girls as an organization joins with many other movements in working toward placing home economics on a more respected and honorable platform.
Just how the system of activities is to make a closer and more intimate relation between daughter and mother is yet to be revealed. The daughter's appreciation, developed through actual experimentation, of what the mother has perhaps been doing all alone in carrying household burdens, will no doubt tend to make a more cordial relation and intimacy between the house leader that has been and the house leader that is to be in the home that goes on forever. At all events there is a crying need just to-day for a closer understanding and sympathy between mothers and daughters: and if this organization of young women and girls will help in that phase of our life, it will be performing a great national service.
A great deal of poetry has been written for and by the Camp Fire Girls and much fine music has been composed for them to sing in their ceremonies. What could be more beautiful than this, by Katherine Lee Bates:
"Burn, fire, burn!
Flicker, flicker, flame!
Whose hand above this flame is lifted
Shall be with magic touch engifted,
To warm the hearts of lonely mortals
Who stand without their open portals.
The torch shall draw them to the fire,
Higher, higher,
By desire.
Whoso shall stand by this hearthstone,
Flame-fanned,
Shall never, never stand alone;
Whose house is dark and bare and cold,
Whose house is cold,
This is his own.
Flicker, flicker, flicker, flame;
Burn, fire, burn!"
The whole ritual is so poetic that it seems to have touched the young life into creative energy.
The ceremony of receiving a girl into the various honors is altogether beautiful; but we must leave something for a surprise to the young girl who is hoping to become some day a member. It must be remembered, however, that the honors are to be earned. The friend of a member is not begged to join the Camp Fire Girls; she is allowed to join if she will enter into the spirit of the society and make herself worthy. To do that she may have to alter her point of view. If she has been in the habit of thinking of the humble duties of life as a drudgery, she certainly will have to change her mind in that respect. To throw romance and beauty and the spirit of adventure about the common things of life is the avowed object of the association. And these are the common things of life—dish washing, house cleaning, first aid to the injured, darning stockings and keeping accurate accounts. To view these as adventures, as bits of romance, is what the Camp Fires are aiming toward. And they are succeeding; for there are hundreds of groups of girls all over the country who are struggling to win the beads by study and service, that shall make these prized necklaces represent their endeavors. The mothers are welcoming this spirit that turns a disliked piece of household work into an adventure of high emprise. They find themselves rushed away from a task they were about to begin lest the daughter should fail by chance to gain a bead she was striving for, and prevented from various branches of work by the rules the daughter was following. But it is not the spirit of vanity and self aggrandizement that forms the basis of the girls' endeavor; it is the love of achievement; it is the game!
If one looks over the books of directions for Camp Fire Girls, one is delighted and fascinated by the pictures that show the many ways the girls have to carry out the intention of the society. Here are girls in the ceremonial costumes, the hair braided Indian fashion, the decorated band drawn around the forehead and fastened behind at the back of the head. In one picture the girls are sitting by the tent at camp, sewing and carving and carpentering for honors. Here they are in a big canoe with paddles lifted all together; again they are starting out for a hay-rack ride, or building a gigantic bonfire for Independence Day, setting up the logs in tepee-shape, while eight girls are bearing the next log to the pyramid. We see them wading, swimming, and making fire in antique fashion with bow and drill; they are cooking in house and in camp; they are washing, they are ironing, they are mending; here they are serving the community by teaching some little girls to sew, or by helping to fight a real forest fire; they are holding ceremonial meetings and conferring honors on those that by hard work have won them. One can only say: O happy, happy girls in this happiest of countries, that have so much done for them, that have so great opportunities, that are so diligently and joyously making the most of their chance in life!
Are you sheltered, curled up and content by the world's warm fire,
Then I say that your soul is in danger!
The sons of the Light, they are down with God in the mire,
God in the manger.
The old-time heroes you honor, whose banners you bear,
The whole world no longer prohibits;
But if you peer into the past you will find them there,
Swinging on gibbets.
So rouse from your perilous ease: to your sword and your shield!
Your ease is the ease of the cattle!
Hark, hark, the bugles are calling! Out, out to some field—
Out to some battle!
—Edwin Markham.
Various societies are now trying to supply one of the greatest needs of the girls in country life: namely, good times. The young life is doing the most natural thing possible when it demands recreation, and grave losses must be sustained if satisfaction is not given to this pure and normal desire.
