But of course, a country full of "Bird Women" could not be said to have advanced very far in civilization. Though we should take great pleasure in conferring her well-earned merit badges on Sacajawea, we should hardly have grown into the great organization we are today if we had not badges for quite another class of achievements.
In 1832, not so many years after the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, there was born a little New England girl who would very early in life have become a First Class Scout if she had had the opportunity. Her name was Louisa Alcott, and she made that name famous all the world over by the book by which the world's girls know her—"Little Women." Her father, though a brilliant man, was a very impractical one, and from her first little story to her last popular book, all her work was done for the purpose of keeping her mother and sisters, in comfort. While she was waiting for the money from her stories she turned carpets, trimmed hats, papered the rooms, made party dresses for her sisters, nursed anyone who was sick (at which she was particularly good)—all the homely, helpful things that neighbors and families did for each other in New England towns.
In those days little mothers of families could not telephone specialists to help them out in emergencies; there were neither telephones nor specialists! But there were always emergencies, and the Alcott girls had to know what to put on a black-and-blue spot, and why the jelly failed to "jell," and how to hang a skirt, and bake a cake, and iron a table-cloth. Louisa had to entertain family guests and darn the family stockings. Her home had not every comfort and convenience, even as people counted those things then, and without a brisk, clever woman, full of what the New Englanders called "faculty," her family would have been a very unhappy one. With all our modern inventions nobody has yet invented a substitute for a good, all-round woman in a family, and until somebody can invent one, we must continue to take off our hats to girls like Louisa Alcott. Imagine what her feelings would have been if someone had told her that she had earned half a dozen merit badges by her knowledge of home economics and her clever writing!
And let every Scout who finds housework dull, and feels that she is capable of bigger things, remember this: the woman whose books for girls are more widely known than any such books ever written in America, had to drop the pen, often and often, for the needle, the dish-cloth and the broom.
To direct her household has always been a woman's job in every century, and girls were learning to do it before Columbus ever discovered Sacajawea's great country. To be sure, they had no such jolly way of working at it together, as the Scouts have, nor did they have the opportunity the girl of today has to learn all about these things in a scientific, business-like way, in order to get it all done with the quickest, most efficient methods, just as any clever business man manages his business.
We no longer believe that housekeeping should take up all a woman's time; and many an older woman envies the little badges on a Scout's sleeve that show the world she has learned how to manage her cleaning and cooking and household routine so that she has plenty of time to spend on other things that interest her.
THE PIONEER
But there was a time in the history of our country when men and women went out into the wilderness with no nearer neighbors than the Indians, yet with all the ideals of the New England they left behind them; girls who had to have all the endurance of the young "Bird Woman" and yet keep up the traditions and the habits of the fine old home life of Louisa Alcott.
One of these pioneer girls, who certainly would have been patrol leader of her troop and marched them to victory with her, was Anna Shaw. In 1859, a twelve-year old girl, with her mother and four other children she traveled in a rough cart full of bedding and provisions, into the Michigan woods where they took up a claim, settling down into a log cabin whose only furniture was a fireplace of wood and stones.
She and her brothers floored this cabin with lumber from a mill, and actually made partitions, an attic door and windows. They planted potatoes and corn by chopping up the sod, putting seed under it and leaving it to Nature—who rewarded them by giving them the best corn and potatoes Dr. Shaw ever ate, she says in her autobiography.