Progressive Era Girl Scouts and the Immigrant: Scouting for Girls (1920) as a Handbook for American Girlhood

The publications and activities of the Girl Scouts offer a fruitful site for examining shifting notions of female citizenship and American identity. This essay considers the home-making and physical fitness passages of Scouting for Girls (1920) in the context of early twentieth-century maternalist activism and women's efforts to Americanize immigrants. Linking concerns about immigrants' health and cleanliness to a brief interval of Girl Scout Americanization efforts, the essay finds that Girl Scouting empowered middle-class girls to impart the doctrines of municipal housekeeping, scientific mothering, and vigorous good health that middle-class women promoted among in their clubs, colleges, and settlement work.