One of the most notable English statesman said in the fourth year of the Great War:
“I am anxious to bear testimony to the tremendous part played by the women in England in this vital epoch of human history. They have not only borne their burden of sorrow and separation with unflinching fortitude and patience but they have an enormous share of the burdens necessary to the practical conduct of the war.
“To their ennobling influence we look not only for strength to win the war, but for inspiration during the great work of reconstruction we will have to undertake after victory is won.”
This is becoming true in American also. Never before have our national ideals been so clearly defined; never before have we realized the relative values of life.
One hundred years ago democracy was a masculine noun. Women worked loyally in the home for husband, son and brother. The war came and suddenly they found themselves working for all men who were holding high the ideals of the American home and the American nation. By assuming these responsibilities, women have entered unconsciously into active citizenship from which there is no retreat.
The great experiment is here. American girls are showing that they are made of the same stuff as their sturdy forefathers, and by thousands are entering untried and difficult fields and finding themselves capable of doing a great many things that their brothers and fathers have heretofore done. Handcraft, industries and professions have all been opened to young women. They are working in farm and field, factory and railway, bank and business office, hospital and camp, canteen and reconstruction. Girls and women with clear heads and adaptability are entering in amazing numbers into business and professional life, proving that their brains are not inferior to those of men. They have been keen to take up new tasks and quick to learn unfamiliar processes and their employers have been generous in acknowledging that skill comes only with practice.
But the authorities found on examining women for their new employments, that the lack was not entirely or fundamentally that of technical training but that a preliminary course was needed particularly in health knowledge and in discipline. These things would have been useful in any line of work, whether for war or for peace, and we are now awake to the necessity of such training. If a girl is to be equally efficient with her brother for work in the world, she must be given equal chances with him, equal chances for gaining character and skill discipline and bodily health, and equal chances for using these when she has got them.
Therefore the Citizen Scout was started, in order that girls with a sound body and disciplined mind should be able to help their country in many different ways after this tremendous world struggle.
Every Citizen Scout should have a vocation which she has chosen and by which she can support herself. If one can work at some congenial employment all the better, but even an apparently stupid occupation can be made interesting by a realization of the part it plays in the world of industry by which we all live, and one can get great pleasure out of work well done, even if it is only oiling a machine successfully. Wouldn’t it make the daily labor more interesting to combine head with hand? For instance to put heads on pins all day long in a factory sounds monotonous, but the people to whom pin making is interesting find out what pins are made of, where the metal is found, how many things pins are used for; what people used as substitutes before pins were made. Once in England, a man took so small a thing as a needle for the subject of a play which has been well known ever since; Gammer Gurton’s Needle. The machines which make the pins and needles are to-day marvels of skill developed through centuries of patient labor of head and hand. Farm labor is toilsome, but the life of the race depends on the products of field and pasture, and the Citizen Scout who works on the land is helping to feed the world.
But success in an industrial or professional career is neither the end nor the greatest joy of a girl’s life. Home making is after all the vocation which calls most naturally and most deeply to a woman and is most worthy of her best efforts. However independent and self reliant a girl may be, the finding of her life comrade, the settling of her own home and the bringing up of her little ones are the biggest happiness that can be had in this world. Nature never meant a man or woman to live alone, and though bachelors may think themselves happy and free, they cannot realize the intense delight that comes with the home, the married comradeship and the children. There a woman has her real opportunity and her kingdom, and at the same time her responsibility. She is the making or the marring of the house, and her influence will rule her children all through their after life. If she recognizes this and shoulders her duty with that idea in mind she can in forming her children’s character do a tremendous thing for each of them and a valuable service for the nation.