The countryside itself seems to be painfully, culpably wanting in the first efforts for the supply of the need for normal, healthful play times. If public health is valued, if pure morals are desired, if home comfort is coveted, not to say if there is a wish that the girls and boys should remain and sustain the rural commonwealth of the future, the first thing to do to gain these ends would be to answer their unconscious outcry for more development of the play instinct. A wonderful woman of our time has written a book about the spirit of youth in the city street; some one should write one about the spirit of youth along the country road. We should awake that spirit and set it to singing on every road and lane, up hill and down dale, all over the prairies and all along the canyons.
That this is a very vital matter is shown in a letter from a Country Girl. She wrote:
"There was one thing I did want to ask you about and that was the need for social recreation, girlish recreation, wholesome, whole-hearted recreation. Judging by the girls I have taught both in country and village schools, it has seemed to me that they need to be taught to be girls, real girls, more than anything else, and to cherish that girlhood. There exists such a false relation between the girls and the boys. They are little stagy grown-ups playing at life, when they should be natural, wholesome children. I have wondered whether, if their social entertainments were different, and, if the true way could be shown them, they wouldn't leave the false and the sham, and be natural. Often the play ends in real disaster and young lives full of possibilities go down into the deeps. It is hard to express this in just these few words on paper but if you know country life as it still exists I am sure you will understand."
This wise young woman has here linked the need for recreation and the dire necessity for moral restraint in a way to appeal to every student of country life and to every one that desires the well-being of the boys and girls there.
When the factors in this problem are thus reduced to simple terms, it seems so easy to manage. The little things to do, the appalling disaster to be prevented! More recreation in the village—more girls saved from direst sorrow and downfall! Who would not spring to help? Is not the duty of the girls who are a little older or who have been away to school or college perfectly, translucently clear? Can you fail to see and feel it?
There was a story of lost opportunity unconsciously revealed in the letter of a college girl, who lives in a long valley between mountains where the young people come in great numbers to do the hop-picking. The plan for living included tents and an eating-table in common. There were dances at night and much drunkenness. The writer added a tragic description of what happens under these circumstances and of the terrible results that follow the orgy.
What is that Country Girl thinking of, that she should waste this opportunity? Why does she not do something for those girls?
What can she do? Organize something! Form some kind of an association. Get the girls together—but not at just the last moment before the great wave rises above their heads. We must build up beforehand; we must start in at foundations; little by little we must undermine wrong likings and insert slowly in their places better likings. We cannot force the growth of the better things; they must grow naturally. Working thus for days and months and years, we may at last cause a better feeling, a better taste; we may develop greater self-control that will be permanent because based on higher ideals and nobler desires.
The young woman who wrote that letter was educated in an Eastern college and went from there to a farm in the West, finding a home at last in this beautiful valley. Who knows but that her whole life and career was ordained in this wandering way in order that she might come to that special valley and seeing the need there, should put her shoulder to the wheel to make a moral uplift for the whole region! The young woman that will accept this high education and then neglect such opportunities for social service has not gained the chief thing—the socialized spirit, the spirit of social responsibility for the world; no, nor even for the very town for which she ought to be first to feel it. Surely she could ask for no better or larger career than to be able to make in her home town a radiant life for all the young people, full of charm, a counter-charm against which the lure of the city would have no power, and thus keep girl life safe and pure, and prevent the sorrowful fate that would befall her young townswomen if they should yield to the temptation that knocks at their door.
The seriousness of the situation for those unprotected from such dangers can scarcely be exaggerated. While the number of native-born American Country Girls that deliberately choose a low or vicious life is, in the opinion of experts, comparatively small, still it is not to be tolerated that any country or village girls should lack safeguarding.
Happily this is the story of an exceptional incident; but how may it be prevented from becoming common? By making the life about the country home interesting in the work and in the play; by building up a complex social structure in every village with music and pageantry, with clubs and societies, with vigorous religious influence and activity, with traveling library and magazine exchange. Not one of the possible means for intellectual and social interchange, however joyous, but is justified in its philanthropic aim. The farm home, the country village must be made a happy place for the young folks. It must never for one instant be dull.
