From “Bringing up Good Children” to “Making a Difference in the World": Examining Gender, Motherhood, and Career in a Century of Girl Guide Manuals

Abstract

You’ve eaten their cookies and heard their campfire songs and seen the sashes full of badges. But have you ever thought about which badges girls are asked to earn, and why? In light of the 100th anniversary of the Girl Guides of Canada in 2010, this presentation questions previous interpretations of the organization’s history. Gender historians have long considered Guiding to be a bastion of prescriptive femininity, citing the organization’s stated aim of teaching girls womanliness. Meanwhile, historians focusing on the Boy Scout movement have placed Scouting’s genesis within the context of a crisis of masculinity, leaving no space for a discourse of femininity and writing Guiding off as Scouting’s uninteresting younger sister. A closer look reveals the situation to be far more complex. Through the analysis of a representative sample of Guide manuals, handbooks, and program books throughout the twentieth century, and drawing on research done about Girl Guides in the UK, this presentation seeks to complicate both the movement’s historic origins and its relationship with traditional femininity. Topics examined include the imperialist origins of Guiding and Scouting, the influence of the Baden-Powell family over Guiding manuals, the use of historical Canadian heroines in Guide manuals, the manuals’ mixed messages about gender roles and future careers, the evolution of Guiding over the course of the twentieth century, and the Girl Guides of Canada’s pro-feminist redefinition in the early 1990s. The presentation contends that Guiding in fact had a complex and nuanced relationship with gender, motherhood, and career options.