Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (review)

Tammy Proctor’s Scouting for Girls is the first nonofficial history of the worldwide Girl Guide and Girl Scout movements, from the organizations’ beginnings in the 1910s to the present day. Although much of the book focuses on British and American material, it does make substantive forays into sources from a dozen other countries on several continents. This vast geographic sweep paired with a century-long time frame (all covered in fewer than 150 pages of text) makes for a rather breathless introductory tour of one of the world’s largest voluntary youth movements. It is no mean feat to wrest a coherent narrative from all these disparate stories, yet Proctor mostly pulls it off with good grace. She manages this by invoking “International Friendship”—a highly touted Girl Guide/Girl Scout value—as the thematic glue to bind the work together.

The trickier needle for Proctor to thread is the question of audience. Scouting for Girls was obviously written with a dual purpose: to rectify an egregious gap in the history of childhood and youth, and to capture the interest of Girl Guide and Girl Scout partisans gearing up for their groups’ centennial celebrations. All the names and dates, as well as the doings of major players such as Sir Robert Baden-Powell, his sister Agnes, and wife Olave, founders of the British Scout and Guide movements, will appeal to enthusiasts eager to learn more of “their own” history. (And, truly, there is a lack of scholarship. For example, Juliette Lowe, indomitable founder of U.S. Girl Scouting who died in 1927 is still waiting for her long-overdue biographical turn.) Social historians might be put off by so much institutional history, but they shouldn’t be. For only in such detail can readers begin to get a feel for the vibrant, local manifestations of this diverse global organization. Scouting for Girls could not possibly flesh out all of these variations, but it does offer tantalizing glimpses and, perhaps even more importantly, suggests numerous avenues for future research.

The book is arranged chronologically with each chapter covering roughly a decade and drawing on a wide array of sources. Published sources range from small-town U.S. newspapers to a panoply of the British press. These public materials are supported by Proctor’s thorough reading of Girl Guide and Girl Scout archival sources, from handbooks and newsletters to personal correspondence and organizational documents. Scattered oral histories make for charming personal asides, while Guide fiction and Scout films from the 1910s and 1920s enliven an especially interesting chapter entitled “Transformations.” Indeed, Proctor attempts to give every chapter an organizing theme, but with somewhat uneven results. The two chapters on the world wars hang together quite well. Particularly successful is the chapter on World War II which shows how nationalism served as both a cohesive rationale for members’ increased war-time activity, but also opened up schisms in the “global sisterhood” as leaders grappled with the ramifications of national and patriotic fervor.

Chapter Three, “Controversies,” is less successful in terms of thematic unity, but is still chock-full of fascinating material. It is also, I would argue, emblematic of both the greatest strength and biggest challenge of the entire text. The chapter touches on questions of gender roles, sexuality, race, religion, ethnicity, and nationalism, though surprisingly for a chapter about the 1930s, not social class. In addition to this thematic cornucopia, “Controversies” covers material from the West Indies, South Africa, Europe, and North America, from the American South to Francophone Canada. It goes without saying that any one topic receives only cursory attention. Yet even in the midst of all these critical issues and far-flung places, Proctor manages to grab a slender thread of her larger project. In 1926, while reviewing the state of Guiding in the West Indies, Chief Guide Olave Baden-Powell was “astonished” to learn that there were no “colored” companies in...