The Caledonian-record. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1920-current, 1921-02-08
What Is Girls
Community League?

Continued from Page Onc)
piano and vlctrola, and to make the
house real girls club. This they
are doing more and more.
No project OF this kind grows all
by itself like Jacks beanstock in a
single night. The seed out of which
came the League was the excellent
series of industrial classes conducted
for several weeks each winter during
a number of years by a specially APP
pointed committee of the St. Johns
bury Woman's Club. To these clas-
SeS girls who wanted to learn to make
their own dresses, or to typewrite, or
to do crocheting, tatting, knitting,
embroidery, basketry and stencilling,
The teachers were for the most part
members of the club committee.
From their work with the girls they
discovered that the social atmosphere
of the meetings appealed almost as
much as the chance to learn worth
while things indicating real need
for further club work.
No better tribute to the success of
the committees labors could be given
than to point out that its relation to
the League (Which is merely an eX-
tension and outgrowth of the Indus
trial classes), is quite like that OF
mother and daughter. Now that the
daughter has, so to speak, grown
up and married and gone into home
of her own" has been no reason for
scveling relations, and so this winter
has seen the members of the commit
tee taking as active an interest as
ever in the classes meeting at the
Woman's Club house.
What is the league attempting TO
do? 1t is trying to give as many st.
Johnobury girls as possible the chance
to have a good and profitable return
from their leisure time. lGrls today
have a great deal of leisure. This does
not mean that they are not busy, but
that they are not so insistently busy
with occupations needful for exist
ence as they would have been in olden
times Suppose they had been ladies
in the days of Homer's Odyssey; they
would have spun long hours with
Penelope or washed clothes with
Princess NauSicaa on the rivers
brink Now the mills and the laund-
lies do most of such work for them.
Or if they had been servants in those
far away days, they would have spent
long hours every day carrying into
the house the necessary supply of wa
ter which today pipes and faucets
make so little work of. Our so-called
working girls" have more spare time
than many a lady of high degree be-
fore the days Of labor-saying machi-
merry.
To FIJI this leisure with wholesome
and instructive employment and re-
creation is what girls clubs the coun-
try over are trying to do. And to this
end the Girls Community League of
st. Johnsbury plans parties, dances,
hikes, picnicS, sWims in the swim
ming season, toboggan, skating and
snowshoeing parties, classes in handi-
craft subjects, and in English, type
writer, nursing, beauty parlor and
dancing. visits undeIguidance to Ii
braly and museum. and smaller "spur
of the moment affairs that generally
turn out TO be the most fun Of all.
The aim of the league is not to do
things for the Girls. so much as to
give the girls direction and oppoltu
nitv to do thinpS for themselves. and
THROUGH the companionship that doing
pleasant THINGS together affords, to
become a lcaUue Of friends.