Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside: Creating Good Citizens, 1930-1960 by Sian Edwards (review)

In this engaging and useful analysis, Sian Edwards joins recent publications such as Kristine Alexander's Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s and Mischa Honeck's Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendency to advance our understanding of powerful Anglo-American youth organizations like Boy Scouts and Girl Guides into the 1930-1960 era. Previous in-depth studies emphasized the origins of such voluntary institutions from 1908 to 1929, so these new works allow us to see if and how these vital cultural agents evolved with broad historical shifts such as the Great Depression and World War II. Edwards occasionally contrasts post-1920s Scouting and Guiding with their initial two decades, such as their declining emphasis on imperialist rhetoric, but a more systematic comparison between the eras would have helped illuminate if these youth organizations stayed true to their founding principles or dramatically departed from them. Like most such studies, Edwards primarily tells a top-down narrative of what adult leaders thought and tried to teach through analyzing organizational publications and records. Framing the book around chapters on work, home and family, community and nation, and constructive leisure appropriately emphasizes these organizations' underlying motive to prepare youth for responsible adulthood. The author convincingly argues that the organizations channeled these concerns through a central ideal of the good British citizen that was contrasted at various times with anxieties over the unemployed teen, juvenile delinquent, or the flamboyant Teddy boy. While the author demonstrates the centrality of gender to these organizations, the role of ethnicity and racial inequality is less scrutinized here.

Edwards's balanced analysis of the Scouts and Guides with that of the rural Young Farmers' Club [YFC] and the working-class Woodcraft Folk [WF] organizations helps provide an important corrective to our predominantly urban, middle-class conception of British youth and their voluntary organizations. The WF's increasingly vocal pacifism and socialism contrasted starkly with the nationalist jubilance of Scout, Guide, and YFC members, especially during World War II. Inclusion of the YFC enables Edwards to identify a rural strain of femininity that incorporated domestic preparation with continued emphasis on dairying and raising poultry as well as managing business aspects of the family farm. The author argues that the urban, middle-class Girl Guides, however, shifted away from their 1920s–1930s emphasis on varied professional careers to narrower housewife training and advice on sex and romantic relationships by the 1950s.

While the book delivers on unpacking the evolving dimensions of British citizenship and gendered youth training in the mid-twentieth century, the particular meanings of "countryside" for these different organizations, cultural groups, and historical eras is less clear. Edwards often blurs or equates such terms as countryside, rural, farm, outdoors, nature, and camp. The author tends to subsume the nature-based camping and hiking of the Scouts, Guides, and WF into the rural YFC's focus on family farms and agricultural labor. Aside from farm work as a last-ditch alternative to unemployment and some promotion of gardening during wartime, however, other studies of American and British Scouting and Guiding have found relatively little emphasis on rural farm landscapes. Like American Boy and Girl Scouting, Edwards's own sources reveal some tone of disdain among British Scout and Guide leaders for the rural farm environment, such as a 1933 Scouter article noting that "farm work in this country may not appeal to all [Boy] Scouts," and a 1931 article in The Guide apologizing for the negative prospects of farm life for modern girls: "No, the pay isn't much for the plain assistants [in poultry farming], but who wants money in the country?" (128, 143). Engagement with the historiography on German outdoor youth organizations like the Wandervogel and Hitler Youth and their notions of "Heimat," as well as research on American and Canadian youth camping...