SCOUTS: Girl Leaders Meet

Some 1,800 fresh-faced women thronged the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Manhattan—delegates to the 13th annual National Convention of Girl Scout Leaders. Their president, Miss Sarah Louise Arnold, made a speech to the effect that there is “more to hope for from the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts than from any other standardized form of education.”

Their vice president, Mrs. Herbert C. Hoover, in speeches and interviews, particularized some of the things to be hoped for:

“The idea is to bring a girl to the state of mind where she will look at a dirty floor in her home, not with a groan and a thought of how she may escape tidying it up. On the contrary, she will look at a dirty floor with critical eye, think how much better it will be when it is cleaned up, and set to work with the newest thing in mops and cleansers to complete the job.

“What is home anyway? Is it a place where mother runs a hotel for the accommodation of the rest of you?

“Or is it a place where you spend your leisure hours and a certain number of working hours cheerfully and happily together?

“The Girl Scout believes it is the latter place, and she gives her best to making it so. She learns to do away with nonessentials in the home, to throw away a lot of frippery little things and to have three or four really lovely things in their place.

“Another splendid lesson that comes to her with scouting is the ability to play. She is not one of the girls who goes motoring in the country with the family on Sunday, helps scatter papers and tin cans around, sets the phonograph going and assails the surrounding haunts of Nature with its clamor. She knows how futile canned music can be when one may listen to a lark.

“Not that she decries the phonograph. There is a very definite place for it in her life. She uses it while she is scrubbing that dirty floor we spoke about. She mops to music. Or hums scout songs while she plies the dustcloth.

“Do girls get as much out of their scout work as boys? Why not? Much the same in character is required of them. They must have courage. It takes just as much courage to stick to the housework until it is done as it does to go out and meet a bear.

“Girls must have as much honor as boys. More, perhaps. For fathers merely go out and meet other fathers, while mothers stay at home and instill tenets of honor in future fathers and mothers.”

Enthusiastic Mrs. Hoover further said: “I think Girl Scouting is the best form of self-expression there is for a girl. That is why I give so much of my time to it. There are plenty of other things I could play about with if I did not consider this the most worth-while.”

New Uniform. The chief item of the Girl Scout leaders’ agenda was to adopt a new uniform in place of mannish, “tin cannish” khaki. Seven ladies paraded the platform in costumes of green wool with suede belts. The leaders delightedly voted that they should all dress that way. For Girl Scouts themselves, a pleated, roll-collared, one-piece slipover of green cotton twill was adopted, with sport hats to match.

Other Business amounted only to electing officers (President Arnold and Vice President Hoover were re-elected); voting a $334,784 budget; deciding to memorialize the late Juliette Magill Gordon Low, childless sportswomen of Savannah, Ga., and London, who founded the first U.S. troop of Girl Scouts in 1912 at Savannah, having derived the idea from the Girl Guides of England.