ay be difficult to find what we may think are typical
examples of the Country Girl as a social group, yet certain it is that
she exists. Of young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine,
there are in the United States six and a half million (6,694,184, to be
exact) who reside in the open country or in small villages. This we are
assured is so by the latest Census Report.

By starting a little further down in the scale of girlhood and advancing
a trifle further into maturity this number could be doubled. It would be
quite justifiable to do this, because some farmers' daughters become
responsible for a considerable amount of labor value well before the age
of fifteen; and on the other hand the energy of these young rural women
is abundantly extended beyond the gateway of womanhood, far indeed into
the period that used to be called old-maidism, but which is to be so
designated no more; the breezy, executive, free-handed period when the
country girl is of greatest use as a labor unit and gives herself
without stint (and often without pay) to the welfare of the whole
farmstead. The American Country Girl is not by any means behind her city
sister in her ability to make the bounds of her youth elastic, though
the girl on the farm may go at it in a somewhat different way. Then,
perhaps, too, the word "youth" may, alas! have another connotation in
the mind of one from what it has in the dreams of the other.

If we should, however, thus enlarge the scope of our inquiry, we should
increase but not clarify our problems. Moreover it is the Country Girl
that interests us, the promise and hope of her dawn, the delicate
swiftly changing years of her growth, the miracle of her blossoming.
There is something about the kaleidoscope of her moods and the
inconsistencies of her biography that fascinates us. The moment when she
awakes, when the sparkle begins to show in her eyes, when we know that a
conception of her mission and of her supreme value to life is beginning
to glow before her imagination--that is the crisis to work for and to be
happy over when it comes. As for us, we ask no greater happiness than
once or twice to catch a glimpse of that.

That great host of six million country girls is scattered far and wide;
they are everywhere present. A certain number of millions of them are
working industriously in myriads of unabandoned farms all over the
Appalachian plateau, and on the wide prairies to the Rockies, and
beyond.