The American Country Girl

by Martha Foote Crow

This wise young woman has here linked the need for recreation and the dire necessity for moral restraint in a way to appeal to every student of country life and to every one that desires the well-being of the boys and girls there.

When the factors in this problem are thus reduced to simple terms, it seems so easy to manage. The little things to do, the appalling disaster to be prevented! More recreation in the village—more girls saved from direst sorrow and downfall! Who would not spring to help? Is not the duty of the girls who are a little older or who have been away to school or college perfectly, translucently clear? Can you fail to see and feel it?

There was a story of lost opportunity unconsciously revealed in the letter of a college girl, who lives in a long valley between mountains where the young people come in great numbers to do the hop-picking. The plan for living included tents and an eating-table in common. There were dances at night and much drunkenness. The writer added a tragic description of what happens under these circumstances and of the terrible results that follow the orgy.

What is that Country Girl thinking of, that she should waste this opportunity? Why does she not do something for those girls?

What can she do? Organize something! Form some kind of an association. Get the girls together—but not at just the last moment before the great wave rises above their heads. We must build up beforehand; we must start in at foundations; little by little we must undermine wrong likings and insert slowly in their places better likings. We cannot force the growth of the better things; they must grow naturally. Working thus for days and months and years, we may at last cause a better feeling, a better taste; we may develop greater self-control that will be permanent because based on higher ideals and nobler desires.

The young woman who wrote that letter was educated in an Eastern college and went from there to a farm in the West, finding a home at last in this beautiful valley. Who knows but that her whole life and career was ordained in this wandering way in order that she might come to that special valley and seeing the need there, should put her shoulder to the wheel to make a moral uplift for the whole region! The young woman that will accept this high education and then neglect such opportunities for social service has not gained the chief thing—the socialized spirit, the spirit of social responsibility for the world; no, nor even for the very town for which she ought to be first to feel it. Surely she could ask for no better or larger career than to be able to make in her home town a radiant life for all the young people, full of charm, a counter-charm against which the lure of the city would have no power, and thus keep girl life safe and pure, and prevent the sorrowful fate that would befall her young townswomen if they should yield to the temptation that knocks at their door.

The seriousness of the situation for those unprotected from such dangers can scarcely be exaggerated. While the number of native-born American Country Girls that deliberately choose a low or vicious life is, in the opinion of experts, comparatively small, still it is not to be tolerated that any country or village girls should lack safeguarding.

Happily this is the story of an exceptional incident; but how may it be prevented from becoming common? By making the life about the country home interesting in the work and in the play; by building up a complex social structure in every village with music and pageantry, with clubs and societies, with vigorous religious influence and activity, with traveling library and magazine exchange. Not one of the possible means for intellectual and social interchange, however joyous, but is justified in its philanthropic aim. The farm home, the country village must be made a happy place for the young folks. It must never for one instant be dull.

To preach this ideal no one can be so useful as the girls themselves. Natural hostesses and social leaders, they are adapted to create wholesome good times in the community. But may we not expect even more? If among the girls of the village there is one who has been away to college and has seen anything of the outside world, ought she not to use her influence among the girls of the village to show them what the real danger is likely to be to one who goes unprepared by industrial and social training to cope with the situation in the city? Ought she not to consider herself to a great degree responsible if any girl from her village or her country community does go away unequipped into the struggle and becomes lost in the oubliette of vice? Ought not the girls with superior knowledge and better outlook not only to do all in their power to keep the home girl amused and interested in the life of the village, but to see that in each individual case the better wisdom is at hand for her as warning and as deterrent? "I should have known better" is small comfort afterward. When the wrong is done, and the girl is lost, does the college girl in her home town take it to her own heart as in part her responsibility? Should she not do so?

In case an inexperienced girl should have occasion to go to the city alone, she should learn beforehand what are the proper and fit things to do at railroad stations and in other public places, and what resources she has at hand there in case of difficulty. The Young Women's Christian Association announce the following rules for a young girl entering a strange city: