Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






THE GIRL IN HER TEENS

BY

MARGARET SLATTERY




The Pilgrim Press

Boston—Chicago




Copyright 1920

By A. W. Fell

THE JORDAN AND MORE PRESS

BOSTON




CONTENTS

  - CHAPTER I—THE TEEN PERIOD
  - CHAPTER II—THE PHYSICAL SIDE
  - CHAPTER III—THE MENTAL SIDE
  - CHAPTER IV—THE SPIRITUAL SIDE
  - CHAPTER V—THE SOCIAL SIDE
  - CHAPTER VI—HER RELATION TO THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
  - CHAPTER VII—HER RELATION TO THE CHURCH
  - CHAPTER VIII—HER RELATION TO THE BIBLE
  - CHAPTER IX—HER RELATION TO THE EVERYDAY
  - CHAPTER X—HER TEACHER




CHAPTER I—THE TEEN PERIOD


She was a beautiful, well-developed girl of thirteen. Her bright,
eager face, with its changing expression, was a fascination at all
times. It seemed unusually earnest and serious that particular morning
as she stood waiting the opportunity to speak to me. She had asked to
wait until the others had gone, and her manner as she hesitated even
then to speak made me ask, “Are you in trouble, Edith?”

“No, not exactly trouble,—I don’t know whether we ought to ask you,
but all of us girls think,—well, we wish we could have a mirror in the
locker-room. Couldn’t we? It’s dreadful to go into school without
knowing how your hair looks or anything!”

I couldn’t help laughing. Her manner was so tragic that the mirror
seemed the most important thing in the educational system just then. I
said I would see what could be done about it, and felt sure that what
“all the girls” wanted could be supplied. She thanked me heartily, and
when she entered her own room nodded her head in answer to inquiring
glances from the other girls.

As I made a note of the request, I remembered the Edith of a year or
more ago. Edith, whose mother found her a great trial; she didn’t
“care _how_ she looked.” It was true. She wore her hat hanging down
over her black braids, held on by the elastic band around her neck;
she lost hair ribbons continually, and never seemed to miss them. She
was a good scholar, wide-awake, alert, always ready for the next
thing. She loved to recite, and volunteered information generously. In
games she was the leader, and on the playground always the unanimous
choice for the coveted “it” of the game. She was never in the least
self-conscious, and, as her mother had said, how she looked never
seemed to occur to her.

And now she came asking for a mirror! Her hair ribbons are always
present and her hat securely fastened by hat pins of hammered brass.
She spends a good deal of time in school “arranging” her hair.
Sometimes spelling suffers, sometimes algebra. Before standing to
recite, she carefully arranges her belt. Contrary to her previous
custom, she rarely volunteers, although her scholarship is very good.
If unable to give the correct answer, or when obliged to face the
school, she blushes painfully. One day recently, when the class were
reading “As You Like It,” she sat with a dreamy look upon her sweet
face, far, far away from the eighth-grade class-room; could not find
her place when called upon to read, and, although confused and
ashamed, lost it again within ten minutes.

What has happened to Edith, the child of a year ago? She has gone. The
door has opened. Edith is thirteen. The door opened slowly, and those
who knew her best were perhaps least conscious of the changes, so
gradual had they been. But a new Edith is here. One by one the chief
characteristics of the childhood of the race have been left behind,
and the dawn of the new life has brought to her the dim consciousness
of universal womanhood. Womanhood means many things, but always
three—dreaming, longing, loving. All three have come to her, and
though unconscious of their meaning, she feels their power. Edith has
seen herself, is interested in herself, has become self-conscious, and
for the next few years self will be the center and every act will be
weighed and measured in relation to this new self. Fifty other girls,
her friends and companions all just entering their teens, share the
same feelings, and manifest development along the same general lines.
More than one of those fifty mothers looks at her daughter growing so
rapidly and awkwardly tall, and says, “I don’t know what to do with
her, she has changed so.” And more than one teacher summons all her
powers to active service as she realizes that for the next two years
she is to instruct one of the most difficult of pupils, the girl who
is neither child nor woman.

But the awkward years of early adolescence, filled with the struggle
to get adjusted to the new order of things, with dreams, with ardent
worship of ideals embodied in teachers, parents, older girls,
imaginary characters, quickly pass.

If they have been years of careful training, if the eager, impetuous
day-dreamer and castle-builder has been guarded and shielded, if she
has been instructed by mother, teacher, or some wise sympathetic woman
in all the knowledge that will help keep her safe and pure and fine,
then she is ready for the wealth of emotion, the increase of the
intellectual and spiritual power to be developed within her these next
few years.

But if not—if the earliest years have been filled with questions for
which no satisfactory answers were given, if great mysteries that
puzzle are solved for her only by what schoolmates, patent medicine
advertisements, and imagination can teach, then she does not have a
fair chance. She is not well equipped for life, and if in some moment
of trial which we fondly dream will never, never come to _her_, to
others perhaps, but not to _her_, she is overwhelmed, then we who have
left her unguarded are to blame.

If at thirteen she was awkward and sometimes disagreeable, at sixteen
we forget all about it, for now she is charming. The floodtide of life
is upon her,—it is June, and all the world is her lover. To be alive
is glorious; she shows it in all that she says and does. She laughs at
everything and at nothing, and she dearly loves “a good time.” She
makes use of all the adjectives in her mother tongue, and yet they are
not enough to express all that she feels. Superlatives abound, and a
simple pronoun, third person, singular number, masculine gender, is
introduced so often into her conversation with her girl friends that
it reveals at least one prominent “line of interest.”

But she is a dreamer still of new, deeper dreams in which self plays a
large part, but a different and more altruistic one; and the longings
that dawned on her soul with adolescence have grown in power. She not
only longs for the concrete hats and gowns and beautiful things, to
sing and play, to be admired, to be popular, but she longs to be good
and to do good. Now, when all her powers have awakened, obeying
instincts of her womanhood, she is ready to give herself in loving
service to some great cause, to serve the _world_.

All teachers of English composition can testify to the desire to serve
which stands out so clearly in the essay work of girls at this period.
Hazel is a type of hundreds. She attended a lecture a while ago and
saw pictures of the tenements; the crowded conditions, wretched
poverty and suffering children stirred her soul. Every composition
since has been a record of her dreams and longings. In every written
sketch or story a wretched child of the tenements appears. A girl of
means, “about sixteen years of age,” with plenty of spending money,
seeks out the child, often crippled or blind, gives it food, clothing,
a wheel chair, or takes it to a great physician who makes it well.
Sometimes the heroine finds work for father and mother, and they move
to a cottage in the country and are happy. Always in the story misery
is relieved and hearts are made glad. Always the heroine is
self-sacrificing and those helped are touched with deepest gratitude.
In the last story, “Little Elsie sat comfortably back in her wheel
chair too happy even to move it about. Her mother tried to find words
to express her gratitude, but could only murmur her thanks. The child
looked up into the face of her kind friend with a celestial smile that
paid for all the sacrifice.”

This desire to give all in altruistic service, this longing to make
the whole world happy, this worship of the _Good_ reveals itself too
in the girl’s effort “to find her Lord and worship Him.” The religious
sense, so strong in the heart of the race that man must bow down and
worship something, some one, be it fire, the moon, the stars, the
river, ancestors, idols of wood or stone, is strong in the heart of
the girl in her teens. And if rightly taught and presented, the Christ
unfailingly becomes her great ideal. All the qualities she most
admires she finds in him. Bravery, courage, purity and strength,
patience and sympathy, all are there and she worships him. For him she
can perform deeds of quiet heroism of which no one dreams,—struggle
desperately to overcome her faults, and sacrifice many a pleasure
willingly. Her prayers are ardent and sincere, and must rise to heaven
as an acceptable offering. I saw such a girl bow her head in prayer in
the crowded church on Easter morning. Her face was good to see. Death
and the grave meant nothing to her, but oh, _LIFE_—it was so good.
Sixteen found her hard at work in the cotton factory. But looking at
her in her new suit and hat and gloves, and at the one bright yellow
jonquil she wore so proudly, you would never have guessed that a week
of toil lay behind her and another awaited her. That night she sang a
brief solo in the chorus choir, and did it well; one of the boys in
the church walked home with her, they talked a few moments, and Easter
was over. At five-thirty next morning she rose, ate her hasty, meager
breakfast, and went to work in the rain. A week later, when we were
talking after Sunday-school, she said, “I don’t know as I ever had
such a happy Easter. It was such a beautiful day.” And then
hesitatingly, “I made up my mind I ought to be better than I have
been, and I’m not going to let my sister go to work in the mill, no
matter what it costs me. I’m going to send her to high school next
year instead of taking singing lessons. I decided Easter night.”

I could see her sitting in her bare, hopeless little room, with the
memory of the sunshine, the new suit and the jonquil, the solo, and
the Risen Lord filling her soul as she made her sacrifice, letting the
cherished plan of singing lessons go.

“What made you want to do it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I felt that I ought to, and Easter makes
you think of those things. I think Christians ought to be more like
Christ, as Dr. —— said in his sermon.”

That was the explanation. She was following, the best she knew how,
the pathway of the Christ—her ideal. God bless her,—the sacrifice will
pay.

Failing to find the Christ, the religious sense satisfies itself with
lower ideals. Intensified longings, dissatisfaction, and a
restlessness not found in the girl who truly gives her allegiance to
the Christ and feels his steadying power, are very evident in the girl
who has not yet found the one whom she can call Master and Lord.

Keeping pace with the deepening and broadening of the religious sense
and the physical growth and development, the intellectual powers have
been busy grasping new truths, eagerly seizing new facts that relate
to life, comparing, rejecting, reasoning, indeed for the first time
_independently_ thinking.

Before her friends realize it, the years have hurried past and the
time has come when only one more “teen” remains. She is eighteen.
Eighteen may find her plunged into life as a wage-earner, one of the
procession of thousands of girls facing realities that are hard. It
may find her already in the whirl of social life, struggling to meet
its demands, or in college facing its problems. Wherever it finds her,
two things are true of her. She thinks for herself,—and she is
critical.

Many of the theories of life and religion which she accepted
unquestioningly she questions now. Doubts assail her, and she is
perplexed by the evidence of wrong and evil resulting not only from
weakness, but from deliberate planning. If all her ideals fail her, if
the men and women she has trusted disappoint her, she grows cynical,
and tells you that “no one is what he seems.”

Now, more than at any time in her life, she needs to meet fine men and
women, that they may overbalance those whom she thinks have failed.
She needs to know definitely the good being done everywhere in the
world, to study great sociological movements, to see the efforts being
made to meet the special needs of the day, the problems of the cities,
and the salvation of the individual. Biography is good for her, and
sketches of real men and women living and working for and with their
fellows strengthen her faith and steady her.

Now is the time when she so easily develops into a gossip, and she
needs anything and everything that will help her despise it, and
provide her with something to talk about beside her neighbors and
associates.

She is keenly critical, because she is comparing theories and
life—because her ideals are high and her requirements match her
ideals. She is scornful, because she has not lived long enough to
realize how easy it is to fail, and she has not learned to let mercy
temper justice. She doubts because she is not able to adjust things
which seem to conflict, and experience has not yet helped her find
harmony in seeming discord.

She still loves a good time, and has it. Her ability as leader,
manager, or organizer reveals itself quickly if opportunity is given.
Her tendency toward introspection and self analysis often makes her
unhappy, dissatisfied and restless. She longs unspeakably to find her
work, to be sure she is in the right place in the great world. She
needs patience, real sympathy, and understanding from those with whom
she lives; to be led, not driven, by those who control her; positive
teaching on the part of all who instruct her, concrete interests,
social opportunities, and some one to love.

“What does the girl in her teens need?” has been asked these past few
years, by fathers, mothers, and teachers of girls, with increasing
desire to find a real answer. As yet, not enough thoughtful people
have even attempted to meet the question to make us sure that we have
a safe and universal answer. Yet we may be reasonably sure of a few
things.

She needs love. But, comes the reply, we do love her. From the time
when she “lengthens” her dresses and “does up” her hair, to twenty
when we greet her as an equal and consult her about all things, we
_love_ her. Who could help it?

But she needs _intelligent_ love, which is really sympathetic
understanding and keen appreciation wisely expressed. And she needs,
from thirteen to twenty, to be taught two things: to _work_ and to
_play_. The girl in her teens needs to be helped to realize her dreams
in action.

_She_ has the dreams, the hopes, desires and longings. _We_ must
furnish the opportunity to work them out into reality. Real,
healthful, natural enthusiasms for all phases of life, she can furnish
if she be a normally developed girl. The opportunity to express that
enthusiastic abundance of life _legitimately_ is ours to supply.

It sometimes seems as if Shakespeare must have been thinking of the
adolescent period of life when he said:

    “There is a tide in the affairs of men,
    Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,
    Omitted, all the voyage of their life
    Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

The teen age is the period where the battle for an honest, clean,
pure, righteous type of manhood and womanhood must be waged and won.
Having realized this, it now remains for us to bend all our energies
and summon all our skill to meet the task.




CHAPTER II—THE PHYSICAL SIDE


That mankind has a spiritual, mental and _physical_ side to his nature
has been acknowledged for many centuries. That they are of equal
importance has been accepted but for a comparatively short time. Time
was when the spiritual nature was developed, the mental side
cultivated, and the physical scorned and abused. The pale face and
emaciated form were indications of the pure heart. The starved body
meant the well nourished soul. When men were most deeply concerned
with the future beyond the grave, and this life was but a penance, a
period to be endured, a terrible battle to win, having little joy, and
almost no pleasure not labeled _wicked_, it was natural that they
should treat with a measure of scorn or ignore altogether the physical
body in which dwelt so much of evil. But when man realized that
eternity begins here and now, he turned his thoughts to the present
welfare of his fellows, and the physical side assumed a new
importance.

In some cases the importance attached to physical welfare is out of
proportion. It is always difficult to keep a sense of proportion when
new light on any line of truth bursts upon men’s minds. But in the
main the place of the physical side is not exaggerated. Every teacher
in the public school realizes it as she sees what a tremendous
difference has been made in the spiritual and intellectual development
of a child who after years of ineffectual struggle to _see_ has been
given glasses that make it possible for him to do the same work as his
classmates. She realizes it as with astonishment she sees a boy
transformed before her eyes, changed into an entirely different child
as the weeks and months pass, because the troublesome and deadening
adenoids have been removed. She realizes it as she sees a poor, weak
little girl, undersized and underfed, changed into a new being under
treatment, with plenty of nourishing food and fresh air. The
experience of the past ten years alone, in the public schools, will
convince one of the value of the physical.

