Look Wider Still: The Subversive Nature of Girl Scouting in the 1950s

For Elizabeth and Lara

As those who follow women’s issues in the media will be aware, over the past few years Girl Scouts of the USA—an organization the name of which has been a byword for wholesomeness, even squareness—has become a flashpoint in the twenty-first century culture wars over reproductive rights, diversity, and the alleged erosion of “American family values.” Girl Scouting, critics charge, has become outrageously liberal, even morally suspect. Indiana state representative Bob Morris made national headlines when he voted against a resolution congratulating American Girl Scouting on its 2012 centennial, asserting that all but three of the fifty role models presented on the Girl Scouts of the USA’s (gsusa) website were “feminists, lesbians, and/or Communists.”¹ Critics have charged gsusa with promoting an lgbt agenda, citing acceptance of a transgender girl into a Denver troop.² Commentators have lamented that the term “God” is now optional in the Girl Scout Promise and have complained that activities in the Girl Scout curriculum encourage girls “to explore mazes and stone or dirt labyrinths—symbols rooted in pagan mythology.”³ They have warned the public of national staff members’ affiliation with organizations that support sex education, abortion, and/or gay marriage.⁴ gsusa has even been accused of encouraging promiscuity.⁵ Based on such allegations, the right-wing Catholic Eternal World Television Network recently produced an exposé documentary series called “Girl Scouts: Mission Aborted” with episodes titled “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Indoctrinating Our Daughters, the Girl Scout Cirriculum” [sic].⁶

Disaffected Girl Scouts and their parents have contributed to the public outcry. Two “brave former Girl Scouts” (as one web page calls them) have begun a pro-life, anti-Scout blog called “Speak Now Girl Scouts,” on which they write, “We refuse to remain silent while this organization’s unscrupulous principles mislead over 2 million girls.”⁷ Another ex-Scout made a media splash in the wake of the Denver transgender controversy when she posted a call on YouTube (which has since gone private) urging a boycott of Girl Scout cookie sales. “gsusa cares more about promoting the desires of a small handful of people than it does for my safety and the safety of my friends and sister Girl Scouts,” she said.⁸ One mother who pulled her daughters from Scouting told the conservative wnd news network, “I feel misled, betrayed, offended, and hurt,” recommending as an alternative the American Heritage Girls, a group said to be “building women of integrity through service to God, family, community, and country.”⁹

Such criticism gives the impression—as words like “betrayed” and phrases like “Mission Aborted” suggest—that in recent years Girl Scouting has deviated radically from its roots, becoming an organization espousing a far different ethos than it did historically. Once upon a time, the implication goes, the movement offered desirable training in healthy principles for girls, but now, in a sad sign of the times, it is attempting to substitute fashionable liberal values for solid “mainstream” ones.¹⁰

Despite such nostalgia for an alleged golden age of Scouting, however, considerable evidence suggests that encouraging its charges to think outside the conservative box is nothing new for Girl Scouting. Girl Scout historian Tammy Proctor, indeed, charts a series of controversies stretching from the movement’s very beginning, including allegations that scouting would turn girls into masculine tomboys (considered in more detail later in this essay), and disapproval of racially integrated and mixed-religion troops.¹¹ Even in the supposed golden age of “wholesome” American Girl Scouting, the 1950s, a national incident made the organization a target for conservative fire in a way reminiscent of the early twenty-first century.¹² This 1953–56 controversy has faded into obscurity over the past fifty years, not discussed in histories of Girl Scouting or mentioned by recent critics of the organization. But it made a great deal of noise at the time, as six fat folders of records at gsusa headquarters in New York City attest. I discovered this collection by chance in the National Historic Preservation Center, Girl...