Girl Scout Contrafacta and Symbolic Soldiering in the Great War

In October 1917 Girl Scouts of the USA answered President Woodrow Wilson's call to America's children by producing a monthly magazine, the Rally. Its articles encouraged Girl Scout leaders and their troops to support the war effort by assisting the Junior Red Cross, sewing bandages for soldiers, and singing Girl Scout–themed rewrites of popular songs.¹ Among the magazine's many parodies, as they are also known, was an unattributed contrafactum—new words to a well-known tune—of "Yankee Doodle," published in the Rally's August 1918 issue (figure 1).² Like many other songs the Rally published during World War I, this song illustrates Girl Scouts' patriotism and wartime contributions.³ However, a deeper consideration of these contrafacta illuminates how Girl Scouts, their captains, and Girl Scouts of the USA negotiated contemporary, competing identities of girlhood during wartime in early twentieth-century America.

While scholars have traced the history of Girl Scouts and Guides in the United States, Canada, Britain, India, and elsewhere, everyday musical practices are often noted in passing or as evidence of wartime attitudes rather than as subjects of research in their own right.⁴ This music-centered investigation frames Girl Scout reworkings of popular songs as a form of protest song, laying bare the ways in which they engaged in direct dialogue with the original texts and situating them intertextually among parody social reform songs. As rhetorical and musical exemplars in a centuries-long tradition of social reform, the songs printed in the Rally—which later came to be known as American Girl—sought to legitimize women's wartime labor and aspirations while reinforcing existing narratives of American assimilation. In the words of Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, Girl Scout rewrites "prefigure[d], crystallize[d] or potentialize[d] emergent, real forms of sociocultural identity or alliance" in the form of a new girls' club.⁵ While these songs adopted soldierly language to promote progressive womanhood, they simultaneously "reproduce[d], reinforce[d], actualize[d], or memorialize[d] extant sociocultural identities" in their upholding of a domestic, primarily white American ideal.⁶

Figure 1.

An unattributed contrafactum of "Yankee Doodle" published in the Rally. Girl Scout Camp Song, American Girl, August 1918, 3. From the collection of the GSUSA.

Used by permission.

The contrafacta printed in the Rally represent a valuable source for recovering a musically silent moment in Girl Scout history. Early evidence of Girl Scouts' musical practices is limited, given that Girl Scout songbooks were not published until after World War I, and the music badge requirements listed in the handbooks—which girls were not required to purchase—give only a prescriptive representation of girls' musical practices.⁷ In addition to tracing the early musical landscape of Girl Scouts of the USA, the parody rewrites in the Rally also help to foreground women's and girls' music making in an era in which male songwriters dominated the publishing industry. These songs acted as a vehicle to imagine two separate but intertwined narratives of Girl Scouts in wartime. One wedded girls and their labor to common domestic feminine roles, while the other positioned girls at the center of their own wartime narratives as soldiers, thereby taking the notoriety of the ubiquitous doughboy and relocating it in girlhood.⁸

First founded in 1912, Girl Scouts of the USA was a girl-centered offshoot of Robert Baden-Powell's British Boy Scouts and an alternative to its more feminized "sister" groups, the British and Canadian Girl Guides.⁹ Five years later, the United States' entrance into the war provided the opportunity to prove the Girl Scouts' value on a national scale and recruit more successfully: membership—of girls and young women aged ten and older—increased dramatically during the war, from five thousand in 1915 to over forty thousand in 1919.¹⁰ Since its first issue, the Rally, which was published primarily for adults and mailed to all registered volunteers and captains, provided updates on the war and promoted girls' and troops' war work.¹¹

Girl Scouts of...