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

In this engaging and informative general history, Tammy M. Proctor traces the people, events, and social shifts that have shaped and re-shaped Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting over the past one hundred years. Proctor, the author of a book and several articles on the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in Britain and its empire and co-editor of the 2009 volume Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement's First Century, examines the ways in which the Guides have sought to remain true to many of their founding values while regularly reinventing certain aspects of their ideology and programs. Proctor discusses the movement as an adult-led attempt to mold modern girlhood, while demonstrating that girls' own desires also influenced its evolution.

From its origins in Edwardian England to its current status as a socially conscious international girls' organization, Proctor provides a useful overview of the fascinating and still understudied history of the world's largest voluntary organization for girls. Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting is a global phenomenon, and Scouting for Girls, while relying heavily on British and American sources, deals with the challenges of promoting international sisterhood by using examples and anecdotes from Asia, Europe, the Antipodes, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The book is based on a wide range of sources including newspapers, organizational records, handbooks, periodicals, fiction, memoirs, official histories, autobiographies and oral history interviews, girls' logbooks, and the secondary literature on Guiding and Girl Scouting in a range of national contexts.

The book is organized chronologically, with each chapter focusing on a particular theme or moment of transformation. It begins in early twentieth-century Britain, with Robert Baden-Powell's establishment of the Boy Scouts—a youth movement that, as Proctor shows, was also taken up with enthusiasm by some women and girls. The book's first chapter describes the official founding of the Girl Guides in 1910 and outlines the movement's defining characteristics and early international growth. Chapter two focuses on the First World War, a global conflict that attracted even more girls to the organization and allowed them, through war-related voluntary work, to demonstrate their usefulness to the body politic. Proctor also notes that the war years were marked by organizational growth and administrative changes, as the movement's age range expanded and its leaders sought to include disabled and geographically isolated girls while claiming to rehabilitate modern girls and "flappers."

The end of the First World War brought still more changes to the organization, including a shift in emphasis to friendly internationalism, outdoor activities, and the training of what Proctor calls "citizen-mothers." These subjects are discussed in chapter three, which traces the formation of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts during the interwar years—an era characterized by economic hardships and the rise of rival politicized youth movements in a range of national contexts. Guiding's global growth during the 1920s and 1930s was complicated by religion, class, and race, and Proctor outlines the development of an unofficial policy of modification and accommodation that allowed individual national groups to tinker with uniforms, activities, and admission requirements. Chapter four deals with the Second World War as another transformative moment in the history of international Scouting and Guiding. As in 1914, Guides and Girl Scouts earned war service badges and membership increased, but Proctor notes that this time the movement's voluntary work focused more particularly on international relief and refugees. There is fascinating material here—on Guiding in concentration and prison camps in Europe and Asia and among interned Japanese girls in Canada, as well as on the often-dangerous post-war relief work done by the Guide International Service (GIS).

The book's fifth chapter, "Transformations," charts the development and alteration of Guide programs and activities over time. Here, Proctor shows how the movement maintained its emphasis on uniforms, social service, and active learning throughout the twentieth century...