Remarks to the Delegates to Girls Nation.

Distinguished young ladies:

I am very happy that you could come here and be with us this morning.

I know that you have been listening to a great many speeches. I have been reading some of the speeches about you.

I thought it was rather odd this morning, when I picked up the Congressional Record, and read a tribute being paid to President Johnson. After it had taken 5 or 10 minutes of my time, I realized it was another President Johnson--your president.

Last week when I had a chance to visit with the boys delegation, I made a suggestion then that I think would be quite appropriate if I should repeat it to you. I believe in parity of opportunity and parity of responsibility even between the sexes.

I told the boys that I would like them to consider an investment. So I put this challenge to you now, as I did to them last week:

After you have completed your education, I should hope that you would give very careful consideration to investing a few years of your lives in the business of helping your Government, helping them in the crucial work of trying to serve the people of this country.

Our country needs men and women who care, and men and women who are willing to work, not just for a paycheck but for the satisfaction that comes to them from trying to make living more pleasant for other folks.

If this is true, as I believe it is, for young men, it is even more significant, or should be, for young women.

Most of your grandmothers can remember when women did not even have the right in this country to vote. One of the arguments against extending this suffrage, believe it or not, was that wives would simply vote the way their husband voted, and this would give husbands an unfair advantage over bachelors at the polls.

I am one who has lived in a family with very strong-minded women. I know better. The democratic principle in our house has often left me on the short end of a three to one vote. Now it is just two to one. I am doing something about that. I am growing up a vote.

I remember one occasion when I was trying to exercise my right that I thought belonged to all people, the right of free speech. I tried for weeks to convince my ladies of the wisdom of a project that I had in mind and they wouldn't buy it. They wouldn't go along with me. They wouldn't get with it.

I became a bit annoyed and, rather exasperated, one day said to Luci, "There is a conspiracy of silence against me." She looked at me very calmly and said, "Daddy, why don't you join it?"

The fact is that ever since American women shared the incredible burdens and the hardships of frontier life they have played a very important part in the life of their country. It was no accident that they received the right to vote first in the new Western States of this country.

Long before the legislation that began our official War on Poverty, it was American women who were fighting the poverty in the neighborhood and fighting it in the legislative halls. It was the American women who first fought for compulsory education. It was American women who first fought against the evils of child labor. It was American women who first fought for minimum wages in this country. They won all of these fights.

So I would like to ask you today to make the same commitment that generations of American women have made before you-the commitment to teaching, the commitment to healing, the commitment to inspiring a change in our country where it is desperately needed. We must never become satisfied with just a status quo.

Most of you will start, I think, by getting married and raising families. About half of today's women marry by the age of 21. They have their last child at about the age of 30.

By the time your youngest child is in school, you may have 30 or 35 more years of active working life before you.

Today, we have 28 million working women in this country. More than one out of every three women are workers. Almost three out of every five working women are married, and living with their families.

So increasingly women are seeking the right to choose how they make their contributions to their family and their community. I think it is perfectly clear that a woman does not need a professional career to either serve her community or her country in most significant ways.

Communities all over this land need women who will speak for justice, where there is injustice, who will demand attention to the people's needs, who will break the silence of complacency, who will carry the battle flag against inertia--which is the main anchor dragging against the progress in our country.

So, however you choose to make whatever contribution you want to make, I hope you will continue to demonstrate the leadership which got you through the gate here today and which has brought you to this garden for me to see.

How well we succeed in the decades to come will largely depend on people like yourselves--on what you decide to do with your own lives. I hope that your visit to Washington will help you to realize what a wonderful place our country is--what a great Government we have and how much our country really needs young people like you to be interested in it and to be willing to help it.

Throughout the many countries in the world today young men in uniform and out of it are serving the needs of freedom. In some places women stand by their side.

But those of you here at home have a great opportunity. You have a great role to play. There are thousands of useful tasks which may not be done at all unless you get with it, unless you decide that you want to do it.

So looking at you, I believe you will--all of you find the place that is really waiting for you in this country. If you do, our country will be better for your having come this way.

I believe all of us, if we could have a wish, would hope that our lives had been lived in such a way that we left things better for those we love--our immediate family.

I think we all would most of all want to leave this world a better place than we found it. It has been good to most of us. We have enjoyed privileges and opportunities, benefits and luxuries, advantages and opportunities which the children of no other country have available to them.

We have an obligation to pay in return for what has been given to us, that is, to improve on what we have leave it better than we found it--because if you give to the world the best that is within you, then the world will give a good deal of it back to you.

I hope that you will be interested in your Government and in serving it. If you cannot serve it directly, help it in every way you can.

Thank you very much.