Certain it is that the physical side exists, and is to be reckoned
with in the development of human life to the highest possible point.
The more we know about the physical side, the more we stand in awe of
ourselves, and the more we appreciate the wonderful machine with which
we are to do our work in the world.

I saw recently two locomotives that taught me again what it all means.
One had been in a wreck and lay pitched over on its side, its splendid
power gone. Its size and its powerful strength made its ruin more
pitiful, and its utter helplessness appealed strongly to all who
looked at it. Near it on the second track, all hot and panting, ready
and waiting to pull its heavy load up the steep grade, was a fellow
engine, in full possession of its powers: how strong, how complete,
how perfectly able to perform its task it seemed as it stood there on
the track beside its helpless brother. For days I could not forget the
picture, and when I looked into the faces of my girls in their teens
all it suggested impressed me anew.

How I should like to have them fully equipped physically to meet the
demands which life will bring to them! The girl in her teens has a
physical side of tremendous significance and importance, for it is
during these years that she develops her powers or wrecks them. It is
her time of rapid growth, of severe tax upon every part of her
physical being. It is during these years she meets her crises.

We have seen that early in her teens a girl begins to care “how she
looks.”

She should be encouraged to look well. She should dress carefully,
which does not mean expenditure of much money, but does mean thought.
She should be taught that dress means much, and physical condition
even more.

But all this, some teachers may say, belongs in the home. It is the
duty of the home to look after these things. Yes, it is true. And it
is a cause for thanksgiving that in so many homes, sweet, patient,
wise mothers watch over their girls and give them what they need. But
every Sunday-school teacher of girls in their teens has at least one
girl whose mother does not or can not help at the time when help is
most needed. Some have had no training themselves and do not see the
need; some are crushed by the multitude of burdens, some are careless,
and some have no knowledge as to how to cope with the wilfulness of
girls which sometimes appears in the years of adolescence. “The whole
need not a physician, but they that are sick,” the great Teacher said
once, and it is true to-day. Both the public school and the
Sunday-school exist to cultivate all of good that appears in the
girl’s life, and develop what she lacks.

Here is a group of girls in a certain Sunday-school class, most of
them well taken care of physically, but with very little of direct
teaching and development morally. They are selfish, self-centered, and
vain. The teacher’s task is clear. Here is another class in a nearby
church, suffering not only from moral and intellectual neglect, but
from physical as well. Again the teacher’s task is plain.

We have seen that buried deep in the heart of every adolescent girl is
the desire to be attractive, to be popular, to have people “like” her.
This desire prompts her often to little acts of courtesy and kindness
and efforts to be agreeable; more often it prompts her to make herself
physically attractive. Take a walk through any park, along the
boulevards, up the main street of small manufacturing towns, or watch
any high school group at the hour of dismissal: if your eyes are open
you will be conscious of the struggle to be attractive,—to look well.
It is registered in hair and hats, bows and chains and pins. Sometimes
it appears in fads in dress,—low shoes and silk stockings in winter,
or the strange combination of no hat, a very thin coat, and a huge
muff. These are the things that make the people of common sense ask
the very pertinent question, “What are these girls’ mothers thinking
of?” It is a hard question to answer satisfactorily. Often the mothers
have helplessly yielded under the power of that insistent phrase, “All
the girls do.”

If once these girls can be made to see the attractiveness of absolute
cleanliness, of the charm of simple but spotless clothing, of teeth,
hair, hands and skin that show _care_, a great deal will have been
done toward helping their general physical condition.

Anything which has to do with personal appearance must be handled with
great tact, for the adolescent girl is sensitive and she resents
direct criticism. But on the other hand she accepts eagerly anything
which promises to help her look well. If a teacher does not feel equal
to the task of assisting the girl to make the best of her physical
side she can find some one to help her. I know of one class of girls
in their teens who will never forget the talk given by a bright,
attractive, clever woman at the monthly social, on “Tales Told by
Belts,” and not a girl in the Girls’ Club, I know, ever forgot the
talk on “Sometimes the _Head_ Rules and Sometimes the _Feet_.” More
girls than usual wore rubbers the next rainy day, and some high heels
disappeared.

Perhaps one of the most helpful of the little incidental ways by which
the Sunday-school teachers may help is through praise. I have in mind
now a girl of sixteen who usually selected her own clothes, and seemed
to have a talent for putting together the wrong colors. One spring,
she, in some way, was persuaded by another girl to have her coat,
dress and hat all in browns that harmonized. One can hardly imagine
the change it made in the girl. She realized it. That Sunday in the
hall, I told her very quietly that she looked “dear,” that she must
never wear anything except soft colors that harmonized; that I loved
to look at her. She showed her pleasure. The next January she asked me
one night if I thought dark blue would be all right for her new suit
if she got “everything to match.”

No one can associate sympathetically with the girl in her teens week
after week and not be concerned about her physical welfare. There are
so many pale, anemic, tired girls that move one’s heart. Some work too
hard. Many live under unhygienic conditions. Many can not stand the
pressure and rush of school and social life. Great numbers suffer from
improper food, and many more because they do not get enough sleep.
Almost every Sunday I hear some girl say she “went somewhere every
night last week.” This mania for “going” seizes so many of our girls
just when they need rest and natural pleasures, the great
out-of-doors, and early hours of retiring.

So many of our girls are “nervous.” A bright, interesting eighth grade
teacher told me recently that she had fifty girls in her class and
that according to their mothers forty-one were “very nervous.” It
seemed to her a large proportion even for girls in their early teens,
and she began a quiet study of some of them. One of the “very nervous”
girls who, her mother thought, must be taken out of school for a
while, takes both piano and violin lessons, attends dancing school,
goes to parties now and then, and rarely retires before ten o’clock.
Another “very nervous” girl takes piano lessons, goes to the moving
picture shows once or twice a week, hates milk, can’t eat eggs,
doesn’t care much for fruit, and is extremely fond of candy. In each
case investigated there seemed to be much outside of school work which
could explain the “nervousness.”

It is most interesting to note the gain, physically, made by almost
every girl in her teens who enters a good boarding-school, where
plenty of exercise, a cheerful atmosphere, regular hours and wholesome
food is the rule.

Just how much the Sunday-school teacher who is a real friend of the
girl in her teens can help is a question, but I know of enough cases
where an earnest interview with the father or mother has resulted in
better care of the growing girl, with more attention paid to her food
and rest, to make me sure that it pays to attempt to help. If it only
means that the girl in her teens shall not go to school or to work
without breakfast, it pays.

I can almost hear some troubled teacher ask, “Where in the
Sunday-school hour is there time for this?” It can not be done in a
Sunday-school hour except incidentally. But those who are at work with
girls in their teens must teach more than a lesson on Sunday. They are
teaching _girls_ to _live_, if they have entered whole-heartedly into
the work.

Every girl in her teens is interested in her physical self. The ways
in which she strives to satisfy her curiosity and desire for knowledge
are often pitiful, often to be deplored.

From my experience I am convinced that anything which tends to center
her interest upon the physical is unwise. For this reason I very much
doubt the advisability of class instruction, except in general matters
of hygiene. What the whole class is interested in they will discuss.
It will be the main topic of conversation among “chums” as they
separate after class, and the effect I am convinced is bad, simply
because it centers thought upon a subject which to the girl in her
teens should not be the chief interest. Then, too, the individuals in
a class vary so much that the instruction to be given needs special
wisdom, tact and comprehensive knowledge of girls which not every
teacher possesses.

That instruction should be given, and that questions must be answered,
is true. A girl’s mother is the natural and best agency through which
knowledge should come to her, and the Sunday-school teacher may very
easily enlist the mother’s sympathy, urge her to be true to her
daughter’s need, and show her how necessary it is that she faithfully
instruct her child in the things she needs to know. If the mother
says, as is often the case, that she _can’t_, that she does not know
how, etc., then the teacher may offer to help with suggestions, with
books, or, if the mother asks her to do so, may talk with the girl
herself. Such a conversation on the part of the teacher should never
be forced, but introduced naturally and easily in some opportune
moment. Sometimes, if there is real confidence and sympathy between
pupil and teacher, the girl herself will open the way.

In a hundred ways, both in teaching and in conversation with the
girls, the Sunday-school teacher may show her own respect for the
physical side of life, the marvel of it all, and the need on the part
of every woman to obey its unchanging laws, from which, if broken,
there is no escape. In scores of ways she will frankly and naturally
reveal to her girls her sympathy with womanhood everywhere, in every
walk of life, and especially her respect for mothers, and her love for
helpless childhood.

Girls learn so much more, and the impressions made are far deeper,
through this almost unconscious influence of the teacher than through
the “lecture” or “lesson.” I shall not soon forget the impression made
upon a class of girls of eighteen years of age by the preparation of a
complete outfit to be presented to a poor woman whose child was to
come into the world in a tiny third-story room amidst deepest poverty.
As one of the girls said, “It will be a lucky baby, after all, with
eight of us to look after it.” Both teacher and girls felt new bonds
of sympathy long before the last tiny garments were finished, and the
girls had learned much.

It is not good for girls in their teens, especially in the latter part
of the period, to be closely associated with women who are cynical,
who have forgotten the tenderness of their own girlhood dreams, or who
are out of sympathy with the great fundamentals of life.

The teacher may so easily reveal, too, her respect for the
conventionalities of life. In her escape from the narrowing influences
of the conventionalities of older countries, the American girl has
gone so far into liberty that she does not realize the protection that
lies behind simple conventionality. While it is perfectly true that a
girl may travel alone from one end of this country to the other with
safety, it is not true that it is wise for her to do so. Fathers are
beginning to realize it, and daughters though not “in society” are
enjoying the assurance that, if obliged for social or business reasons
to be out late, their fathers will call for them. It will mean an
effort on the part of the father, but it brings a reward, for his
daughter, feeling herself guarded and protected, develops into a finer
type of woman.

The girl in her teens is interested always in the influence of the
passions and emotions upon the physical nature, and knowledge given in
a simple direct way is good for her.

“Why do some people get very pale and others very red, when they are
angry?” asked a fourteen-year-old girl one day.

“Sometimes you tremble when you are angry,” said another; “and you
usually talk very fast,” added a third. The discussion which followed
was interesting and helpful. They were astonished at the reports made
by physicians and students of the effect upon digestion of angry
words, or sullen silence, during dinner. They learned in a new way the
value of the temper controlled, and of self-mastery in all lines. They
were interested enough to bring into class instances of self-control
under trying circumstances, and of calamities following complete loss
of control for only a few minutes. I think they realized in a new way
the majesty of the perfect self-control of Christ in the most trying
moments of his life. We talked over with profit the effect upon the
physical life, of hurry, of fear, of worry and useless anxiety, and
have tried to find why the Christ was free from them all. The
conclusions reached by the girls themselves have been helpful in every
instance.

As long as we live, the physical will be with us; it is not to be
despised, but respected; not to be ignored, but developed; not to be
abused, but used. It demands obedience, and exacts penalty when its
laws are broken. It is so complicated that no one can understand it.
We may study and analyze, but how much of the physical is mental, and
how much of the spiritual is physical, no one to-day is able to say.
Of this we may be sure,—the physical side of the girl in her teens is
a tremendous force that must be reckoned with, and demands for its
fullest development and her future well being all the sympathy,
patience, and wisdom that parents and teachers can supply.




CHAPTER III—THE MENTAL SIDE


The girl in her teens does think. She has been called careless,
thoughtless, inattentive and a day-dreamer. Though these things are
often true of her, she is on the whole a thinker. Her day-dreams are
thoughtful. In building her air castles she uses memory and
imagination, and sometimes one wonders if these factors to which we
owe so much do not get as valuable training from “dreams” as from
algebra. Certain it is that many women who have helped make the world
a more comfortable place in which to live laid plans for their future
work on sweet spring days, or long autumn afternoons when Latin
grammar faded away in the distance, and things vital, near, and real
came to take its place.

When Lucy Larcom stood by the noisy loom in the rush and whirl of the
big factory, day-dreaming while her busy hands fulfilled their task,
memory and imagination were being trained, and one morning the world
read the day-dream. At first it was a picture of flowers and fields
and cloudless skies, then it came back to the tenements on the narrow
streets and said:

    “If I were a sunbeam,
      I know where I’d go,
    Into lowliest hovels,
      Dark with want and woe.
    Till sad hearts looked upward,
      I would shine and shine.
    Then they’d think of heaven,
      Their sweet home and mine.”

This and many another gem the imagination of the factory girl wrought
out beside the loom.

The day-dreams, the “castles” reared by the imagination of girlhood,
must find expression, and they do—in diaries, “literary productions”
and poems at which we sometimes smile.

But who shall say that the mental side of the girl in her teens does
not get as much valuable training through the closely written journal
pages, or the carefully wrought poem which perhaps no one may ever
see, as through the “daily theme” or the essay written according to an
elaborate outline, carefully criticized by the teacher. The ambitions
of the adolescent girl along literary lines often receive a rude shock
when her essay is returned with red lines drawn through what, to her,
are the most effective adjectives and most beautiful descriptions.

Many a literary genius has been destroyed by the red lines of an
unimaginative instructor. But there are some wise enough to allow the
girl to express herself in true adolescent fashion, criticizing only
when errors in punctuation, sentence formation or spelling occur, and
letting her gradually outgrow the glaring wealth of imagery that is
the right of every girl in her teens.

But the adolescent girl does not think in “dreams” alone. She thinks
in the hard terms of the practical and the every day. Her mental life,
expanding and enlarging, is stirred to unusual activity, as is her
physical nature, and she makes so many discoveries absolutely new to
her that she thinks them new to all. She gives information of all
sorts to her family and expects respectful attention. She knows more
than her mother, criticizes her father, gives advice to her
grandmother, and is willing to decide all questions for the younger
members of the family. She has a new idea of her own importance, and
sees herself magnified.

It seems but yesterday since she was just a little girl, willing to be
guided, directed, ruled by her elders. Now she resents the direct
command, persists in asking “why,” and is not satisfied with “because
I think best.” She chafes under strict discipline, rebels openly,
sulks, or yields with an air of desperate resignation when her dearest
desires are denied. She thinks she knows best. That is her chief
trouble. The things she wants to do seem best to her,—she thinks they
will mean her real happiness, therefore she chooses them. That were
she allowed to follow her own choice, ten years from now she would
sadly regret it does not influence her much, for the now is so near
and so desirable.

I was calling one evening in the home of a friend who has a
sixteen-year-old daughter. A few moments after I was seated she came
into the room wearing a simple evening gown of pale blue silk, her
hair arranged in the latest fashion, and her eyes dancing with
excitement and anticipation. I could easily pardon the look of
satisfied pride upon the faces of both her father and mother. After
greeting me cordially she said, “Mother, I may do it just this time,
mayn’t I? Please, mother!” “Do what?” said the mother. “You know, the
carriage. Harry’s father gave him the money, and it’s so much nicer
than the crowded car.”

