CGIT, A RAPIDLY DWINDLING BUT WORTHY INITIATIVE

Canadian Girls in Training, Dresden, ON branch, 1935.

In my last Wrights Lane post I bemoaned the fact that we were losing many of the very worthy youth organizations that at one time contributed to the character and development of so many Canadians in the 20th Century. In this article I review the history of one of those organizations, prompted by the above photograph I recently uncovered showing an active Canadian Girls in Training group in my hometown of Dresden, ON. in 1935.

In the fall of 1915, as the First World War raged overseas, four young women decided to undertake a novel project: create an interdenominational organization that would serve the needs and aspirations of young Canadian girls in the 11 to 16 age range. They were Winnifred Thomas, a New Brunswick Methodist and graduate of Mount Allison University; Olive Ziegler, a Torontonian and recent graduate of the University of Toronto; Una Saunders, a Brit and Oxford University grad who had become the general secretary of YWCA Canada; and Constance Body, an Anglican who was on a career path to becoming general secretary of the YWCA.

At a time already replete with new youth-oriented organizations such as Girl Guides, Junior Red Cross and various agricultural societies, that quartet of Canadian women decided the country — specifically, its Protestant faith groups — needed one that would be distinctly Canadian. Its purpose: to give girls the same opportunities as boys to serve their country, to train girls for humanitarian service, and to provide a discrete space for girls to discuss gender-related issues, as well as personal and faith formation.

Within two decades, Canadian Girls in Training (CGIT) had become an unqualified success. CGIT groups operated in more than 750 Canadian communities, often as adjuncts to Sunday school classes in United, Anglican and Presbyterian congregations. The movement’s growth was so rapid, in fact, that it was hampered only by its ability to find enough qualified leaders.

And that leader, Thomas argued, was key. A CGIT leader had to be able to function as a teacher and friend, but also needed to possess subtle leadership skills to help girls develop their own character through a “four-fold life” comprised of physical, intellectual, religious and service components.

Self-discovery was an important theme, as was freedom to question and discuss issues of personal importance. (By the early 1930s, CGIT had adopted a sex education unit, based on The Mastery of Sex, by British psychologist Leslie Weatherhead.)

As early as the 1920s, CGIT groups were in the business of teaching girls about the importance of female influence in home, work and community settings. It promoted higher education and leadership skills for women and acted as a seedbed for what would later be identified as the women’s movement. Ontario lieutenant-governor (1974-80) Pauline McGibbon, the late Conservative cabinet minister Flora MacDonald and labour leader Grace Fulcher Hartman were products of the CGIT program.

The late Canadian historian Margaret Prang, a native of Stratford, wrote in 1985 that the CGIT movement helped “shape a vision of their country and the world, and of themselves as citizens, for many Canadian girls. . . . Life in CGIT provided an introduction to what a later generation would identify as a ‘women’s culture.’ ”

That indebtedness to a church-based organization is not one that modern feminist groups acknowledge very often.

The first CGIT branch in Dresden was formed in 1935 and attracted interdenominational participation from within the town, 24 young woman at its peak. Meeting in the Sunday School Hall at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, the Dresden branch was organized by the minister's wife, Mrs. F.R. Anderson assisted by Mrs. Earnest Dunlop, and remained active for about seven years, to the best of my knowledge. At least one other CGIT branch followed in Dresden, circa 1958, in addition to several others in the area around that same time.

As CGIT limped toward its 100th anniversary, it was but a shadow of its former self. The organization consists of only about 2,000 girls scattered among about 150 groups across Canada. The decline in enrollment, of course, is linked to the decline in church membership over the past couple of decades. And the falloff in Ontario has been severe.

In Ontario, there are only three groups left, “all with excellent and dedicated leaders,” says Gail Dolson, executive secretary of the Ontario CGIT Association. “That is certainly a far cry from the days in the ’50s and ’60s, when there was a group in every United Church in the province, most Presbyterian churches and Baptist churches as well.”

And while the curriculum has changed somewhat to meet modern challenges (it now covers drugs and alcohol abuse, for example), “it is difficult to get girls interested in a group that asks them to lift their heads up from their cellphones,” Dolson says.

Despite CGIT’s state of decline, its contributions in helping shape Canadian society over the past century have been greatly understated — or simply lost. In their haste to head for the exits of Protestant churches over the past four decades, Canadians have also unwittingly deflated some para-church organizations.

In spite of the decline, CGIT made an enormous contribution to women’s issues, gender equality and the development of a nation, and its four young founders would be proud.

You simply cannot tell me that there is not a need for a similar organization for girls in Canada today. All that is lacking, it would seem, are willing qualified leaders, encouraging parents and girls in their early teens who can pull themselves away from the insular distractions that have become so alluring in this ambivalent day and age.

Perhaps that would be asking too much of today's society.