The Young Women's Christian Association feels that it is its "privilege to reach the Country Girls in terms of their own environment, helping them to help themselves and to become active social forces in their own communities."
Pursuing this thought, the wonderful idea was hit upon of using the available energy of the Country Girl that goes away to college as she returns to her home full of inspiration for a "career." The career of being a good angel to her home community is offered to her.
One of the many Eight Weeks' Clubs organized throughout the country by the Y. W. C. A.
Carrying out this purpose with energy and great enthusiasm, as they do everything they take up, the Y. W. C.A. instituted a special section of their work which they called the "Eight Weeks Club." Under this scheme, in the late winter or early spring, trained secretaries who are able to give time and strength to the work and who are touched with the flame of that character-contagion, are sent out to the colleges. Preparation classes are formed among these girls, schemes are marked out for the summer, and a suggested plan of study printed for them in the Association Monthly is gone over. In the summer of 1914 about nine hundred names of Country Girls in college who were willing to embark for the summer's work were received. They came from one hundred and fifty-eight different colleges. Not all of these were eventually able to lead clubs; some were prevented by sickness, by family reasons, etc., after they got home. But there were one hundred and seventy-two who reported promptly that they did actually lead Eight Weeks Clubs, and about 2800 girls were enrolled in these clubs. The clubs represented thirty-one States, Pennsylvania leading with twenty-two, Iowa having nineteen, South Dakota ten, Wisconsin twelve.[2]
If you think that there is not much that you, a lone, single girl without any help can do, listen to this story which one of the Christian Association secretaries tells of the experience of one college girl who went to teach in a small town. "The first Sunday I was in town," she said, "I went to Sunday School. There were eight people there and they were all old. On the next Sunday there were five and one of them was blind; and what do you think? They asked me to take the superintendency." Did she take it? The secretary says she held her breath for the answer, for on just such a turning-point as this hangs the solution of the whole country problem. "I did; and when I went away in the spring, there were ninety-three in that Sunday School and none of them was blind."
If one lone Country Girl can do so much as that, what might not be accomplished if all the girls in the community were as one heart and mind to work together for the Sunday School, for the Church, for the Christian Endeavor and the Epworth League, and for all the causes that seek higher things in the community? A young woman may never know what emergency she may be training for when she begins to teach a Sunday School class.
It is the hope of the Y. W. C. A. that the Eight Weeks Club for the summer may ultimately be developed into an all-round-the-year Y. W. C. A., to go on indefinitely. The desire of the secretaries is to organize the young women of country and village life on the basis of the county. A County Secretary, trained for the work, should be placed in charge and should seek to reach every girl within "team-haul" or street-car riding distance with the invitation to meetings, where music, books, and pictures are found, together with wholesome social guidance and direct religious inspiration, and above all the companionship that forms a channel for the effectiveness of those good and uplifting influences. "The County Secretary," says one of their leaflets, "must not only know country life but student life and city life and industrial life. She must be an expert in educational, physical, religious and civic questions and she must be able to lead and to organize so that clubs and groups may be produced which shall meet needs extending all the way from athletics and recreation through social and general community life up to distinctly religious and devotional service. She must be able to use volunteer leaders and to mold them into a sympathetic cooperation for the bearing of one another's burdens which ultimately will lead them to share one another's successes. The County Young Women's Christian Association ... is bound to come into its heritage of success and to transform the girlhood of the country and village life of our land."