White Heat, Guide Blue: The Girl Guide Movement in the 1960s

Abstract

This paper examines the reinvention of Britain's largest uniformed youth organisation, the Girl Guides Association, during the 1960s. It will be argued that the movement's leaders initiated a successful reform process that both analysed and assimilated predominant social mores and tastes amongst British youth. In doing so, they forged a modern, voluntary organisation with mass membership that has remained an integral part of mainstream youth culture. Recent historiography has questioned many perceived orthodoxies regarding the social and moral revolutions associated with the 1960s. The renaissance of Guiding, a movement designed as a rampart for the social order, casts doubt on popular portrayals of the 1960s as a decade of youthful radicalism.