To preach this ideal no one can be so useful as the girls themselves. Natural hostesses and social leaders, they are adapted to create wholesome good times in the community. But may we not expect even more? If among the girls of the village there is one who has been away to college and has seen anything of the outside world, ought she not to use her influence among the girls of the village to show them what the real danger is likely to be to one who goes unprepared by industrial and social training to cope with the situation in the city? Ought she not to consider herself to a great degree responsible if any girl from her village or her country community does go away unequipped into the struggle and becomes lost in the oubliette of vice? Ought not the girls with superior knowledge and better outlook not only to do all in their power to keep the home girl amused and interested in the life of the village, but to see that in each individual case the better wisdom is at hand for her as warning and as deterrent? "I should have known better" is small comfort afterward. When the wrong is done, and the girl is lost, does the college girl in her home town take it to her own heart as in part her responsibility? Should she not do so?
In case an inexperienced girl should have occasion to go to the city alone, she should learn beforehand what are the proper and fit things to do at railroad stations and in other public places, and what resources she has at hand there in case of difficulty. The Young Women's Christian Association announce the following rules for a young girl entering a strange city:
Do not start to a strange city or town without information about a safe place to stop.
Do not leave home without money for an emergency and sufficient for a return ticket.
Do not ask for or take information or direction except from officials.
Do not accept offers of work either by person or advertisement without investigation.
The Y. W. C. A. has employment bureaus and boarding-house directories, and cafeteria lunch-rooms.
Travelers' Aid Secretaries meet all incoming trains.
These appointed systems of relief for girls in difficulty the girls should understand about, and feel free to take refuge in them if occasion requires.
Assuredly there are many young women in the country who are fully as well prepared for the work of revitalizing the life in country and village community as the college-trained girls are. A number of these are far more so than some who have had the opportunity for higher education. It is said that a man can go through college and be a fool still. The same is no doubt true of a woman. But from those to whom much has been given, much will be required; and this requirement comes from all about us as well as from above.
The thing to be done is to cut off this thread of inevitable sequence at the beginning; to give the girl in the small town the movies and the other varied amusements that will make it impossible for her to think of going away; to give her the knowledge of the poisonous results of vicious contacts and companionships that will make her abhor them with her very soul and be terrified of them; and to provide her with the opportunity for earning that will satisfy her self-respect as a unit in the home industrial community. These things cannot be done by one person alone; the parents must work at it, the better class of girls in the community must work for it, using constantly varied tactics to meet the enemy; and the minister, the teacher, the people all together must combine to prevent this bitter inroad from entering rural life.
For the Country Girls who by nature, ability, predilection and training, are endowed for special service, there are attractive fields open. The work of visiting nurse, of physician, of home economics agent and demonstrator, of social secretary, of teacher, of minister and pastor, are available fields for womanly endeavor. No Country Girl need feel called to go to the other side of the world to fulfil her mission. In her own valley she can have a life work that will be full of the rich returns for her well-directed, self-sacrificing service.
I am aware
As I go commonly sweeping the stair,
Doing my part of the everyday care—
Human and simple my lot and my share—
I am aware of a marvelous thing:
Voices that murmur and ethers that ring
In the far stellar spaces where cherubim sing.
I am aware of the passion that pours
Down the channels of fire through Infinity's doors;
Forces terrific, with melody shod,
Music that mates with pulses of God.
I am aware of the glory that runs
From the core of myself to the core of the suns.
Bound to the stars by invisible chains,
Blaze of eternity now in my veins,
Seeing the rush of etherial rains,
Here in the midst of the everyday air—
I am aware.
—Angela Morgan.
"Efficiency" is now the watchword in all endeavors, and every man worker and every woman worker is being put under training to secure the greatest amount of it. The factory is stretched to the strain. In every department store there is an efficiency school for the clerks, and every one has to take this discipline. All large public schools have a score card for the instructors and every teacher must stand or fall by the results of the criticisms therein set down.
In the home economics department of various colleges a section of a course of study is sometimes given to the close examination of the score card for the housekeeper. The points discussed include not only the technique of the kitchen, but the character that lies behind all efficiency and the training for making the most of native endowments.
Why, then, if the Country Girl wishes to become efficient, should she not have a "score card" of her own? At any rate it may be an incitement to her conscience, and perhaps it may give some suggestions for her life-plan.
The Country Girl's Score Card given here is not to be taken as in any way final. Let it be thought of as suggestive only.
Notable excellencies in character, temperament, or disposition: integrity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, courage, fortitude, self-reliance, steadiness, fearlessness, generosity, magnanimity
Notable deficiencies in character, temperament or disposition as shown by such actions or incidents as these: