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The Outdoor Girls In a Motor Car
This Stratemeyer series, The Outdoor Girls, generally focuses on girls in nature, highlighting skills of strength and woodcraft, moving the protagonists out of the domestic sphere by taking them into nature. Many of their activities align with those of the newly-founded Girl Scout movement, begun in 1912 by Julia Gordon Low. In this volume, the third in the series (published in 1913), we see the influence of the increasing reader interest in automobiles. While the Motor Girls had been on the road since 1910, this book, which functions as a kind of crossover in terms of its topic, depicts Mollie and her friends just as they are first learning to drive. Like Cora, Mollie is the daughter of a widowed mother, and her car also appears as a birthday gift. The copy of The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car on our Shelf also bears evidence of maternal affection and approval, as evident in its elegantly written inscription, “Flora from Mother, 1929.” Flora’s mother clearly felt comfortable giving her daughter a book whose cover and illustrations show independent girls out driving, camping, canoeing, and exploring. We can’t know, however, whether Mother read enough of the book to encounter the ghost, haunted house, missing girl, and thunderstorm that also add excitement to this selection! -AJP