“Know God, Serve Others”: Religion in the Canadian Girls in Training in the Interwar Years

Abstract

religious and a practical movement. While not all components of the program were concerned with religion, this was the medium through which the national leaders thought they could help participants bring a “fullness of life” to all aspects of their daily existence. The national organization tried to help local leaders develop programs that would help girls become competent leaders as well as engaged mothers and wives. Throughout the interwar period, the national organization’s struggle to encourage CGIT participants to assume more public roles in the life of the nation was often at odds with an insistence on the primacy of the home and the vocation of motherhood. The national leaders of the CGIT believed that if teenage girls could be guided to a deeper religious belief, they would be more inclined to enter into the public sphere as effective, politically active leaders. At the same time, the connection between domestic and religious ideology was very strong. The role of the mother and the primacy of the domestic sphere continued to be central in mainstream Protestant churches. Both messages were present 3