Training Leaders at Colleges

How did you receive your Girl Scout volunteer training?

Was it in a classroom with other new volunteers, led by an experienced volunteer?

Was it a telephone conference call, with you alone in your living room?

Perhaps you watched an online video? Read a packet of papers that came in the mail?

When you were taught how to perform a friendship circle, did you hold the actual hands of a living, breathing human being, or did you have to make do with the throw pillows on your couch?

Chances are, you did not head to the nearest university to major in Girl Scouts. But that was the practice in the earliest days of the movement, especially in areas where troops were just forming.

UK Training Card

In 1922, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller fund awarded the first of many grants to the Girl Scouts to train a group of young women who would teach Girl Scout Leadership Training Courses at colleges as universities. The program was extremely popular and quickly spread across the United States.

Reports for 1925 indicate that 6,000 young women had taken courses in the first three years they were offered. Training courses were available at 116 universities, colleges, and technical schools, located in 39 states and territorial possessions.

Participating institutions included Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Columbia, New York University, Cornell, University of North Carolina, and the University of Texas.

Pages from GSL-1924-01-January.jpg
from January 1924 Leader magazine

At Stanford University, for example, the Department of Education offered classes to prepare prospective troop leaders.

Typically, students from a variety of majors took the Girl Scout coursework in the spring quarter, but the smaller summer quarter classes were usually made up of rural teachers hoping to bring Girl Scouting to their schools.

Nancy Beck Young, Lou Henry Hoover: Activist First Lady

Some schools offered academic credit for the leadership training. The University of Iowa offered one credit hour to women who complete the course and run a troop for the rest of the school year.

Stanford alumna and GSUSA President Lou Henry Hoover threw her support behind college-level training and encouraged expanding the program to more and more teachers’ college whenever possible.

Leadership Course
Textbook from 1942

Girl Scout officials also hoped the courses would encourage young women to consider careers in the Girl Scout movement.

GSU Pin
GSU pin

GSUSA partly revived this idea with the website Girl Scouts University (http://gsuniversity.girlscouts.org/), which provided online training and enrichment courses. However, the website has not been updated in over two years.

This Girl Scouts University should not be confused with an earlier incarnation, also called Girl Scouts University (http://www.gsuniv.org/history/). This site somewhat links to the newer GSU site. Notably, it still has valuable history resources produced by the former National Historical Preservation Center.

©2018 Ann Robertson

Pittsburgh’s Troop 47

Being a Girl Scout archivist is always an adventure. Donations come in bags and boxes, via the mail or literally left on a doorstep. We know to go through the donations carefully. We get lots of old uniform socks, the occasional 20-year old cookie box (with the cookies still inside!), not to mention the potentially hazardous old first aid kits.

One recent donation included a shopping bag full of assorted papers: flag ceremony diagrams, permission slips, the typical troop records. But among the packing lists and kaper charts was this photo:

 

Pitt Girls
Captain Irma Gorton and Troop 47 of Pittsburgh, c. 1923

 

At first I thought it was a photocopy,  but no, it is the real thing.  There is some damage to the photo, but it is in remarkably good shape for being nearly 100 years old.

According to the caption written in pencil on the back, this is Troop 47, sponsored by Latimore Junior High School in Pittsburgh. Irma S. Gorton was captain, and the date is estimated as 1923.

But wait…there’s more! These documents were in an envelope in the same bag of random papers:

 

Gorton Card
Irma Gorton’s membership card

 

 

Gorton Certificate
Irma Gorton’s appointment certificate

 

The appointment certificate needs some preservation attention. It has been folded for decades, all four borders are present but delicate. You can also see the official stamp/seal in the lower left corner.

It is only fair to send these items to the Girl Scout Council of Western Pennsylvania, but I wanted to share them first!

©2017, Ann Robertson