“I told you this afternoon what I thought about it,” said the mother,
“but you may ask your father.”

She referred the matter to him. “Harry” wanted to have a carriage and
drive home after the party, his father was willing and had given him
the money. And now mother objected! All the nicest girls were going to
do it, but mother preferred a crowded street-car! Supreme disgust and
a sense of injustice showed in voice and manner. Her father smiled, as
he said, “Well, I think your mother is about right.” Still the girl
persisted until her father said sternly, “Mildred, you may do as we
wish or remain at home.” Sullen silence followed, while she made
preparations to go. As her mother helped her on with her wrap, she
said kindly, “I’m so sorry, Mildred. It is hard for us to deny you,
but a few years from now you will understand and be grateful.”

The daughter’s answer came quickly: “That is what you always say, but
I know I’m missing all the pleasures the other girls have.”

The mother was discouraged. “I don’t know what to do with Mildred,”
she said, after her daughter had gone, “she seems to have lost all
confidence in us.”

“No,” I said, “she hasn’t. She has supreme confidence in herself. If
you had frankly told her your reason for refusing her request, or
simply said that it was not the proper thing, since you could not
furnish her with a chaperon, it might have helped. But if you treat
her as patiently for the next few years as you have done to-night, she
will come out all right.”

I am sure she will. The rapid development of her mental life is
showing through her will. The years are coming when she will _need_ to
choose for _herself_. The power to choose is being developed now.
Inexperience leads her to make unwise choices, and so the experience
of older and wiser people must guide her, and if necessary decide for
her. But wherever it is possible for her to choose for herself,
whenever the issue at stake is not too great, the wise parent and
teacher will allow her to choose, yes, even require her to do so, that
the power of choice may be developed and the mental forces
strengthened. And when she has chosen they will help her carry out her
choice, that she may see the result and judge of its wisdom, thus
helping her in the struggle to develop both will and judgment.

The time when parents attempted to break the will is passing. The wise
parent and teacher of the girl in her teens knows that she needs, if
her future is to be useful and happy, not a broken will but a trained
will. Training is a slow and steady process and requires unlimited
patience.

The aim of every one in any way responsible for the education of the
girl in her teens is to help her to see the right and desire it. If
that can be done for her, she has at least been started on the road
that leads to safety. This is the time when those who teach her may
help her to see the value of promptness, absolute accuracy, and
dependableness. When she promises to do a thing it is the duty of all
who teach her to help her keep that promise. But she must always see
the value of the thing taught. The mind must be satisfied; she must
know why. The girl in her teens is developing the individual moral
sense, and if the years are to bring strength of character every open
avenue to the mind must be used to help in constantly raising
standards and impressing truth.

The awakening of the girl in her teens to new phases of mental
activity reveals itself in her passion for reading. It is true that
some girls before twelve read eagerly all sorts of books, but most
girls develop a genuine love for reading with adolescence. They then
become omnivorous readers. When one looks over lists of “Books I Have
Read” prepared by high-school girls he is astonished by the number and
variety.

It is most interesting to note the books designated in personal
conversation as “the dearest story,” “just great,” “dandy,” “perfectly
fine,” “elegant,” “beautiful,” and “the best book I have ever read.”
That these books have a tremendous influence on the mental life in
forming a “taste” for literature, and furnishing motives for action,
ideals, and information, no one can doubt.

Who helps these girls to satisfy their hunger for a “good book to
read?” Many have no help,—they read what they will. Sometimes the
parent acts as guide, often the book lists gotten out by the city
librarian, or graded lists of books prepared by teachers in the public
school, although many times at just the period when most reading is
being done the “lists” disappear from the schoolroom. Seldom does the
Sunday-school teacher guide her girls in their choice of books, yet
this is one of the most valuable and helpful things a woman can do for
a girl.

One often wishes there were more books of the right sort for the girl
in her teens. With the exception of the old standards that remain
helpful to succeeding generations there are comparatively few books
for girls that are interesting, fascinating, wholesome, and free from
those “problems” on which few women and no girls can dwell with
profit. Modern writers have given us a few fine, inspiring stories for
girls, and the teacher who seeks them out, reads them, and then passes
them on to her girls is helping in a real and definite way to deepen
and broaden character. All teachers of girls are hoping that, now so
many good books for boys have been written, our writers will turn
their attention to girls and their needs.

Girls in their teens need biography and enjoy it. They need to know
fine women who have actually lived. If the lives of such women could
be written for girls they would find eager readers. The author of the
life of Alice Freeman Palmer has presented an inspiring and helpful
gift to the girls of all time, and its influence can never be
estimated. We need more such books.

No one of us would return for a moment to the stories of heroines so
good that in the last chapter they died and went to heaven, but we do
need books in which girls and women are sane, reasonable, and good,
yet live, and enjoy living to the full. The world is full of
wholesome, true, womanly women, and our girls need to know about them
in fact and fiction.

The mental activity of the girl in her teens reveals itself also in
her great desire to know. During the period of her teens the girl so
often appears superior to the boy mentally. Sometimes she is, but more
often the seeming superiority can be explained in two ways: the hunger
for knowledge and longing to understand life come to her earlier than
to the boy; she desires to excel, and feels more keenly the disgrace
of low rank and unsatisfactory progress in her studies, which leads
her to devote more time and conscientious effort to master them. While
her brother is buried deep in athletics, she is buried in dreams,
romances and facts. She wants things explained. After sixteen, there
dawns the period when she demands that her teacher shall know. She
must have knowledge. Some teachers of girls in the later teens hold
their interest through a charming personality, a knowledge of the
heart of a girl, and a clever presentation of lessons. Still, such
teachers are unable oftentimes to help the girl in her struggle to
straighten out tangles of what she calls “faith” and “knowledge.”

She asks with a new earnestness, “Are the miracles true?” “Is the
Bible different from other books?” Only last week a girl of eighteen,
suffering with her dearest friend, whose brother had been sentenced to
a term in prison for gross intoxication, said to me: “That man prays
often when he is sober to be kept from drinking, how can God let him
do it when it is just killing his mother and all the family? I don’t
see how it can be true that God loves men when he lets them be so
wicked, and when people suffer so, and starve and die in wrecks and
fires and—it’s terrible. I know you will think I’m awful, but
sometimes I don’t believe in God at all.” Her voice trembled, and I
knew the hurried sentences represented months of thinking. I did not
consider her “awful.” God help her—she has looked the old, old problem
of evil squarely in the face for the first time, and is staggered by
it. How to help her in this crisis we shall consider in our discussion
of the “Spiritual Side.”

She needs now more than ever a teacher who can understand her, who has
thought things out for herself, who can teach positively, who is too
near life to worship creed, and too large to be dogmatic. One so often
wishes, when looking into the face of some thoughtful girl, with mind
keen, alert, active, but perplexed and confused by knowledge that
seems to contradict itself, for some miracle by which for a moment the
Great Teacher might come and speak to her the words that made his
doubting pupil say, “My Lord and my God.”

The mental activity of the girl of to-day reveals itself in the later
teens by a keen and deep interest in social questions, in the great
problems that concern women. But a few weeks since I looked into the
faces of scores of earnest college girls, many in their later teens,
who were discussing at a week-end conference, “The Individual and the
Social Crisis.” It was not a mere discussion. These girls had plans,
they had facts, they were looking at the question on all sides. Within
the month I met another group in conference. They were a “Welfare
Committee” for an organization of working girls. They knew what they
were talking about, they had plans, and were seeking solutions for
problems that needed to be solved.

The girl in her teens is a dreamer at thirteen, seeking to realize her
dreams in real life at nineteen.

During those six wonderful years of repeated crises, the mental life
of the girl is being shaped and determined by environment. To some
extent the teacher may influence that environment, and become a real
part of it. It is her privilege to furnish the imagination, through
prose and poetry, with fields in which to wander afar, broaden the
vision through books of travel and information which she may put in
the girl’s way, increase her love of music and pictures through
occasional concerts and visits to the art galleries, and in scores of
little ways open new doors to the greater realms of knowledge which,
if unaided, she would have passed by.

It is a great thing to be able to help another mind to think for
itself. That, the wise teacher is always striving to do. She
challenges her girls to think. This is the reason why she wants the
girl in her teens to know something of the history of the church; to
be acquainted with the young men and women on the mission field, and
know what they are doing; to know what the cities are trying or
refusing to do for the housing of the poor, and for the protection of
women and girls; to know the laws of home hygiene, and to use her
mental faculties to help answer the question of the relation of the
church and the individual under existing conditions in her own
community and in the world. The girl in her teens is interested most
in the very thing in which the Great Teacher was himself
interested—life, the life of his own day, and he so instructed his
disciples that the eyes of their understanding were opened and they
began to think for themselves and of their fellow-men.

We have to-day, in the girl in her teens, who in large numbers is
still in our Sunday-schools, a tremendous mental force. Were it
awakened and developed, helped to see and interpret life according to
the principles of Jesus, in fifty years the church would find most of
its present problems solved. For hard to realize as it is when looking
into the faces and training the minds of the girls in their teens of
to-day, still it is true that we are looking at and training the women
of to-morrow, yes, those who a few years hence holding their children
in their arms, shall decide all unknowing what the next generation of
men and women shall be and do.

To encourage the girl in her teens to use her mental powers to the
utmost, to help her gain knowledge and self-control, to guide her in
her thinking, is the task of every parent and teacher, and it is a
task tremendously worth while.




CHAPTER IV—THE SPIRITUAL SIDE


All civilization begins in sensation and feeling. The most abstruse
and abstract thought of to-day is possible because ages and ages ago
men living in caves were hungry and sought food, were cold and sought
warmth, felt fear and sought protection. They conquered in battle with
fierce animals and neighboring tribes, and felt the joy of victory and
the satisfaction of possession. The “self” sensations and feelings are
at the foot of the ladder of civilization by which man, with almost
infinite patience has climbed thus far. But self is not all. As the
ages passed, man’s pleasure of protection included his neighbor in his
feeling and thought. Misfortune evoked pity, and suffering called
forth sympathy, the desire for fair play for self grew until it became
a sense of justice which included the other man, and the moral sense
developed and was strengthened by experience through the succeeding
ages.

From the beginning “the _spirit_ of man sought ever to speak.” At
first he would propitiate the spirits of air and fire, the rulers of
earth and sea, the harvest and the battle,—please them and buy their
favor that he might be happy. In weird chants and dances, in feast
days and fast days, by sacrifice and penance, he endeavored to appease
the spirits of his gods and insure happiness for himself. Great
multitudes of the human race have gone no farther. After all the
progress of thought their prayers are still intense appeals for
blessing upon self and self-interests, and they still keep the feasts
and fasts, and bring offerings with hope of personal reward. But every
century brings an increasing number so filled with the sense of
another’s need that in some measure at least they forget self. Their
prayers are petitions for others,—their gifts are poured out without
thought of recompense; the spiritual nature within them, awakened and
developed, triumphs and manifests itself in a thousand varying deeds
that bless mankind.

This spiritual nature, which from the beginning has sought after its
Creator that it might worship him, is not a thing apart, living in a
separate “house,” but rather a phase of man’s complexity. It depends
for its growth upon both the physical and mental sides of man’s
nature, and cannot be divorced from them.

At the foot of the path that reaches to the very height of spiritual
life, we find feeling as sensation and emotion. The myriad sensations
which express themselves in bodily consciousness through the physical,
and the emotions which find expression through mental consciousness,
can not escape their share of responsibility for the development of
the spiritual side. As year after year he sees successive classes of
children repeat the development of their predecessors, one stands in
awe and reverence before the presence of laws which seem universal in
the development of child life. He notes the days when life means food
and clothing furnished by another. He notes the strong development of
the self interests to the exclusion of others. He sees the gradual
development of the sense of justice, of pity, of sympathy. He watches
the development of altruism in adolescence. He sees the rapid change
of body, mind, and spirit, and witnesses the struggle for control,
sometimes on the part of one, sometimes the other, until at last
physical, mental or spiritual emerges in control of a life. Or in the
rarer cases, where a more perfect development has come, all three work
together in the effort to make a perfectly balanced man.

We saw in our brief study of the physical side that a girl in her
teens can feel. Her whole being is sensitized, ready at a moment’s
notice to respond. In our study of the mental side we saw that she can
and does think, is capable of the heights and depths of emotion, and
is able in a limited way to make comparisons and reach sane
conclusions.

As the physical side of her nature is awake and the mental side keen,
curious and eager, so the spiritual side feels the thrill of new life
and opens to all the wealth of impression. She is close to the great
mysteries of life, and “whence came I, what am I here for, where am I
going,” press her for answer. In her early teens she accepts gladly
the theories and creeds of those who teach her. There are
comparatively few “unbelievers” from thirteen to sixteen. The average
girl at this period is religious in the truest sense of the word. Her
moral sense is keen, her conscience is alive,—she longs unspeakably to
be good; to overcome jealousy and envy; to be truthful, thoughtful of
others; and a score of minor virtues she longs to possess. Yet in
strange perversity she is often none of these things. She finds it
easy to pray, and a song, a picture, a story filled with deeds of
deepest self-sacrifice, awakens immediate response. She can be
appealed to through her emotions, and her deepest religious sense
touched and developed. The awakening of her spiritual nature thus
through the emotions is perfectly legitimate. The appeal should never
be sensational, and never under any circumstances awaken an hysterical
response. Not tears but unbounded joy should be the result of her
response to an appeal to all that is best in her.

If the Sunday-school were equipped with just the right teachers, and
able to so influence parents and home conditions that the girl in her
early teens were regular in attendance, very few would reach the age
of sixteen without having determined to love and obey God and to live
in the world as Christ lived. Almost all would unite with the church,
which is the visible expression of the religious life,—and be ready to
throw themselves into its work.

In all my experience with Sunday-school girls of this period regular
in attendance and interested in the work I have found when talking
with them that they invariably say, “I think I _am_ a Christian,” “I
am trying hard to be good and to be a Christian,” “I am willing to
sign the card, I have been trying to be a Christian for a long time,”
etc., etc. Then, having so expressed themselves, if later I talk over
with them the matter of uniting with the church, I find only a few
objections repeated year after year by successive classes. “My father
and mother think I am too young,” “My father says I would better wait
until I know what I am doing,” “I am afraid I am not good enough,” and
the one most reluctantly expressed, “If I join the church I am afraid
I’ll have to——,” then follow the things which perhaps must be given
up. I have yet to find the girl from thirteen to sixteen who has been
a regular attendant at Sunday-school since primary age who has no
desire to call herself a Christian. The splendid devotion to duty, the
sympathy, the service to the world, the marvelous love and compassion,
the supreme sacrifice of our Lord, makes the strongest possible appeal
to the spiritual nature of the girl. We may confidently expect her to
respond, and she does.

