THE GIRL SCOUTS
A Training School for
Womanhood
By KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
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.