The American Country Girl

by Martha Foote Crow

CHAPTER XXVII

ORGANIZATIONS, ESPECIALLY THE YOUNG WOMEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION

In a Memoir that belongs to the classic traditions of our country, that of David Brainerd the Missionary, we read that he besought the Lord that he might not be too much pleased and amused with dear friends and acquaintances one place and another. We have now a new and different ideal of community feeling; we pray that we may be "pleased and amused with dear friends and acquaintances," for we realize that only by having ideas together and working together may we reach the highest ideals not only for the community but for the individual.

Where isolation becomes really intolerable, the Country Girl cannot be blamed for taking the first means to relieve herself of its dangers. But where there is a possibility of making a stagnant place become healthily busy and interesting, she must be blamed for not making an attempt in that direction.

An association of the girls alone is always possible if there is even one more than one to start with. Perhaps others will soon join. The most unpromising material, if it is human material, can be brought into line and made something of. But there must be a start.

Now and then we know there is a girl found among the good people of a village who has thoroughly bad inclinations. Such a one, after the case is made clear, must be put into the hands of some person of trained experience and mature judgment. This is not to be managed by the girls themselves. Because of this possibility it is thought best that every club for girls, especially for the younger girls, should have a guardian or a secretary of older years. Whatever rules are made, say, for instance, by the Young Women's Christian Association, in the fundamental plans for societies of girls, we may be sure they have been devised by people who are good, and who desire the best for the girls, and who understand the whole situation and speak and act from this knowledge.

It may be that the girl who will entertain the bold idea of forming a club or society is not by any means the one who most needs the club. She thinks of it because some happy circumstance has developed in her a power of initiative, the courage or instinct for beginning something new. It takes courage sometimes to undertake an absolutely new work; and the girl who has been always helped, never told to go ahead and do things for herself, will not have developed that power. The ability to start things can be hypnotized out of anybody; the faculty for it, if once possessed, can be deadened or suppressed beyond the last degree of vitality. To take the first step is a matter of life or death with such a long suppressed nature; but that one step over, the crushed vitality springs strangely to life and then every step is easier. Then the beautiful experience lies before you of constantly growing life; faculties that you hardly knew you possessed spring into being. This is growth, and growth is the only life.

There will sometimes be in the village one girl who cherishes a higher ideal of conduct than she sees embodied in the life about her. Where did she get it? Perhaps from a mother who, immersed in her home cares and burdens, has taken little part in the affairs in the town. She in turn received from her mother delicate thoughts that have vanished from the village when a lower standard of manners came in with certain new and less cultivated people. In this new atmosphere the daughter has tried to live and has been mostly alone. Lack of companionship has made her unsocial and somewhat unbending. Her mind lacks swift response because she has had no chance to practise swiftness of response in conversation and repartee. Moreover, she has not the influence among the girls that she ought to have because they take her search for better forms of conduct for self-conceit; they consider her proud and stiff and priggish; those touches of ceremoniousness which she chooses because of her passion for beauty and grace, they consider affectation. There is no place like the country to put affectation in its place; but it is as possible there as elsewhere to misjudge the real sources of inspiration in matters of conduct.

In the hearts of these very girls who look askance at the solitary one as she passes along the village path and talk among themselves about her primness and her pride, there may be a great admiration for her after all, a desire to copy all her little touches of elegance, a swift noting of her graces and of everything new she adds to her repertoire of manners. If she keeps her body very straight and holds her chin correctly, they will be looking in the glass to find out whether their spinal column can be stiffened to give the same effect. They may laugh at her but they try to imitate her.

After all, you see, the fundamental standards are the same; the difference being that one girl comes almost to the point of living up to them, the other girls have tried and because of ignorance or lack of opportunity have failed, and have looked upon their failure until they have despaired of ever succeeding. Fundamentally there is the same desire at the heart of both the refined recluse girl who longs to have company among the other girls, and the less agreeable, less refined and less cultivated girls who secretly envy while they ridicule, and are waiting only for the open door to enable them to walk in and leave their coarseness and bungling outside.