But if the girl has been irregular in attendance, has lost interest in
class or teacher, is permitted to enjoy the stimulus of social life
while too young, comes to church only on special occasions, has little
or no definite moral instruction at home, and does not come into close
touch with rich spiritual life, she will drift through the years of
adolescence with her spiritual nature undeveloped and expressing
itself only in vague longings unsatisfied. The chances are that such a
girl will never have anything but a superficial interest either in her
own development or the vital life of the church expressed in its
various agencies.

Two years ago, at a conference, a girl of sixteen from a fashionable
boarding-school, coming from a home where fads and fashions rule, said
to me, “I never knew Christ was so wonderful, but then I have never
thought much about it, though I go to morning service in the winter. I
have never met women and girls like those I have seen this week; they
are so interesting,—they are doing so many things to help people,—they
seem to love to live. I don’t want to live a mean, selfish kind of
life. I am going back to school for my last year. What can I do? How
can I help?” I have met many girls of whom she is the type. Little is
being done for the spiritual side of their natures. The Sunday-school
at present does not reach them to any great extent. One of the
greatest problems facing the fashionable church is how to reach in any
way girls in their teens who are members of its congregation. Such
girls with their abundance of life have at least a right to those
things offered in the Sunday-school which will mean the awakening and
developing of the spirit. They need teachers especially equipped in
every way to meet them and help them. To find such teachers is one of
the problems that must be met within the next few years. Perhaps we
may look confidently for help before long to the girls of culture and
refinement now in our colleges hard at work upon every kind of problem
dealing with the development of a better life for girls and women. For
these girls are beginning to look at the Sunday-school seriously as
the means of bringing moral and religious education to girls of all
classes, and are asking how they may best equip themselves for service
in its various departments.

The problem of the other girl is just as great. She works all the
week, and when on Sunday morning she is tired, the family sympathize.
She gradually drops out of Sunday-school, is not able because of her
long hours to enter into the work of the church, does not come into
contact with any vitalizing spiritual force, and slowly this part of
her nature, lacking food and stimulus, begins to die. She spends
Sunday afternoon and evening socially, and enters upon the new week’s
work with no uplift of soul and spirit to help her when temptations
come.

She needs a real teacher, sympathetic and appreciative, to hold her
during the first years of her working life. One who can make the class
a social factor, and by her effort and personality make the
Sunday-school hour interesting enough to insure attendance. Then the
teacher has an opportunity at least to bring the girl into contact
with Christ, and through instruction to feed and develop her spiritual
nature until it is ready through exercise to develop itself.

The spiritual nature needs food as does the physical. If the physical
life is poorly nourished in this time of the most rapid development, a
loss of vitality and power is the inevitable result. The same is true
of the mental life. There must be healthful, attractive, abundant food
for interesting, enjoyable thought. And just as surely the spiritual
life, unless the emotions and moral sense are nourished, will yield to
slow paralysis or run into wrong and wasteful channels.

But there comes a time in the spiritual experience of the girl,
usually about sixteen, when she wants to do something to express the
longing to give herself which is growing more intense each year. If
the Sunday-school and church are together able to provide her with
work she is fairly safe for the next few years. The work will mean
definite interest, will call for some sacrifice, and will bring the
satisfaction of accomplishment. The spiritual side of her nature will
find in this way opportunity for immediate expression, and we must
never let the fact escape us that without opportunity for expression
abundant life is impossible.

Sooner or later there is bound to come to the average girl in her
teens a period of doubting, anxious questioning. Most often it appears
at the very end of the period. The outcome of this longer or shorter
period of turmoil in thought may be a much broader, deeper faith in
the Christian ideals and the realities of life, or it may be a
drifting away from the church and the loss of definite faith in
anything.

There are in the world many more people who will not _do_ than who
will not _believe_, but a large and growing number of young women are
questioning, doubting, and finally deciding that we can not know, and
that the faith of our childhood is without reasonable foundation. Some
of these will seek satisfaction for the spiritual nature in later
years in all sorts of “isms,” “ists,” and cults; some will drop all
definite terms of faith and find a measure of satisfaction in
educational work among the poor. Some will grow hard and cynical, lose
all interest in any visible form of religion, and give themselves over
to a good time. The doubters and questioners are often thoughtful,
sincere young people, with mental ability of the best sort and high
moral sense, and every Sunday-school teacher who has any influence
with them must put forth every possible effort to save them, for their
own sake and that of the world. For the world can ill afford to lose
its women of faith.

Occasionally, the girl who asks questions is not sincere in her desire
to find answers; she just wants to argue. Argument with such a girl is
not helpful. As a rule, doubts expressed grow stronger. In talking
with a girl who wants to tell all that she doubts, I have found it
helpful to lead her to make positive statements as to what she
believes, and urge her if she feels that she must part with her old
faith to start a new one with what she _does believe_. To treat her as
“wicked,” or to be “shocked” by her expression of unbelief is
exceedingly unwise. Positive teaching, free from dogmatism, along the
line where her doubts seem to lead will help to strengthen her, and
work with actual problems of a social and altruistic nature will act
as a good balance. Those who are at work with actual life problems
have invariably the strongest and broadest faith because they come
close to humanity and see its worth as well as its weakness, and in
the long run can not explain what they see without the presence of God
in the world, nor help the deep needs they realize without the aid of
Christ.

If the girl who questions is sincere, and is troubled and unhappy
because she can not believe, she deserves and should have the deepest
sympathy. The teacher to whom she comes for help is to be envied, for
she has the great privilege of an opportunity to help her _see_.

Oftentimes it is such a little thing that hides from her the whole
great range of Christian thought. I shall remember always the little
hill that hid my view of the White Mountains I had made such a
sacrifice to see. I had reached my stopping-place late at night, in
the rain, and when morning came with a flood of sunshine I went
eagerly forth to catch a first glimpse of the mountains. They were
nowhere in sight. A quiet country road, shaded by tall trees, and a
long, low range of hills was all I saw. Deep disappointment filled my
soul. I determined to go back. Before noon my companion climbed the
hill opposite the house and beckoned eagerly for me to follow. I shall
never forget what I saw! There they were, clear, blue, reaching up to
the bluer sky. How I loved them that summer,—touched with fire at
sunset, purple and gold in the deepening twilight, soft and far away
in the early morning mist; and when clouds shut them in, hid them from
sight, I knew they were there, calm, still, immovable! I had seen
them. Yet for a whole morning a little hill shut them from my vision,
and I had concluded that some one had deceived me, that from the
little town they could not be seen.

The greatest power of the teacher is that of beckoning to the pupil
that he may follow, helping him to climb the little hills, that he may
open his eyes and _see_. The mental questions must be answered as far
as possible. The difficulty in the way must be surmounted. The hill
must be climbed. If the teacher feels that she can not meet the task
herself, friends and books may help. The girl usually doubts the
miracles; doubts the deity of Christ, thinks the Bible is not
different from other books, asks the old, old question, “If a man die,
how can he live again?” She questions the existence of a God of power
in a world where so much evil and misery abound; says the foundation
of everything is gone, and that she is wretched and unhappy.

It seems to me a most helpful thing to make her feel that all
thoughtful men and women have at some time in their experience asked
these questions. Both the teacher and the girl must accept the fact of
mystery,—that there is much that we cannot hope to know, many laws of
mind and matter of which we know just a little, and many more of which
we know nothing. Mystery is a fact. That the spiritual sense can reach
into a realm where the mental faculties cannot follow, and that the
spirit of man can perceive what the mind alone cannot comprehend, we
have a right to believe.

When so much has been acknowledged the teacher may tell her pupil what
she personally believes about the disputed questions, and what the
scholars of the world believe on both sides of the question. The
teacher’s belief is often the strongest argument, especially if she
has met the questions, found an answer, and her own faith is positive,
sane and strong. But if the teacher meets the troubled, anxious mental
state of the girl with dogmatic argument, insisting upon the definite
phraseology of some creed, she will most certainly fail to help. What
we want to do is not to inculcate a creed, but to help a girl to come
into living, vital touch with her Maker, that she may live with
confidence and be a help in the world.

In time she will find the creed that expresses for her in the most
satisfactory way what she has come to believe.

One of the most keen and interesting girls I have ever met, a junior
in college at nineteen, said to me after stating all that she could
not believe and why,—“Can’t I believe that Christ was the finest man
that ever lived, and try to live and work in the world as he did? I
can’t believe anything else.” “Yes,” I said, “that is true, believe
that. I think he was _more_, but start there. Do all you have planned
to help the needy, but don’t forget to read again and again what he
said about himself and what those who have served the world most
fearlessly and faithfully say of him.”

Two years later at the conference she told me she had come to the
conclusion that “what he did and said and his present influence in the
world can’t be explained unless he was in a sense different from
ourselves, divine.” This was _her conclusion_, reached by thought and
study. It was worth much more than any insistence two years before
that she believe as I did.

The way to help most effectually the girl who doubts, so far as my
experience has gone, is to help her to see that she can start,
standing firmly on what she believes, and then to help her faith grow
by giving her work to do and by putting in her way books that give
constructive teachings. Then one may supply her with stories of those
who have lived what they believe, and if possible bring her into
contact with fine, sane men and women of strong faith who love and
enjoy life.

Sometimes all the doubts and questionings come because life is so hard
and seems so unfair and unjust. Then the troubled girl needs to know
just one thing—“God _is_ love”; and only the teacher who loves can
help her,—she will know how.

Nothing can so stimulate the teacher’s own faith as to be brought,
year after year, face to face with world-wide questions hurled at her
from the lips of girls in their later teens. She learns at last to
anticipate the time when doubts will trouble by giving during the
early teens definite constructive teaching that will strengthen faith
and deepen the spiritual sense.

The girl in her teens is a worshiper of the ideal, and the teacher’s
business is to furnish her with ideals so beautiful, so strong and so
desirable that with irresistible power they woo her until she is ready
to leave all and follow. If she is possessed by a great ideal nothing
is too difficult for her to do, no price is too high to pay in the
effort to realize it. Ideals are the things in life most real, for
they determine action.

In impressing high ideals upon mind and spirit the teacher of girls in
their teens has advantages over those of any other period. All nature
is ready to help, the wealth of emotion waits to be stirred to action,
the spirit waits to be led.

If the spirit of the teacher is to lead, it must itself be led. It
must be dominated by great ideals.

The girl in her teens needs a teacher whose deepest longings are not
all satisfied—then she understands. She needs a teacher who is not
afraid to let her emotions speak—who knows that the greatest deeds
possible to man have their birth in the emotions. She needs a teacher
who sees amid all the joys and real pleasures of the world, as well as
amid the petty cares and dark and puzzling problems which are our
common lot, the Spirit of her Creator working out in man for ultimate
good the great plan of which she is a part.

Such a teacher can open the eyes of her girls and help them to see the
Father for whom the human spirit is ever seeking—and will not be
satisfied until it finds.




CHAPTER V—THE SOCIAL SIDE


I have been spending the day with adolescence, surrounded by boys and
girls in their teens and young men and women just outside. It is now
the evening of Memorial Day, and I have spent most of the day at the
popular pleasure resort just outside the city. My companion, a young
woman just out of her teens, had taken her holiday to come to the
normal school to arrange for entrance in the fall. She has worked hard
for two years, saved her money, and now plans to take a full course at
the school to fit herself to become an expert teacher in China. She
wanted to spend the rest of the day with me and talk about it, and I
took her to W. ——, that we might enjoy the out-of-doors. We sat in a
secluded corner of the big open dining-room, and during dinner she
talked of China’s need, of the great opportunity,—hurled facts about
the darkness of China at me until I gazed at the animated encyclopædia
in astonishment. Her face glowed with enthusiasm; it is a sweet face,
girlish and eager, and I could but wonder as I looked at her how
China’s need had gotten such a hold upon her.

While she seemed for a few moments lost in thought, my eyes wandered
over the room crowded with youth. All sorts and conditions were there,
but all young. It was Memorial Day, but they had not waited to see the
short procession of those who still remain to us of the hundreds who
went out with their lives in their hands at the country’s bidding. The
procession and all it signifies meant little to them. They were jolly,
happy, light-hearted, rough and very crude, and yet—they were just the
ones who, if the country should call again, would answer; the boys
promptly, willingly, offering their lives, the girls laying their
hearts on the altar of their country’s need. But to-day was just a
holiday. At the table near us was a group of four, none over
seventeen. The discussion and final ordering of the dinner was most
interesting. They talked over prices, too, with great frankness,
“That’s too much,” and “we don’t need coffee, that will take ten cents
off for each of us.” I have seldom seen four people enjoy a dinner as
they did. The girls’ dresses manifested the effort to attain “the
latest thing,” and the boys were not behind. When they left the
dining-room and walked down toward the boat-house they tried to look
so unconcerned! How they had saved for this day! This one little day!
At every table were groups just as interesting. The grounds were
crowded with other groups, laughing and shouting and joking. The jokes
no one save themselves could appreciate. The skating rink was
crowded—the dancing pavilion—the open air theater—every incoming
trolley brought more intent upon having “a good time.” I forgot China
until a direct question brought me back. Here she was,—my eager,
intense, enthusiastic girl,—looking forward with joy to China with its
crushing weight of ignorance, its impossible language and its
almond-eyed people neither asking nor desiring to be helped! What has
made the difference between her and those all about me? Before I could
answer her question or my own, three automobiles passed, filled with
laughing girls and boys, all in their teens. Their faces were
different from those in the grove,—their laughter more musical,—the
automobiles bore their country’s flag, the girls wore flowers. I knew
some of the faces—it was a “house party,” and they were off for a
“good time.”

Suddenly it surged over me that this was but one little spot in the
great country—and the rush of the other thousands, the shop girls,
clerks, the office girls, the students, all in search of a good time
oppressed me, and before my mind hurried back to a Chinese
kindergarten, my heart cried, “Oh, Lord, how shall the world _play_
with real pleasure and profit?” Is _this_ the way? I heard no answer.
The problem is too big for me, yet I cannot let it alone, for the
world must play, and always the most eager players are young,—and
always the girl in her teens is the center of the game.

Man is social. He must have companionships and pleasures in common
with his kind. Only when physically deficient, mentally deformed,
abnormal, does he become anti-social. This is true all through life
and especially true in adolescence when nature is most keenly
conscious of elemental powers and passions.

