Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. By Tammy M. Proctor (Santa Barbara: Praeger, ABC-CLIO, 2009. xxi plus 189 pp. $44.95)
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jsh/shr080
ISSN1527-1897
Autores Tópico(s)Gender Roles and Identity Studies
ResumoTammy Proctor's Scouting for Girls is the first nonofficial history of the worldwide Girl Guide and Girl Scout movements, from the organizations' beginnings in the 1910s to the present day. Although much of the book focuses on British and American material, it does make substantive forays into sources from a dozen other countries on several continents. This vast geographic sweep paired with a century-long time frame (all covered in fewer than 150 pages of text) makes for a rather breathless introductory tour of one of the world's largest voluntary youth movements. It is no mean feat to wrest a coherent narrative from all these disparate stories, yet Proctor mostly pulls it off with good grace. She manages this by invoking “International Friendship”—a highly touted Girl Guide/Girl Scout value—as the thematic glue to bind the work together. The trickier needle for Proctor to thread is the question of audience. Scouting for Girls was obviously written with a dual purpose: to rectify an egregious gap in the history of childhood and youth, and to capture the interest of Girl Guide and Girl Scout partisans gearing up for their groups' centennial celebrations. All the names and dates, as well as the doings of major players such as Sir Robert Baden-Powell, his sister Agnes, and wife Olave, founders of the British Scout and Guide movements, will appeal to enthusiasts eager to learn more of “their own” history. (And, truly, there is a lack of scholarship. For example, Juliette Lowe, indomitable founder of U.S. Girl Scouting who died in 1927 is still waiting for her long-overdue biographical turn.) Social historians might be put off by so much institutional history, but they shouldn't be. For only in such detail can readers begin to get a feel for the vibrant, local manifestations of this diverse global organization. Scouting for Girls could not possibly flesh out all of these variations, but it does offer tantalizing glimpses and, perhaps even more importantly, suggests numerous avenues for future research.
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