Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s by Kristine Alexander, and: Our Frontier is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy by Mischa Honeck (review)

Historians of twentieth-century youth organizations have long struggled to untangle the overlapping, and often contradictory, layers of meaning ascribed to organizations by their members. Organization founders, and the professional youth workers who took over from them, tried to apply up-to-date, child-centered pedagogy even as they cast a wary eye at modern youth cultures. Enthusiastic parents—and those who were reluctantly commandeered—came equipped with wilderness skills and concerns about implicit militarism. Children joined with expectations that ranged from starry-eyed enthusiasm to bored compliance. Scholars have tugged at all of these threads in an effort to weave complex histories of the organizations—Boy and Girl Scouts, 4-H Clubs, Camp Fire and Girl Guides—that commanded the allegiance of millions of adults and children across North America and western Europe in the twentieth century. In the past few years, however, historians of youth have begun to insist on another dimension of analysis, the transnational. This work, ably begun by Jennifer Helgren's American Girls and Global Responsibility and Gabriel Rosenberg's The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America, is furthered by the two excellent texts under review.

Kristine Alexander uses histories of Girl Guides from Britain, Canada, and India to explore how the creation of modern girlhood was inextricably bound up in the imperial and nationalist projects that shaped the interwar years. Mischa Honeck, preferring "the lens of the imperial" to the transnational, argues that the Boys Scouts of America set its members loose on a world that was troubled by US expansionist desire, especially when it came thinly veiled with a mask of boyish innocence (5). For both authors, the geopolitics of empire and nation are fundamental to the establishment, growth, and popularity of youth organizations. An obsessive, modern fascination with young people, paired with a concomitant plasticity of the meaning of youth, rendered boys and girls useful partners in what Honeck calls the "rejuvenation" of empire. For Alexander and Honeck, Guides and Scouts, representatives of allegedly "non-political" organizations, perform the work of empire wherever they go. Together these texts lay the foundation for a historiography of youth organizations that places a critical analysis of the international alongside national and local stories.

Alexander chooses to engage the transnational dimension of Girl Guiding by interweaving profiles of organizations in Canada, England, and India. As she rightly points out, the leaders of Girl Guiding and Scouting were immensely—and often naively—proud that their organizations achieved popularity around the globe. Leaders exhorted Guides "'to get to know their own country' and celebrate 'the glory of [their] heritage'" even as they reified an essentialist understanding of global sisterhood that assumed an inherent commonality among young women (127). Alexander sets herself an ambitious task in Guiding Modern Girls—not only to develop and explicate three far-flung examples of Girl Guiding, but to reject the case study approach and instead view British, Canadian, and Indian Girl Guiding as equal nodes of transmission in a dynamic exchange of ideas that work together to create an international program. She adroitly employs Guides from the metropole, a settler society, and a colony to highlight the tensions and contradictions embedded in Guide leaders' assumptions about cultural and racial hierarchies as well as gender roles. Although she is sensitive to the racist provincialism that often imbued the organization, Alexander never allows Guiding's imperial birthright to overwhelm her story. In insisting on girls' ability to adapt the Guide program to their own ends, she creates space for an agentic, even subversive, understanding of the girls and women...