It is true that the girl in her teens is often alone. Alone she dreams
her day-dreams, writes her poems, floods her imagination with all the
things that are to be. In common with all humanity she meets her
deepest experiences alone. Yesterday a girl of nineteen tried to tell
me of the happiness her engagement to a fine, strong man had brought
to her. She said, “all that it means _can’t_ be said.” Last week a
girl of eighteen tried to tell out all the loneliness and crushing
disappointment her mother’s death had brought, but she ended her
appeal for help with the old cry, “no one can really help, I’ve just
got to bear it.” Before the teens have passed so many girls learn that
great joy and great sorrow must be met alone.

But for the common life of the every day, man lives with others. He
can neither work alone nor play alone, and with adolescence comes the
realization of it sweeping into the life. “The gang,” “our crowd,”
“our set,” work and play together.

The girl who loves and seeks solitude continually is ill mentally,
physically, or spiritually, and needs watchful, sympathetic care,
which shall discover the cause of her morbidness and help her to
escape from it.

Environment fixes largely the companions of the girl, and her place in
the social scale predetermines to some extent how she shall play. If
she is in a home where the family is closely related to the church in
all departments of its active work and life, the church becomes her
natural social center. Its entertainments, suppers, young people’s
socials, etc., furnish the means for her amusement and the place where
she may form friendships. If she is a working girl boarding in a
strange city or living in a home in no way connected with the church,
unless the Y. W. C. A. through the gymnasium or other classes reaches
her, where shall she find her social center where she may enjoy the
society of other young people, form friendships and have a good time?
In summer the public parks answer that question. In winter, the
skating rink, “the dancing party,” the moving picture show.

If the girl lives in a happy home surrounded by wealth, together with
culture and refinement, her social life will be guided and guarded
during her teens and she will be helped to have a good time. If she be
that happiest of all girls, the one whose own home is the social
center, where music, games and fun abound, and where friends are
always welcome, she is safe. Such homes might solve the whole problem,
but there are not enough.

When the teacher looks seriously at the social side of her girls in
their teens and realizes the craving of the whole nature for
companionship, laughter and fun, she finds it hard to say “Don’t” even
to the things of which she does not personally approve, because she
must meet the question clear and frank, “What _can_ I do then?” That
question has been answered, so far as the church is concerned, only
here and there. Some splendid and successful attempts have been made
that give us hope for the future.

Most Sunday-school teachers of girls in their teens have awakened
recently to the fact that unless the demands of the social side be
satisfied in a sane, healthful way, the girl’s spiritual nature
suffers, and the mental and physical as well.

When once the teacher really sees it she can no longer be content to
meet the interested members of her class just an hour on Sunday, to
discuss the lesson of the day. The crowded parks, the trolleys, the
“parties,” the call of the great demanding whirl of amusements from
Sunday to Sunday, presses upon her soul. She learns how her girls
spend the week end and the evenings and then she throws herself, her
knowledge, her skill, her time, into the scales, hoping where she
finds girls in the danger zone to turn the balance in favor of clean,
safe, sane pleasure.

Any teacher willing to make a little investigation will be surprised
to learn how many of the girls enjoying the kind of amusements which
do not make for sound moral health, were at ten or twelve regular
members of the Sunday-school, and how many still come occasionally.

My observation the past few years of the social side of the girl in
her teens, and especially the girl who has left school, has made me
feel that if the opportunity to choose came to me as to Solomon, I
would rather have the knowledge and power to give the young people of
to-day sane, safe amusement than anything else I know.

The social side of the girl reveals itself not only in the desire to
have a good time, but in the deep and ardent friendships formed during
the teen period.

While she enjoys to the full the society of the group, the girl in her
teens invariably has a “dearest friend,” who shares her joys, sorrows
and confidences. This tendency becomes especially evident at sixteen
and becomes more marked at the latter part of the period.

These friendships may be the source of greatest blessings or may mean
the lowering of the whole tone of moral life. Both mother and teacher
need to observe carefully the formation of friendships and be sure to
encourage only the helpful ones. Public school teachers of experience
can all testify to the rapid changes in girls which so often follow
the development of a deep friendship.

I remember a girl of sixteen, dreamy, imaginative, and so much
interested in her boy companions that lessons, home interests, and
everything else were sacrificed. What to do with her, and what
interests to substitute, were questions that both mother and teacher
failed to solve. At a most opportune time a “new girl” moved into the
neighborhood and entered school. She was practical, attractive, a good
scholar, greatly interested in outdoor athletics. Because they were
neighbors, the two girls were thrown much together. The companionship
deepened into friendship. Soon the dreamy sixteen-year-old was playing
tennis on summer afternoons, and reading aloud in the hammock
afterward to rest. When winter came she suddenly decided that school
and study were worth while, brought up all her averages, and made up
her mind to try for college. Skating and the gymnasium made her a new
girl. And all this transformation, fortunately for her good, came
naturally and very rapidly through the influence of her companion. It
comes almost as quickly in the other direction. Nothing can be more
helpful to the shy, timid, self-conscious girl than the companionship
of one who will encourage her and help her take her place with others
in the social life of which she is a part.

Some of the bitterest suffering known to girls in their teens comes
because they are “left out” and must go “alone.” The misery of being
left to oneself is registered in that familiar sentence, “Oh, I don’t
want to go alone!” The girl in her teens needs a “chum,” a “best
friend,” a companion, and anything that the teacher can do to aid in
the formation of helpful friendships is worth while, for the friends
loyal and true through the teen age are the ones who in later years,
when the need is deeper and friendships are tested, stand by. That
there should be some way and place in which, surrounded by a Christian
environment that makes for righteousness, girls in their late teens
and just outside, who have no homes, or homes only in name, can meet
and learn to know young men of the right sort is evident to all who
have even considered the matter.

When the Great Teacher was here no need escaped his notice. All that
he taught and did was in response to _need_. Many of the teachers of
to-day are earnestly asking how far they can follow him in this great
principle of his life.

When as teachers, interested in what we call the deepest things in the
girl’s life, we are sometimes impatient with her light-heartedness,
with the giggles and boisterous fun and “silliness” of the early
teens, and the social tactics and sophistries of the later period, let
us remember that the natural, healthy girl is “whole.” She is body,
mind and spirit, and all three together make her a social being. All
three speak in the passion to enjoy,—to seek pleasure. And the teacher
of girls in their teens is as truly in the service of the living God
when she boards the trolley car and accompanies her girls to the lake
for a picnic supper after a day of hard work or study as when teaching
them on Sunday the splendid principles that governed Paul’s life. She
just as truly serves, some cold, rainy, February afternoon as, with
two of the girls she wants to know better, she cuts out red hearts to
decorate the room for the valentine social to which the members of her
class have each invited a girl not specially interested in the
Sunday-school as when she talks over on Sunday, “Serve the Lord with
gladness,” for on Sunday she is telling them how to serve and on
Tuesday she is showing them how through her own action. And they
understand and are more willing to listen as she strives to impress
upon mind and heart the facts and ideals that shall keep them steady,
pure and true amidst all the distractions and temptations of the
world’s good time.

If the teacher once catches a glimpse of the significant fact that a
girl can not play wrong and pray right, a new realization of the
importance of the social side will stir her to action and send her out
to seek help from all who are willing to aid in the solution of the
world problem, of how to satisfy the social nature in ways that make
for character.




CHAPTER VI—HER RELATION TO THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL


That the Sunday-school has no relation whatever to vast numbers of
girls in their teens is a fact apparent to any one interested in the
girlhood of that period. And it is a fact of tremendous significance.
It means that at the time when the religious sense is keenly
responsive, when the mental faculties are alert, when the physical is
asserting itself with all its power for good or evil, the girl in
large numbers is not getting definite, systematic instruction from the
best book of ethics, morals and religion that the world has known. She
is not being brought face to face each week with questions that have
to do with her own welfare, and that of the world, nor is she being
led to think definitely of her personal relation to the church and its
work for mankind. Unless she is in some way led to think along these
lines all the myriad little interests that call to her from the
outside world slowly crowd out the more real and uplifting thoughts
and influences.

Every one, even in mature life, needs to come regularly into contact
with influences that tend to lift him up and woo him away from the
domination of the petty and material, and even more is it needed
during the years when character is taking definite form.

No girl can afford to lower her ideals or even to allow them to become
tarnished. Life apart from contact with religion in some form seems to
do that. Men in later years seem often to recover the ideals lost
during their teens; women seldom do.

So even a glance at the problem shows one that the first thing for the
Sunday-school to do is to establish a relationship between itself and
the multitudes of girls in their teens.

The best way to do this, as any teacher knows, is to keep a strong
hold on the girls who have been regular in attendance up to twelve
years of age. With these girls as a nucleus, it is easier to make
definite effort to gain new members and to make the class so
attractive that they will stay.

When the teacher has resolved to make the effort to reach out for the
girl who is leaving the Sunday-school in large numbers, the clear and
challenging question, “What makes a class attractive to the girl in
her teens?” immediately presents itself.

In the first place, the Sunday-school as a whole makes a great
difference to the girl in her teens. She likes enthusiasm, the
impression that the school is popular with its students, that
indefinite atmosphere which makes her know that pupils and teachers
alike enjoy the hour and come because they want to. A superintendent
who is popular with young people, who is thoroughly likable, is almost
indispensable in the teen age. The Sunday-school choir with
fortnightly rehearsals, if impossible to meet oftener, is a great
help, and after a year or two of training will do splendid work. I
have in mind a school where the organized choir meets only once a
month. The music for the next few Sundays is practised; those who are
to be soloists or those to sing the duets are chosen; light
refreshments are served by the committee from the choir, and a most
enjoyable evening spent. The regular attendance of the choir at
Sunday-school has been remarkable, and a number of new members gained.
The same methods can be used with a Sunday-school orchestra when there
are enough members who play the various instruments.

The girl in her teens enjoys and responds to the well-arranged program
when the prayers, the responses and the whole order of service are
dignified and impressive. Just watch the college girl and her younger
sister in the preparatory school at chapel and you can read her
response in her face. She enjoys variety, too, and the program which
remains in use so long that after three years’ absence she can come
back and go through it exactly as it was when she left, is not the
kind likely to appeal to her.

We have seen in our previous studies that the girl in her teens is in
love with real life. She likes people, and the Sunday-school lesson
must discuss real people and present problems if it is to deeply
interest her.

I was present recently in a class of twelve girls about sixteen years
old. Nine members of the class were supposed to be “heathen” and three
girls were to tell any one of the parables as if for the first time to
these people, anxious and curious to learn of the Christian faith. The
interest was very real. After the telling of each parable the class
discussed it and what it would mean to a people hearing it for the
first time. “The Sowing of the Seed,” “The Good Samaritan,” and “The
Ten Talents” were told. At the close the teacher told very vividly of
an experience of a dear friend of hers who sat one day in the great
plaza of a Mexican city, and told the story of the lost coin to a
Mexican woman who wore a bracelet of old and curious coins. The
account of the response of this Mexican who heard the story for the
first time made a great impression upon me, as upon every member of
the class. The teacher then appointed three girls for the next week to
tell any one of the experiences of Jesus on his preaching tours as
they would tell it to a group of factory girls who had neglected
church for years and almost forgotten how to pray. Several protested
that such girls would not listen, and the discussion as to their
needs, what they had to help them live pure, true lives, what had made
them careless and indifferent, was brought to a close by the quiet
question of the teacher, “Do these girls need Christ or his teaching?”
They said, “yes,” with conviction, and in answer she said, “Then there
must be a way to tell what he said and thought so that they will
listen; perhaps next Sunday one of our girls will find the way, and I
have a most interesting story to tell of a splendid factory girl who
herself found a way.”

That lesson did so many things for that class of girls. It made them
think. First they had to be able to tell the stories Christ told. The
class in discussion had to think of the adaptability of the story to
the people who needed to hear it, and of all it could mean to them.
They felt the joy of the one who had the privilege of telling it to
the Mexican for the first time. They said themselves that the great
army of girls in our factories need Christ. They were to think for a
week on how his words might be brought to them. The lesson was left
with anticipation for next week’s story. It was a type of what every
lesson should be. It connected the past and present; it touched life
in their immediate surroundings and in the uttermost parts of the
world; it gave opportunity for original expression and it led to
discussion. It reached some conclusions. It appealed to the
imagination and emotions and closed with a desire on the part of the
pupils to talk more, and know more, and think more.

Perhaps in years to come we shall have good courses of lessons, six or
eight weeks in length, which will help the teacher to do just these
things. Courses which shall deal with church history for six or eight
weeks, then with missions, with charities, with the history of the
Bible, with the definite teachings of the New Testament and their
relation to society to-day, dealing always with _life_ and always with
Christ as the great helper and redeemer of man in his struggles to
live aright. While we wait for such courses the individual teacher
must attempt, with the material she has, to make real and vital
connections with life, broaden the pupil’s horizon and increase her
desire for knowledge. New courses and better lesson material, either
in public school or Sunday-school, never come through folding one’s
arms and spending one’s time criticizing the material at hand, but by
using it, changing it, adapting and experimenting with it until
something is found which more nearly meets the need. Any teacher now
reading this chapter may be the one to discover through her own
experience just the material for which teachers of the girl in her
teens are waiting. That is the reason every one may teach with courage
and joy.

It makes little difference where one starts in the discussion of
public-school or Sunday-school problems, he always comes back to the
teacher. After all has been said, the teacher is the greatest force in
establishing and maintaining a close relationship between the girl in
her teens and the Sunday-school. “Ways and means” are necessary and to
critics of the so-called “machinery” of the Sunday-school, I have only
one answer—unless I can get a pupil to come, I can’t teach him. Absent
and irregular pupils receive no benefit even from the finest of
teachers, and any legitimate “means” by which a pupil may be induced
to come, and a regularity of attendance be established, we have a
right to welcome and use. But after the pupil has entered and become
regularly enrolled it is the teacher who is the stimulating, guiding
and holding power. To analyze the charm of personality which attracts
and holds the girl in her teens is impossible, but there are certain
things which the teacher must do that we may discuss.

She must remember that the girl in her teens has “grown up,” and that
she is very conscious of it. One must be more her friend than teacher.
In the earlier years every Sunday-school teacher really interested in
her pupils calls freely in the home. When the girl reaches the teen
age, the teacher must ask permission to call. “May I call on your
mother?” often opens the way for a special invitation, or at least
gives the girl an opportunity to make the invitation cordial or to let
it be known that for some reason she prefers not to have her teacher
call. I remember one girl of seventeen who never gave me any
encouragement when I suggested calling, and I respected her wishes.
One day when she was very ill, the mother asked me to come. The girl
had always dressed well, was intelligent and refined, and would have
been supposed to come from a family of comfortable means. I found it
to be a home of real poverty, where the father, a nervous wreck
struggling with diabetes, was unable to work regularly, and the mother
was obliged to assist. Even with the seventeen-year-old girl giving
every cent she could spare, it was a hard struggle. The girl was proud
and reticent; she had not wanted me to know, and I was glad I had not
come until she was willing. That day when she was ill and discouraged
she was willing—she really needed me.

