Do not start to a strange city or town without information about a safe place to stop.
Do not leave home without money for an emergency and sufficient for a return ticket.
Do not ask for or take information or direction except from officials.
Do not accept offers of work either by person or advertisement without investigation.
The Y. W. C. A. has employment bureaus and boarding-house directories, and cafeteria lunch-rooms.
Travelers' Aid Secretaries meet all incoming trains.
These appointed systems of relief for girls in difficulty the girls should understand about, and feel free to take refuge in them if occasion requires.
Assuredly there are many young women in the country who are fully as well prepared for the work of revitalizing the life in country and village community as the college-trained girls are. A number of these are far more so than some who have had the opportunity for higher education. It is said that a man can go through college and be a fool still. The same is no doubt true of a woman. But from those to whom much has been given, much will be required; and this requirement comes from all about us as well as from above.
The thing to be done is to cut off this thread of inevitable sequence at the beginning; to give the girl in the small town the movies and the other varied amusements that will make it impossible for her to think of going away; to give her the knowledge of the poisonous results of vicious contacts and companionships that will make her abhor them with her very soul and be terrified of them; and to provide her with the opportunity for earning that will satisfy her self-respect as a unit in the home industrial community. These things cannot be done by one person alone; the parents must work at it, the better class of girls in the community must work for it, using constantly varied tactics to meet the enemy; and the minister, the teacher, the people all together must combine to prevent this bitter inroad from entering rural life.
For the Country Girls who by nature, ability, predilection and training, are endowed for special service, there are attractive fields open. The work of visiting nurse, of physician, of home economics agent and demonstrator, of social secretary, of teacher, of minister and pastor, are available fields for womanly endeavor. No Country Girl need feel called to go to the other side of the world to fulfil her mission. In her own valley she can have a life work that will be full of the rich returns for her well-directed, self-sacrificing service.