How Girls Can Help Their Country

If character training and learning citizenship are necessary for boys, how much more important it is that these principles should be instilled into the minds if girls who are destined to be the mothers and guides of the next generation. An attractive and practical form of active educational pastime is needed and for this purpose the Girl Scouts are organized. The Scout movement, so popular among boys, is unfitted for the needs of girls, but on something the same lines has been devised the present system giving a more womanly training for both mind and body.


Honor, duty, loyalty, kindness, comradeship, purity, cheerfulness, and thrift, are the qualities it seeks to develop.


To be a Girl Scout, a girl should love and admire these things in other people, seek to attain them herself, and to promote them among her comrades, not in any priggish fashion, but through being loyal, honorable, kind, and helpful, in the home, in the school, in the field, on the playground, and in the Club Room.


Abstract talks about these qualities mean little to youth.


Because this is so, a set of definite laws is given to the leaders to be read at their own discretion to the girls as practical definition of what it means to be honorable, loyal, helpful, etc.


When a leader has come to know a girl, and the girl has become well known to the other girls, if, in the opinion of the leader, she has become fine and strong enough to meet the requirements of the law, she may be permitted, if she so desires, to promise to do her best to keep the law and so become a Girl Scout eligible to qualify for any Scout rank.


The Captain should remember that simple living in the spirit of this law is more important than being able to state the law and talk glibly about it. Children learn more from imitation and from the right ordering of their experiences than they do from any amount of didactic teaching.


A Captain should avoid preaching and formalism. She should live with her girls in a happy, helpful, wholesome, honorable spirit and so promote the same spirit in the patrol. The finer girls in the patrol will do the rest, and youth will be led by the formative and compelling power of example.


Some reference to the Boy Scouts book may be of service to the instructors but should not be followed too closely. Good womanly common-sense will be a sure guide as to how far to go with it. And in America we have in some parts of our big country problems to meet that are unknown abroad. In some parts of the country too much actual scouting cannot be indulged in except under competent protection.


Among girls there are wide class distinctions—much wider than among boys. The character training of the Scouts seems to bring these classes if not actually closer together at least much more in sympathy. It is unnecessary and perhaps injurious to obliterate them altogether. All being Scouts brings about a kindly sympathy and unity of aims.


This classic is organized as follows:


Part I. Summary

How to Start a Patrol

The First Meeting

The Girl Scout Law

The Second Meeting

Duties

Part II. Camping

Open-Air Pursuits

Self-Defence

Woodcraft

Botany

Stars

Gardening

Part III. Home Life

Sanitation

Health

Housewifery

Home Cooking

Care of Children

Part IV. Hospital Work

Part V. Patriotism

Self-Discipline

Self-Improvement

Part VI. Organization

Qualification for the Three Grades of Girl Scouts

Enrolment

Tests for Proficiency Badges

Notes to Instructors