There are many times when for reasons akin to this or others entirely
different but equally good, a girl prefers to have her teacher see and
know her apart from her home. Every woman who understands girlhood in
the later teens respects such a wish.

The teacher’s home should, if possible, be always open to the girls
and they should feel free to come. Sometimes it is not possible and
then the cosiest corner in the smallest church parlor should be
available.

As the girl approaches the later teens the Sunday-school class should
become more and more a place of training for service. It has been my
experience that after seventeen many girls prefer to work in
Sunday-school rather than to remain as pupils. If the girls express
such a desire, or show particular willingness to act as substitutes,
to help in the music of the elementary departments, or to tell stories
to the beginners, such a desire should be recognized and an
opportunity given a girl to test herself under supervision. The
Sunday-school should be constantly preparing assistant
superintendents, directors of music, secretaries and teachers.
Material for the teachers’ training-class is found in classes in the
later teens.

Some of the most loyal, responsive and successful teachers of pupils
from nine to twelve, I have found in the boys and girls of the later
teens. While they lack mature judgment and discretion, they have
enthusiasm and desire to succeed in any undertaking. If the
Sunday-school is constantly training such helpers as assistants, and
testing them as substitutes, then the changes that are bound to come
in the teaching force of any Sunday-school are not so disastrous, for
some one will be ready to supply the need.

As has been hinted in previous studies, the Sunday-school should lend
valuable assistance in making the church a social center for the young
people who need it. To be of real vital interest to the girl, the
Sunday-school must touch her everyday life. It does that through the
social side of its work. The organized class giving socials,
entertainments, enjoying lectures and music, picnics, trolley parties,
skating or camping has a decided influence for good on all the
members. I know of one such organized class of girls eighteen and
nineteen years old which met three times a month for an entire year.
They met one week “for fun,” the next to “go somewhere,” or “to hear a
talk,” or “to sew and read, and talk if we want to,” and the third for
a “sing” to which they invited members of the boys’ classes. All these
meetings were popular, well attended, and have meant a strong united
class with a splendid spirit.

The girl in her teens needs the Sunday-school because of the help and
uplift which its teachings are bound to bring to her. Even if she
belongs to a class in its early teens which is given over to the
giggles, to wandering thoughts, to all sorts of asides in more or less
noticeable whispers, to the continual admixtures of the Bible lessons
and the events of the week just passed or to come,—even though as is
often the case with the American girl, she is thoughtless enough to
forget to be either reverent or courteous, still it pays for her to
come. She gets something,—often more than we think.

And the Sunday-school needs the girl in her teens. It needs her
devotion, her enthusiasm and eagerness, her close touch with both the
real and ideal in life, that it may keep its balance, stay in the real
world of need, and not walk far afield by paths of theory. The
Sunday-school has awakened to its need of the girl, and now at its
door lies the task of making her feel more and more her need of it.




CHAPTER VII—HER RELATION TO THE CHURCH


The girl in her teens, in common with all humanity, needs the upward
pull. Fresh air, suitable clothing, nourishing food, so desirable in
all stages of her development, become, we have seen, an absolute
necessity during her teens. If not supplied, her whole future is
doomed to pay the penalty; and unless during the period of the
awakening and strengthening of ideals, a steady, uplifting,
spiritualizing force has a definite influence upon the rapidly
changing and developing forces of her nature, the chances are that her
whole future will pay the price neglect always demands. The steady,
upward pull is a necessity.

There are so many things in life that furnish the downward pull. Even
the more fortunate girl, who lives in her own home and spends the
greater part of each day in the enlarging atmosphere of a good public
school, feels the downward pull. In the most carefully selected of
select schools, the girl, though guarded every moment, feels the
downward pull of the petty, selfish and mean. The girl in her teens
hard at work among the world’s toilers is painfully conscious of it in
one or more of its many forms.

In the struggle between the higher and the lower—the upward and the
downward pull—humanity finds its growth and development. If there is
no struggle there is no strength. The girl in her teens does not know
all this—her teacher does, and puts forth all her effort to strengthen
the upward pull.

As we study and observe the girl in her development one question
persistently follows us. To what shall we look for this upward pull?
There are many answers: the home, the school, friends, good
environment, the church. With the last we are especially concerned.

Even the most open and avowed enemy of the church of to-day would not
hesitate to place it definitely on the side of the upward pull. Its
history, teachings and ideals, like its spires, point upward. It says
reverently and steadily to a world of busy men so much engaged in the
rush for mere things that they find it easy to forget all else, two
simple, tremendously significant words—GOD IS. It says persistently,
above the struggle for power through possessions,—“Truth,
Righteousness, Justice, Love, these alone mean happiness,” and at some
time during his progress from childhood to old age man stops to
listen. The most natural and effective time to stop is during the
early teens.

Of course the church, being made up of humanity, has its weaknesses.
As an upward pulling force it is not perfect. Nothing is. Its most
loyal friends are the ones most conscious of its faults and failures.
Its members feel its weakness more keenly than the outside world
possibly can, just as the members of a family feel more deeply than
the outside world the weakness and failures of its members in any
particular.

But in spite of its errors of creed, its lack, in many cases, of
authority and initiative, and its temptation to shun real problems,
yet the members do feel the power of its upward pull, and the
community in general is conscious of it.

To place the girl in her teens where she will feel most strongly the
lifting power of the church is the business of her parents and
teachers.

In the average community the girl has been more or less in contact
with the church from her earliest years. Her estimation of its value,
its purpose and power, has been built up through the years by what she
has heard parents, companions and teachers say of it. It is a refuge
for the weak, a company of people who think themselves better than
others, a respectable moral organization through which men climb to
higher social planes, a necessary guardian of good in the community;
or, the visible expression of the religion of Jesus Christ, the
highest and most potent force in the world to-day for the conversion
and uplifting of mankind. Her opinion is in accordance with the
general opinion of those in her immediate environment.

As she approaches her teens, if her parents are not church people,
through the influence of the Sunday-school of which she is a member
she usually becomes a more or less regular attendant upon the services
of the church. If her teacher is wise she does all in her power to
establish the habit of church attendance. If the pastor has a thought
and a word for the younger members of his congregation the girl,
interested and helped, responds according to her temperament.

About the time she enters her teens, if she is a Sunday-school girl,
she has had, through Decision Day or in answer to the direct question
of her pastor or teacher, the opportunity of saying, “I choose to be a
Christian.” If her teaching has been careful and wise she will know
what being a Christian should mean to a girl of thirteen, and she will
make the choice gladly and of her own free will. Before she is sixteen
she will have met the question of her direct relation to the church.
Shall she join it in its work in the world? If “joining the church” is
made the simple, sincere matter that it really is, the average girl
responds easily and earnestly. Only those who year after year have
helped girls from fourteen to sixteen decide to take the step can know
the genuine, loving, devoted spirit in which they come to their
decisions.

Through the weeks of instruction that follow the decision, when the
girl learns, under her pastor’s or teacher’s direction, the history of
the church, the development of her own denomination, and the
statements of its creed, the work the church has done, and is actually
doing for the poor and outcast, the rich and careless, her admiration
for it deepens, and all the love and devotion of her girl heart goes
out to Him whose wonderful life and sacrifice have inspired ordinary
men and women to live in the world as real Christians.

After such instruction, when the Sunday comes on which she is to
publicly unite with the church she _knows what she is doing_ and
_why_. She knows as fully as any one can _what she believes_, for
belief is a growth, and life and experience always modify it. The
mystery of the communion service is to her as clear as it is to any of
us, and she prays as truly and sincerely as the oldest and wisest.

How much of uplift to her whole life her act has been can be known
only to those who year after year have walked home with her after the
service, received her notes so full of joy, and watched her effort to
live aright in the weeks that follow.

So far in the relation of the church to the religious and spiritual
development of the girl the steps have been successive, natural, and
easy, but now the hard part comes.

She is on Monday, after uniting with the church, the same girl that
she was on Saturday before doing so. If she had a bad temper, she has
it still; if she was easily tempted to be insincere, selfish,
sarcastic, careless, unkind, the characteristics are with her still.
She has simply placed herself on the side of the upward pull, and
every one of us who comes in contact with her should watch the
struggle against the downward pull never with condemnation and
criticism, but always with sympathy and assistance.

Here is where the church so often fails. Having joined the church she
is ever after expected to be good. “The girl has joined the church,
all is done,” is a false and fatal conclusion.

I have been watching with real interest a young girl who, after a most
happy engagement, a beautiful wedding, a delightful continental trip,
is learning to live in the prosaic every day. She had forgotten that
it is always there waiting for us. In her great uplift and happiness
little things had not made her as angry as before. But she found out
what could happen when “Harry” forgot to order the cream for the
dinner party at which all her friends were present for the first time
in her new home. After her outburst of anger she was so discouraged
that she was tempted to think the whole thing was a mistake, that she
could not have loved him, and she could never be happy again. She had
not reckoned with herself. The plain details of everyday living reveal
one to himself. He finds he cannot live in the clouds, and that the
art of living harmoniously and finely in the valley must be learned,
and it takes time.

The girl in her teens after uniting with the church and experiencing
the uplift and stimulus must come back to the every day. Like my young
friend, she so often thinks that she will “never feel angry again.”
She does, and with the failure to control herself or the quick
yielding to her special temptation comes the feeling of utter
discouragement. She is not good enough to be a member of the church,
and it was a mistake. She needs help—her mother or teacher—to make her
see that even a deep love can not in a moment overcome a quick temper,
nor uniting with the church overcome the habit of the unkind word and
selfish act. It will give her comfort and courage to know that one
becomes a real Christian by successive steps, and it will take all her
life to accomplish the task.

The first thing a young member of the church needs to help her become
what we want her to be, a sane, natural, happy girl, interested in,
enjoying and loving all the things that belong to the normal girl in
her teens, is work.

She must have something to do, for unless the emotions are given a
sane, legitimate outlet, she may come to the fatal conclusion that
religion is a thing apart from life, or there may follow a lowering of
ideals, or the morbid introspection common to girls in their teens,
but which the Christian should escape.

So we must direct her thoughts from herself to her companions. It is
she who can establish a bond of interest between the other girl and
the church. She can bring the other girl under its influence, and help
her see what it stands for in the world.

“No,” said a girl to me at a conference, “it isn’t any of the
speakers, or the books, or sermons that have interested me; it is just
Edith and Alice. They are such splendid girls and they just love the
church and all the work they are doing. They are having such good
times and are truly happy. I want to understand it. Whatever it is I
want it.” I have heard scores of girls say it in varying phraseology.
One girl influences another more than we can, so we may set her at
work with her companions.

But that is not work enough—and it is too indefinite. She must have a
part in the mission work, the social work, be interested in the sick
and unfortunate, and learn now that the business of the church is to
care about the lonely women, the toiling women and their children, the
little, narrow, self-centered women, and those who find it hard to be
good, just as its Lord and Master cared. Nothing is more encouraging
to those who love the church than a large number of bright,
attractive, natural girls, on whose hearts and lives this great truth
is beginning to make an impression which must find expression.

The second thing necessary to the right development of the girl in her
teens is ideal Christian women in the church of which she is a member.
The women of the church, from those a little older than herself up to
those who for many years have been its support, must show to her what
it means to be a Christian woman in the church, community and home.
Alas for those girls who see that it means only attendance upon the
services of the church when perfectly convenient, and when minister
and choir are entirely satisfactory! Alas for those girls who see that
it means little more than a comfortable sense of respectability and
social opportunity!

Fortunate are those girls who in their early teens see among the
church members scores of sane, true, large-hearted women interested in
every need, anxious to help, and willing to serve in every way that
time and means will permit.

The church of whose women the girl in her teens, watching with her
keen eye, can say, in her ardent way, “I’d rather be like Mrs. ——,
than any one I know—she is perfectly lovely,” is of real value as an
uplifting, vitalizing force in the world.

The girl in her teens needs the church to furnish the upward pull and
there is need of greater effort in every line and by every member to
bring her into contact with it.

The church needs the girl in her teens with all the intensity of her
power of devotion and genuineness of her love; with all the strength
of her emotions so easily turned under right conditions toward the
best things in life.




CHAPTER VIII—HER RELATION TO THE BIBLE


One beautiful June Sunday I stood waiting for my car at the transfer
corner, thinking about the Sunday problem and watching the crowd
hurrying away to the parks and the lakes, when a most interesting
group of girls passed. There were six or eight of them about sixteen
years old, and in their light dresses, their fresh, sweet faces half
hidden by hats that were “too dear for anything,” they made a picture
good to see.

They were evidently returning from Sunday-school, for most of them
carried Bibles, and, as I watched them out of sight, I was plunged
into a wilderness of questions as to what that wonderful old Book,
written in the dim, hazy past under foreign skies, in languages almost
forgotten, could possibly have to do with gay, happy, laughing
girlhood—in the midst of the things of to-day. And I knew that to the
majority of girls in their teens it means little. Most of them own it,
respect it, and feel a certain reverence for what it says, but it
plays little part in their everyday lives.

The average girl in her teens uses it more or less in the preparation
of her Sunday-school lesson. She hears certain portions of it read
without comment in opening exercises in school; in a comparatively few
instances it is read in the morning or evening at home. That is
practically all that most girls have to do with the Book whose
teachings have so largely made possible the wealth of happiness of the
girlhood of to-day.

How to bring the girl in her teens into touch with this Book of books
so that it shall exert upon her individual life its wonderful power of
transforming, purifying, and strengthening character is a problem.

But those who have been trying hard to meet it have learned some
things. They have found out that the girl in her teens knows little of
the history of the Book, and that when she is told the story of how we
got our Bible she is intensely interested. Its wonderful history, from
the time before it lay in parchment rolls on monastery shelves and on
through the centuries until it reached the hands of ordinary men and
women, and the period of their struggle to learn to read that they
might know what it said, stirs the imagination and awakens a host of
questions that lead to knowledge.

When she begins to understand what it has cost to preserve the book,
how not only men and women, but boys and girls, have loved it and died
rather than betray it or disobey its commands, it becomes to her a new
book, worthy of her study.

But the history of the Book, although it is necessary and does deeply
interest the girl and increase her respect for it, is by no means all
we want her to have.

