PLAYING AT HOSTESS

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 120, 24 May 1933, Page 13

PLAYING AT HOSTESS

AMERICA'S GIRL GUIDES

In America, as in other countries, the Girl Guide jino vement has \ grown and spread with amazing rapidity and has developed various interesting characteristics of its owa (states an exchange). Among other features has been the institution of several hundred "Little Houses," which have been efficiently planned and organised and in which Girl Scouts, as ■■ they are called, ■ may practise cooking, cleaning,' and housework of all kinds, oven to playing hostess under conditions as much as possible like those they are likely to meet in their own homes. Among the well:known American women who have taken a keen interest in the movement are Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Hoover, and Mis. Calvin Coolidge, and a contemporary journal gives an interesting account of the latter's visit to one of the "Little Houses" in Washington. She found several girls busy . getting luncheon ready for visitors, while others were arranging flowers in the kitchen." Upstairs in a wo'll'equipped nursery she found two girls bathing a life-like doll baby under the supervision of a white-capped nurse. When the "baby' had been patted dry, dressed, and put into its hygienic crib for a morning nap, Mrs. Coolidge stepped into an adjoining room and;., discovered a "patient"—whose very red • cheeks and very bright eyes rather spoiled the picture, but never mind!—getting an alcohol rub from two Girl Scout home' nurses. The rub finished, the nurses dexterously performed the difficult feat of changing the sheets while the patient lay in bed. PRACTICAL INSTRUCTION. Practical instruction in' first aid, homo nursing, dressmaking,, and other essentially feminine occupations art all part of the training. The questioi whether this equipment is a Teal ser vice to the girl in after years is, oi course, of paramount importance, but the general belief seems" to bo that it Ono twelve-year-old Girl Scout put it in a nutshell: "If I know I'm going to like dressmaking, I can go to regular classes and learn more about it than I can in Scouting—and the same with country dancing or sick nursing. But if I want to find out what I'm really going to do all my life, then there's no place like my troop." The older Girl Scouts agree that the troop's the place. At, least a score of nurses traced their initial interest in the work they are now doing directly to the proud day they were awarded their first aid and home nurse badges. There are ever so many case stories similar to that of Jane, supervisor in a well-known hospital, who determined in her first year as a > Girl Scout to make nursing her life work. Her nature badges gave on& girl the impulse that sent her to an island near Bermuda where, as a member of William Beebe's technical staff, she was part. of the annual expedition of the department of tropical researcli for the New York Zoological Society.

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