The Girl Scouts: A Training School for Womanhood

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Women Working 1800 - 1930)









THE GIRL SCOUTS

_A Training School for
Womanhood_

By KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

[Illustration]

Series No. 11

GIRL SCOUTS NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS
189 Lexington Avenue
New York City




A Training School for Womanhood

_By Kate Douglas Wiggin_


I am heartily interested in the Girl Scouts of America. The fact is, I
think I was always a Girl Scout myself (although the name was unknown);
yes, from the very beginning. Even my first youthful story was "scouty"
in tone, if I may invent a word. Then for a few years afterward, when I
was "scoutingly" busy educating little street Arabs in San Francisco, I
wrote books, too, for and about younger children, but there came a time
when "Polly Oliver's Problem" brought me a girl public. It was not an
oppressively large one; that is, I never was mobbed in the streets by
Polly's admirers, but they existed, and Heavens! how many letters they
wrote!

I see now that "Polly" was a real girl scout, but faithful as she
unconsciously was to the then unwritten laws of the sisterhood, she
faded into insignificance when my absolutely true-to-type Scout appeared
in the guise of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Rebecca did not reform,
convert or uplift her seniors, her parents, grandparents, neighbors and
constituents, but she could never keep her hands off things that needed
to be done, and whatever enterprise was on hand there was Rebecca to be
found--sometimes on the outskirts, frequently, I fear, in its storm
centre.

Do you remember that it was Rebecca and her twelve-year-old friends who
sewed the white stars on the Riverboro home-made flag, just as the
Roosevelt High School girls have been doing for their great leader these
last weeks?

My summer home lies between two Maine villages on opposite sides of the
Saco River. There are Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts in each of the
villages; but off the main roads, almost on the fringe of the pine
forests, are boys and girls too far away from one another to reach any
group. One little chap said to me: "My brother Tim wants to be a Scout,
but there isn't anybody to be a leader and the boys live too far apart.
Tim's got all the circulars and books and instructions and he can be a
lone scout, but he doesn't want to be a lone scout--Tim doesn't; he
wants to be with other boys."

The very words "A lone scout" suggested a story to me that I have never
written, but wish that these words might reach the eye of a girl who
would like to practise the scout virtues, even if she cannot belong to
the great band. It is hard, without the companionship and inspiration of
a large friendly company, to follow a secret ideal and an imaginary
leader, to be a lone scout yet to be working with thousands of unknown
little sisters. All the while that the "lone scout" is learning to be a
woman--true, brave, busy, thrifty, cheerful, she can say to herself: "To
help a little is to do the work of the world." That is the real slogan
of the Girl Scouts since for the most part they do little duties, assume
small responsibilities, carry the lighter burdens. Above all, they learn
to "Carry on!" doing a woman's work in a woman's way, doing small things
that women have always done as well as the new things that have opened
to women, either by their own pluck or because men have at least given
women a chance, and doing them patiently, self-forgettingly, with the
old-fashioned touch of a woman's hand. The world isn't in need of women
who are duplicates of men. A girl should try to be the best scout in the
world, if it is in her to go so far, but she must remember that after
all she is a Girl, not a Boy Scout.