The fragmentary knowledge of Abraham and David, Esther, Ruth and Paul
which she has gained in her childhood must be supplemented now by the
knowledge of great periods and what the world learned through them.
She needs to be shown what the Psalms and some of the chapters of
Isaiah and the other prophets have meant to the literature, music and
art of the world.

I remember with pleasure the class of girls sixteen and seventeen
years old who studied the books of Job and Jonah with me one year. The
dramatic element held us, and Job and his friends, Jonah and his
struggle, became very real to us. Two years afterward one of the
girls, in talking about references to the Bible in literature, said to
me, “Well, when they refer to Jonah or Job I’m safe, for those two
books I shall never forget.” She can grasp a book as a whole, remember
it and enjoy it.

But the study of the Bible under guidance and with every means used to
make it interesting and helpful is not all that we want for our girl.
She must be led to find in the Bible personal inspiration and help.

Experience so far has taught me that unless the girl in her teens is a
member of a Christian Endeavor Society or kindred organization, or a
member of the church, she is not likely to read the Bible for herself,
nor is it easy to interest her to do so. She may enjoy poetry and
really good literature, and be an omnivorous reader, yet never read
the Bible. She has often told me frankly that she really does not like
to read it because it is not interesting and she does not understand
it.

We understand her feeling perfectly. The phraseology is unfamiliar,
and her knowledge is not broad enough to help her with the context;
and to do anything voluntarily with regularity, unless it is
absolutely necessary, is not easy for the average girl in her teens.
But every one interested in the future development of the girl’s
personal religious life is anxious to establish now, in her early
teens, the habit of reading every day the words that have brought new
life and salvation to the world.

It needs no argument to show that any girl is safer, finer, and less
easily led into dangerous byways of thought and action if in beginning
the day, or when it closes, she takes time to read “Blessed are the
pure in heart: for they shall see God,” “Do unto others as ye would
that they should do unto you,” or the story of the Good Samaritan, the
healing of the blind, the parables, the thirteenth of First
Corinthians, or, “If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while
he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man’s
religion is vain,” or the next verse, with its clear-cut definition so
plain that any girl can understand.

Through these and the other words of the New Testament she is coming
daily into touch with the deepest, most fundamental truths to which
men have ever listened. More than that, she is coming through these
words into touch with Christ. No girl can read day after day the words
he spoke or the record of his works of compassion and love, the story
of his patient, brave endurance of the cross, his faith that the
disciples he loved would carry on his mission, without becoming a
finer type of girl. And if after reading she bows her head for a
moment only, and sincerely prays for strength to do right all through
the day, or when the day is over, asks for pardon for what she has
done amiss, then we need not fear that she will go far wrong on her
way through life. One may be insincere under many circumstances, but
one is rarely insincere when, alone, at the beginning or close of the
day he reads the words of that Book, and prays. So we, who long for
the best for our girl in her teens, are willing to do anything in our
power to help her establish the habit of sincere reading of the
teachings of Christ, and of genuine prayer for strength to live them
out every day of her life.

Oftentimes such little things help in forming the habit. I know of one
teacher successful in reaching the secret recesses of girls’ hearts,
who, with three of her fourteen-year-old girls, read every night for a
year the same Bible chapters, she assigning them one week in advance.
After they read the short selections they prayed for one another and
the members of the class not Christians. Just how the prayers of those
girls for their friends could or did affect their lives none of us can
understand, but that they did have a definite moulding influence on
the lives of the girls themselves and their relation to other girls
was plainly evident.

I know of one impulsive, imaginative, sixteen-year-old girl who formed
the habit of reading, while retiring, a chapter or more from the weak,
sentimental, but nevertheless fascinating, love stories which just
then were her delight. She found it hard to go to sleep, and often lay
for hours in a highly excited emotional state, going over and over the
words of the hero and heroine.

At Christmas, an older girl whom she greatly admired gave her a Year
Book having a Bible verse at the top of each page, followed by
quotations or forceful words of explanation. She asked her young
friend to read it the very last thing every night, and underline with
pencil anything she thought especially fine or true, and put a
question mark beside anything she did not understand, and every few
weeks they would look it over together. The sixteen-year-old decided
to learn the Bible verses. Often she looked up the reference in the
Bible. She faithfully underlined, questioned, and went to bed with
some of the finest thoughts in literature filling her mind. Any one
who heard her testimony, while in college, as to what that year’s
reading meant to her might be almost tempted to present year books to
all girls in their teens.

Another very earnest young teacher, in love with girls, purchased for
her class cheap New Testaments and small unruled blank books. She
assigned a topic for a month’s reading, such as faith, love, courage,
justice, and asked the girls to cut from the Testament all verses on
that subject, and paste them under the proper headings. The result was
a group of girls reading every night on the assigned topic, and at the
end of the month able to read from their blank books all that Christ
and the apostles had to say on that subject. Many of the girls added
quotations and poems referring to the special subject, thus enlarging
their own conception of it.

The girls valued their blank books highly, and exhibited them with
satisfaction. The teacher did not seem especially proud of the books,
but exceedingly pleased that the class had grown familiar with so many
of the verses. She had a right to feel gratified with her work, for
she was helping them to become acquainted with the Book, just as I
help my girls in their teens in school to become familiar with the
encyclopædia—by sending them to it repeatedly, until they form the
habit of consulting it.

That many girls in their teens are steadied and helped through hard
experiences by the words of comfort and encouragement which they find
in the Bible any teacher of experience in Sunday-school work knows.

I am looking now at the picture of the sweet, strong face of a girl of
seventeen. She is hard at work helping support the family. The father
has tried many times to reform and let drink alone, and as many times
failed. The girl can hardly endure the life at home, yet for the sake
of the younger children she must stay. Recently, when I told her how
much I admired her, she said, “It has seemed this year as if I
couldn’t keep on. I can’t tell you how much two verses on my calendar
have helped me. I keep saying them over and over, ‘I will never leave
thee, nor forsake thee,’ and ‘Fear not, I will help thee.’”

Another girl, struggling to overcome the habit of exaggeration which
has been a characteristic of her family for generations, said to me
one day, “I think so often of that verse, ‘With God all things are
possible.’ If it weren’t for that I would give up, for just as I think
I am improving I fail again, and it seems as if I never could tell
things as they are.”

I have found many girls in their teens lonely, discouraged,
misunderstood, or in the presence of great sorrow, turning to the
words of the Book, and really finding help and comfort.

If, then, the girl in her teens can be taught something of the history
of the Bible,—the languages in which it has been written, the methods
by which it was compiled and translated, and finally printed,—so that
she will not half believe that in some mysterious way it dropped down
from heaven, or else never even ask where it came from; if she can be
taught that its men and women were real and lived under real
conditions in a real world; if she can know something of their
struggles, defeats and victories, and learn to love their psalms and
poems; if she can be led to see something of their growth and
development as they waited for the Christ to come, then the Bible will
be to her a real book, not a fetish to be worshiped afar off.

And if she can be led to seek in the Gospels and letters of the New
Testament help and inspiration to live honestly and sincerely, then
the Bible will become a tremendous force for righteousness in her
daily life.

When she meets the hard things of life or the temptations of leisure a
girl so taught and trained will have something to help her; and such a
girl, as she enters college and takes up critical study of the Book,
will have nothing to fear.

The secret of the marvelous influence of the Old Testament on human
life lies in three short words,—“And God said,” and the secret of the
marvelous transforming power of the New Testament lies in one word,
“Christ”—“Christ”—“Christ.” When the girl in her teens opens daily to
read for herself what that Book has to say of the leadings of Jehovah
and the teachings of Christ, she is on the road to safety,—therefore
the work of every teacher is to help her to open it.




CHAPTER IX—HER RELATION TO THE EVERYDAY


The girl in her teens, although she is able now and then through her
imagination to transfer herself to a land of day-dreams, where all she
desires is hers, for the most part is obliged to live in the everyday,
and often she finds it hard.

But she is young—and one may always hope when in her teens. If she is
ill, health may come in a few weeks, a month, a year at most. If she
works hard, she may always hope for a “better place with more money,”
or by and by, just in the future a little way, a happy home of her own
where she will have everything she wants.

If she is struggling for an education, the joy of what she will be
able to do some day sustains her. If she is a care-free girl with no
burdens, one whose parents give her every advantage and strive to make
her girlhood happy, life is one great joy and the future an even more
wonderful dream.

But these girls, every one of them is obliged to live in the ordinary
world, and we who realize it must so train them that when they meet it
in reality they will be able to live happily.

One reason why there is so much misery and unhappiness in home life
to-day is because the girl in her teens is not trained to live. Even
those who love her most say, “Oh, she’s young yet, there’s time
enough.” Meantime habits are formed and when the “time” comes
effective training is not possible. In spite of hopes, castles,
day-dreams, most girls are destined to live amid the commonplaces of
life, and unless we prepare them, many will fail to learn that

    “The trivial round, the common task
    Will furnish all we ought to ask;
      Room to deny ourselves, a road
      To bring us daily nearer God,”

and so insure our happiness.

The Sunday-school is limited of course in what it can do to guide the
girl in the everyday, so many other agencies enter into her training,
and yet we have seen that what we teach on Sunday must influence her
on Wednesday as she settles some question, or we have not really
helped her.

As we try to plan how we may best help her to live, we ourselves meet
the question, “What, after all, do we want her to be in this world of
the everyday?”

It is a little hard to answer, we want so much for her, and yet it can
all be summed up in one sentence, “We want her to be comfortable to
live with.”

When we stop to think of what a flood of blessing would come to this
old world if all the girls now in their teens were comfortable to live
with, and will be as they develop into full womanhood, we know no
effort should be spared to make them so.

If the girl in her teens is comfortable to live with she will be
content in the place where she is. She will have that sane
satisfaction which is not apathy but which makes the best of what it
has till something better can be found.

Very early in her teens the girl begins to pencil upon her face the
first tiny lines which in later years, grown deep and heavy, will mark
her discontent. There are so few faces that show their owners have
learned to be content.

A sixteen-year-old girl friend of mine the other day said in a
discouraged way, “Well, I wish Frances’ mother felt differently about
their home. Her mother is such a lovely cook, and their house is neat
and pretty, too, but she will never let Frances have any of the girls
to dinner because they haven’t a maid. She wouldn’t let even _me_ go
upstairs to Frances’ room, and I know it must be so pretty by the way
she describes it. It is too bad; we just love her, and we could have
such good times. She can’t accept our invitations very often because
her mother won’t let her entertain us. It is just too bad.”

The girl was right. It was “too bad” to deprive Frances of the society
of these girls, who, though they came from homes where more money was
expended, would have so enjoyed her simple hospitality.

Although not meaning to do it, her mother is teaching Frances to place
wrong values upon things, and her life will be narrowed and made more
and more unhappy because the living-room is small, and the floor not
of hard wood, but painted around the outside of the rug, and she will
come to believe that happiness consists of possessions. When she
marries, like thousands of other girls she will be unhappy unless her
own new home is perfect in equipment from the start, she will want the
new, “up-to-date” things faster than her husband’s salary can supply
them, and the long line of misery that follows may easily be hers.

If, instead, her mother could demonstrate that a neat, clean, and
therefore attractive home is a fit place in which to entertain any
friend by welcoming her daughter’s friends for a good time, how
quickly for that girl things would assume their right places in the
scale of importance. We can help her to be happy and content by
showing her in what very simple ways good times may be had.

If the girl in her teens grown to womanhood is to be comfortable to
live with she must be trained to be kind. Kindness is born in
unselfishness, and if we expect her to be unselfish, the days of her
teens must be her training days. She must be carefully guarded from
daily association with women who speak cynically of life, and shielded
from close contact with those whose conversation is invariably the
criticism of their neighbors. She must be led to let her heart
speak—the heart is rarely unjust and seldom unkind. Her thoughts must
be continually turned, as were those of Frances Willard and Alice
Freeman Palmer, toward her neighbors in need, until a world-sympathy
is born in her, and the joy of helping makes her keen to help. The
girl to whose lips almost involuntarily spring the words “Let me help
you” will not find it so easy to utter the cutting word or the phrase
that leaves a sting. A real interest in “the other girl” will tend to
make her unselfish.

If she is comfortable to live with she must be thoughtful.
Thoughtfulness also has its birth in unselfishness. The girl wrapped
up in thoughts of herself has little time to be concerned with others,
and demands invariably that she be the center of the circle. She does
not make others comfortable and is not good to live with.

The girl who is good to live with in the world of the everyday, shares
her joys and pleasures with the family. How many times I have seen a
tired mother forget her cares listening to the recital of her
daughter’s “good times”! Her petty little annoyances, her
disappointments, she keeps to herself.

After all, when we sum up the qualities of the girl in her teens which
endear her to every one, and make her good to live with, we can put
them under the one word unselfish. If she is this, then she will apply
herself to her studies; she will remember her mother’s burdens and not
add to them; she will think of all she owes to her father and show her
gratitude to him; she will be a helpful friend to the boys and girls
with whom she associates, and she will have a good time, as the
unselfish girl invariably does. By frequent illustrations taken from
life, the Sunday-school teacher may hope to make her see how true
these things are. An absolutely unselfish girl may be, as those in
their teens say she is, “impossible,” but the impossible can be made
wonderfully attractive by the teacher who can picture the girl in her
teens at her best.

In her life in the everyday, no matter what her circumstances may be,
the girl is constantly tempted to live below her best. The temptation
to be disagreeable about the household tasks that fall to her, to
forget the errand she is asked to do, to be careless about her room,
to leave things for her mother to look after and put away, to be
impatient with younger brothers and sisters—all these things are so
easy. Not to yield to them requires constant watchfulness and
struggle, and the word of warning on the part of the teacher, through
story and illustration each Sunday, helps the girl see these faults in
all their miserable littleness.

In her school life she meets the temptation to neglect her studies,
and to spend too much time on the social side. Many girls are tempted
to yield to petty deceptions; some are tempted to copy or exchange
work; many are discourteous, and many more do nothing to make school
life happy for any except those in their own “set.” Some whose parents
are so unwise as to leave them without knowledge or protection fall
into temptations from which they never escape.

The high-school girl needs from the earnest lips of a woman she
admires the weekly word of warning, and the oft-repeated plea to keep
herself pure and fine.

If the girl in her teens is in business she meets daily the temptation
to let her own interests interfere with her employer’s, to waste time,
to give excuses, to indulge in pleasures that do not uplift, but mean
late hours, little sleep, and physical unfitness for work. She needs
every Sunday the practical words of warning and inspiration straight
from the heart of a woman who understands her temptations and can help
her to overcome them.

Wherever the girl in her teens finds herself she needs some one to
make her want to be her best amidst all the things which tend to pull
her down. She needs strong words that will show her to herself in all
her weakness making her ashamed if she has yielded, and at the same
time arousing in her the determination not to yield again.

When the teacher understands the girl in her teens and lives close
enough to her to become her confidante, she knows how hard the fight
to be good and fine and strong in the everyday is, and she realizes
more and more as her experience broadens that while the girl’s love
for her parents is a great incentive toward right living, and desire
to please those whom she greatly admires is a help, and while
unhappiness and other consequences of evil-doing act as deterring
agents, yet no one of these things, nor all of them together, will
prove strong enough to keep her pure and honest and make her
unselfish.

What will? Nothing will make her absolutely perfect. Only one thing,
so far as I know, will keep her safe and strong in the life of the
everyday. That thing is the consciousness that she lives in the
presence of God, accepting Jesus Christ as her example and her
_Helper_ in her effort to live aright.

A girl conscious that she lives out each day under the pure, kind eye
of an infinite personality, interested in her efforts toward
righteousness, and that she need not be afraid to ask for strength or
for pardon, finds it easier to do right and harder to do wrong than
the other girl who leaves him out of the struggle.

In all the hundreds of girls and women I have met, the most
thoughtful, generous and unselfish, the purest in heart and mind,
those richest in the finer traits of humanity, have been conscious of
the presence of God in the world of the everyday.

They live as in the presence of a perfect father, and live aright, not
because men see, but because he sees, and they are able to live as
they do because they ask for help and receive it. If we are to be of
real help to the girl in her teens, this consciousness of the
_reality_ of God we must give to her.

I have so often seen it help in the lives of individual girls. I am
thinking now of Vivian, whose parents had given her up in despair. She
was careless, rude, and untruthful. In school her teachers considered
her “a bad girl.” The Sunday-school teacher who took her class when
she was fifteen was one to whom the Christ was very real. She talked
about him reverently, as if he were a real friend and a great help in
everyday life. She interested Vivian. At Christmas she gave her
Hoffman’s “Christ.” Vivian put it on her bureau, dusted the picture
every day, and thought about it often. The teacher loaned her books of
the sort which made Christ seem a real friend. She began to think of
him as such and to pray that he would help her overcome the things
that everybody despised. She read “What would Jesus do?” several
times. She began to feel that God saw and cared, and as she worded it,
“I felt that in all these hard things Christ would help me, and I
asked him many times every day to make me do as he would.”

Her room showed that something had come to Vivian. A quietness came
into her conversation. She treated her mother with a gentleness that
was so different that her mother cried when she told the teacher about
it. The girls saw the difference. Twice when she had been untruthful
she went to her teachers and confessed it. She made a desperate
struggle to speak accurately. Her father called her a changed girl,
and his face showed his joy over the change. She is to-day one of the
sweetest, strongest young women I know, prominent in her college and
trusted and loved by scores of girls.

She is one of many whose lives I have seen changed, and as the years
pass, and I see the power of the Christ still working miracles in
girls’ lives, I long for more teachers like that one who opened
Vivian’s eyes.

The greatest thing which the teacher can do for the girl in her teens
is to open her eyes to a real Christ, for then all the incentives for
pure, unselfish _living_ in the commonplaces of life’s “everyday” will
be hers.




CHAPTER X—HER TEACHER


When for a moment one remembers the girl in her teens, the long line
that lives in the memory from those just thirteen up through the
sweetest and prettiest at sixteen, to the beautiful, graceful, and
dignified ones just twenty, it makes a picture hard to equal.

There is such evident joy in just living! When one catches a glimpse
of the groups in their light dresses, with hair ribbons of every size
and color according to the wearer’s interpretation of the latest
fashion, wending their way to the high school, he feels that life is
indeed a glorious summer morning. Though sighs and complaints may be
heard over lessons too long and too difficult, they are not very deep,
and are soon forgotten; though low marks do make very serious students
with minds concentrated on work for a few days after report cards are
out, yet with the majority the depression is short-lived, and life is
sunshine once more.

When as whistles blow and factory gates swing wide, one catches a
glimpse in the early morning of the girl in her teens going to work,
he hears snatches of happy laughter and jesting. No matter how hard
the work, it cannot crush out the laughter in the heart of the girl in
her teens; the good times after work is over or at the week end when
she puts on her ribbons and gay attire make easier the crash of
machinery and less painful the aching muscles.

The girl in her teens is glad she is alive, and her evident and keen
enjoyment of a world which some of her elders have found hard and a
little disappointing does more to cheer and brighten the dull gray of
the commonplace than she knows, or than we stop to remember.

As we think of this long procession of the girl in her teens which
memory can so easily recall, and then see in imagination the host of
those who call themselves her teachers, we are tempted to cry, “Her
teachers! What manner of beings are they who pretend to instruct,
enlighten and guide all this energy, this fascinating line of
possibility and promise!”

It is easy to write or speak of the “ideal” teacher for all this fresh
young life, filled with inexpressible longings for success and
happiness. But the study of the very human and very real teacher,
ideal only in the highest sense, in that she is struggling after
perfection, will be much more practical and helpful to us.

Should the teacher of girlhood in the years of the teens ever be a
man?

Yes, there have been many fine, successful teachers whose strength and
manly qualities, whose sincere devotion to Christ and his teachings,
have had a lasting influence for good upon the girl in her teens.

It is a good thing for the girl to see the world and its relation to
moral and religious life through the eyes of a far-seeing man. It is a
help to her to get his mental grasp of situations as from week to week
they follow together the life of Christ and his teachings or seek to
understand the characters of Old Testament days.

A fine man’s frankness, sincerity, and general freedom from the
annoyance of little things prove a stimulus and a help to the girl. It
is almost unnecessary to say that he must be the right sort of man,
large-hearted, strong, and free from all suggestion of the
“goody-goody.”

However, it has been my experience that while a man makes a most
efficient teacher for the class during the hour of the Sunday-school
session, he cannot guide and influence a girl’s life in the everyday
as can the right sort of woman. Unless he has a home and a wife
thoroughly interested in his work, or herself active in the work of
the Church, he can do little in a social way during the week. If he is
a successful, hard-working man he has little time to think of the
girls or their needs except on Sunday, and unless he is a man of wide
experience or has daughters of his own he does not understand girls,
and must perforce deal in generalities.

In this matter, as everywhere in life, there are exceptions and no
hard and fast law can be laid down, but my experience thus far has
been that, all things considered, a womanly woman is best fitted to
meet the many needs of the girl in her teens.

She must be a womanly woman, else she will have forgotten her own
girlhood days and cannot come near enough to the girl in her teens to
appreciate her need, nor will she have the personality that wins her
confidence and love. The cold, hard, mechanical sort of woman one
occasionally finds in charge of a class of girls is not the one whose
influence will be felt in the years to come.

We have seen again and again in previous chapters that the teacher of
the girl in her teens must be in love with life. If she has found it
hard, she must not let that embitter her. The fact that she has met
hardships and conquered them, has met sorrow and it has only deepened
her sympathy and broadened her outlook on life, makes her a real
inspiration to the girls who meet her each week.

I am thinking now of such a woman, into whose life one heavy sorrow
after another has come. At thirty she is alone in the world, having
lost in ten years parents, husband and two children. Yet there is no
bitterness in her life. She is not in any sense a cynic. More than
twenty girls, from sixteen to nineteen years of age, who make up her
class, leave the presence of that sweet, strong woman with her tender,
sympathetic spirit, and her calm, steady faith, able all the week to
live better, more wholesome lives because they have been with her for
one hour. She never speaks of herself, but often of courage, of hope,
of making the best of things, of giving all one can in service to the
world, of unselfish, cheerful living, and the girls listen and believe
that all she says is true and possible.

The teacher must be an optimist. She is not self-deceived, she sees
the faults of the girl in her teens. She is conscious of the
thoughtlessness, the utter lack of courtesy, the love of the extreme
in everything, and the greater faults of insincerity and pretense that
characterize to so great an extent the girlhood of to-day. But while
she is pained she is not dismayed. She is a good diagnostician. She
examines her individual patients, finds the weak places, discovers the
cause of the disease, and then goes to work systematically to
eradicate it, trusting to the normal, unaffected organs and tissues to
aid in restoring perfect health. She believes in and uses preventive
measures and they pay.

The teacher must herself be an example in thoughtfulness and courtesy,
respectful to those higher in office, and willing to co-operate with,
instead of criticizing, those who have plans by which they hope to add
to the efficiency of the school as a whole.

None of these things are lost upon the keen-eyed girl in her teens;
indeed, the teacher’s dress, even the condition of her gloves, makes
an impression and has an influence.

It has become a truism that to be successful in teaching one must know
the pupil; yet only last week I met a teacher anxious for a new course
of study which would interest her class of girls sixteen and seventeen
years of age, who revealed in conversation the fact that she knew
practically nothing of the girl’s homes. She did not even know the
section of the city in which many of them lived, had made no calls and
could tell the occupation of only two of the fathers. She did not know
for what the girls were preparing themselves, nor any of their hopes
or desires, and she had taught the class for two years. She said the
girls were not interested, and did not prepare assigned work.

This type of teacher is fast disappearing, but wherever she exists the
fact that the class seems to be “not interested” indicates very
clearly that those who insist that _the teacher must know the girl_
are right.

In the series of studies of the girl in her teens an article appeared
in _The Sunday School Times_[1] giving the opinions of several hundred
girls as to what constitutes “a lovely teacher,” and according to the
statements of these girls, a lovely teacher is, “pleasant,” “fair to
everybody,” “treats every one alike,” and “is interested in what you
are doing.” “She writes notes to you when you are ill,” “calls on
you,” “is kind and patient,” “makes the lesson interesting,” “explains
what you don’t understand,” and “knows a great deal.”

Upon these as necessary qualifications of “a lovely teacher,” the girl
in her teens from all sorts of homes and from various parts of our
country is agreed, and as we think about it we feel inclined to trust
her analysis.

When the average teacher tests herself by these standards, she finds
deficiencies, but they are not discouraging ones, because every
characteristic named by the girls is possible to every teacher.

She can make things interesting if she is interested and takes time to
prepare her lesson material. It is a never-failing source of surprise
to discover what interesting material,—anecdotes, illustrations,
pictures and information,—can be found upon every subject when one is
looking for it.

It is perfectly possible for the average teacher to be “pleasant”—to
carry about with her the atmosphere in which work becomes a pleasure
and difficult problems are just things to be conquered. This
atmosphere of cheerful hopefulness makes everything easy. For many
teachers it is the natural attitude toward life and work, which comes
from constant association with eager, buoyant youth. If it is not
natural it may be cultivated.

“Notes” and “calls”—acts of thoughtful kindness on the part of the
teacher when illness or trouble enters a home, may be small things in
themselves, but they mean much to the adolescent girl, and they bring
their own reward. They also are possible to every teacher.

The confidence of a girl is more easily gained if one, to use her own
phrase, “really likes” her. If a teacher knows her pupil, that is,
sees her as an individual, learns her ambitions, longings, hopes and
fears, she does “like” her. It is almost impossible not to like the
average girl when one knows her. Every teacher can learn to teach
individuals, not classes, and girls, not subjects alone.

The wise men of the past have told us, and experience and observation
have proved, that we grow to resemble that which we admire. Admiration
means imitation, therefore the necessity that those who are striving
to awaken the best in the girl in her teens be those she can and does
admire, and have traits of character she ought to imitate.

There never was a time in the history of religion when so many tools
and such fine equipment for service were ready for those who want to
be skilled workmen, and the teachers who desire the skill to make
their work on Sunday really count in life every day in the week, have
but to begin just where they are and progress as fast as possible.
Bible classes for those who want and need to know more of the Book
they teach are easy of access to many, and courses of study are open
to all. The training class, where the characteristics of the various
ages, and the needs of pupils, and how to meet them, may be
intelligently considered, is possible in any community, and good
correspondence courses are now available.

If one desires to do so it is perfectly possible for him to become a
better teacher for the sake of those whom he instructs. For it is in
desire, after all, that action is born, and that which one greatly
desires he will seek after. To help the girl in her teens see the best
in life and desire it, we have said, is the business of her teacher.
Through the physical, mental, and spiritual sides of her nature, the
teacher is to lift the girl to the place where she can see for
herself.

There are so many girls all over our country, and in the farthest
corners of the earth, to-day rendering splendid service to the world,
sometimes in the shelter of their own homes caring for their children,
sometimes in great hospitals, or lonely outposts as nurses, sometimes
as teachers or missionaries, often as servants of every sort, who are
living with a broad outlook and deep, sympathetic insight, because
somewhere, back in the teens, by the patient effort of teachers they
were lifted out of their narrow selves to the place where they were
able to catch a glimpse of the real meaning of life.

Finding it impossible one day to make my way through the crowds on the
street waiting for a procession to pass, I stopped, and standing back
a little from the curb watched the eager faces gazing up the street.
Right in front of me stood a group of men in their working clothes,
and in their midst a tall, broad-shouldered expressman, explaining the
reason for the “parade.” In a moment the sound of brass instruments
burst upon us, a line of policemen swung into sight, the crowd of
small boys following close beside the uniformed men, their eyes on the
flying banners, and keeping step as only boys can.

Suddenly above the noises of the street, above the commands of the
officers and the music of the band, I heard a little, thin, shrill
voice from the crowded corner where the men stood, cry out, “Lift me
up so I can see!” It was a street child, a little girl, whose dress
and face showed that neither money, time, nor thought had been
expended upon her. She looked so tiny as she stood there trying to
peer through the crowd at the procession in the street. But she was
not afraid. Again it came, “Lift me up, I say, so I can see!” Eager,
insistent, filled with desire, the voice attracted the attention of
the men. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then with that look one
loves to see upon the face of a strong man, the expressman stooped and
picked her up. As he held her there, high above the heads of the
others, one little arm went round his neck, and she “held on tight”
while the other hand pointed at horses, banners and men, and she
called out again and again in her joy and delight, “Now I can see, I
can see everything!”

The procession passed. He placed her on the sidewalk, and as the crowd
scattered she hurried away, satisfaction written upon her small face.
But as I walked slowly back toward the great school buildings on the
hill, her voice rang in my ears, “Lift me up so I can see!” And I knew
that that is the unconscious cry of the childhood of the world to the
teachers of the world; that those words are the plea, often
unexpressed, of the girlhood of to-day—“Lift me up—so I can see!” And
I know that those who answer must themselves have eyes opened by the
Christ, to see, and hearts quickened by his power, to lift.

-----
[1] “A Lovely Teacher,” March 5, 1910.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Girl in Her Teens, by Margaret Slattery