Delinquents and Debutantes

Twentieth-Century American Girls' Cultures

Sherrie A. Inness

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780814737651
• eBook ISBN: 9780814737736
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The contributors, including such leading scholars as Vicki L. Ruiz, Jennifer Scanlon, and Miriam Formanek-Brunell, examine myriad ways in which a variety of discourses and activities from popular girls' magazines and advertisements to babysitting and the Girl Scouts help form girls' experiences of what it means to be a girl, and later a woman, in our society. The essays address such topics as board games and the socialization of adolescent girls, dolls and political ideologies, Nancy Drew and the Filipina American experience, the queering of girls' detective fiction, and female juvenile delinquency to demonstrate how cultural discourses shape both the young and teenage girl in America.
Although girls' culture has until now received comparatively little attention from scholars, this work confirms that understanding the culture of girls is essential to understanding how gender works in our society. Making a significant contribution to a long-neglected area of social and cultural inquiry, Delinquents and Debutantes will be of central interest to those in women's studies, American studies, history, literature, and cultural studies.

Part 1 Law, Discipline,
and Socialization

1
Making a Girl into a Scout

Americanizing Scouting for Girls

Laureen Tedesco

The history of American Girl Scouting is a narrative of resistance: Boy Scout founder Robert Baden-Powell resisted admitting girls into his organization,¹ the Boy Scouts of America resisted the rivalry of the Girl Scouts in America, and early Girl Scout “volunteers” resisted being commandeered by founder Juliette Low, who used her deafness as an excuse for ignoring protests (Kerr, “Juliette Low” 87). Additionally, authorized Girl Scout accounts note Low’s abandoning the Baden-Powell name for the girls’ group, Girl Guides, in favor of the “more American” Girl Scouts. The histories of the movement in the biographies of Low and the Girl Scout manuals replay again and again Low’s and the girls’ tenacity in forging an adventurous program for American girls despite opposition or disinterest.² These histories build an ethos of Girl Scouting as a program of girl advocacy: Girls and their adult leaders wrested the program from the unwilling and triumphed.³

Girl Scouting seems to have had a stake in emphasizing the struggle, fighting for the right to play what were once boys’ games. The organization’s self-portrait may help to explain the enduring popularity of Girl Scouting, which has absorbed or outlasted most of the other all-girl outdoor clubs of the early twentieth century. Girl Scout literature from the 1910s and 1920s—roughly the first twenty years of the American movement—promotes the organization as comparable to the boys’ group but self-sufficient and distinctly American, using rhetorical strategies that simultaneously imply links between Boy Scouting and Girl Scouting and establish a separate sphere for the girls. That “separate sphere” is delineated in the homemaking, nursing, and mothering skills taught in Girl Scouting and Guiding. Both the boys’ and girls’ programs present themselves to potential recruits as extending a (male) tradition of chivalry and scouting that transcends cultural boundaries, but the girls’ program incorporates a domestic regime that the boys’ program does not.

The Girl Scout movement’s blend of outdoor activity, self-improvement, and homemaking pursuits addressed the concerns of a number of American groups, mainstream and otherwise, at the dawn of the century: Youth workers and social reformers, progressivists, nature education enthusiasts, physical education specialists, eugenicists, and advocates of domestic science training as well as suffragists all had an interest in training the girl physically, emotionally, and morally, if not spiritually. Spiritual training, in fact, was available in abundance through myriad Christian Endeavor Societies, YWCA work, sectarian girls’ societies, junior Women’s Aid Societies, and other church-based groups. The Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls, like boys’ groups such as the Woodcraft Indians and the Sons of Daniel Boone, touted their new programs as nonsectar-ian, transmitting an “American” ideal that transcended denominational and cultural barriers.

The attempt to provide a culturally unifying ideal, an American model for girlhood, appears in the first Girl Scout handbooks, which taught Girl Scouts to perceive themselves as nearly equal to American boys and more independent than their mothers and the British Girl Guides. The Girl Scout texts combined traditional blueprints for feminine conduct with a newer behavioral model combining robust activity, emergency preparedness, and social agency. Sherrie A. Inness and Sally Mitchell have demonstrated the ways the manuals and fiction for Girl Scouts and Girl Guides reinforced gender stereotypes, teaching girls to aspire to making the home their natural field of activity. In this essay I will expand upon a comment Inness makes in passing, that “scouting in fiction and reality might offer girls a fleeting feeling of agency” (234). Inness analyzes the scouting movement’s complicity in reproducing “suitably socialized bourgeois women” (234). I would like to look at the sense of agency, however fleeting, that the manuals transmitted even while reinforcing traditional domestic constructs.

This essay will analyze the ways the Girl Scout manuals of 1913 and 1916 sought to shape girl readers’ conception of themselves as Scouts: members of a cross-gendered, cross-generational fraternity dedicated to righting wrong and preventing disaster. The manuals told girls that they could inherit a male tradition of chivalry and frontier scouting by strengthening their minds and bodies, practicing rescue skills, and adhering to the Scout law.

The manuals offered girls real-life opportunities to participate in this male tradition. Girls could already imaginatively identify with male heroes of the past in the boys’ fiction they read.⁴ Girl Scout manuals provided the novelty of syntactically linking girls to their boy contemporaries and giving them a syllabus for excelling at boy-dominated activities such as shooting, independent camping and tracking, detective work, and electronics. The manuals supplied technical instructions and references to expert sources (rather than juvenile how-to books), and they suggested that time and practice were all girls needed to acquire life-saving skills and the inner resources to meet any disaster. The books also established a peer group, the Girl Scout organization that sold and studied the books, in which girls could learn and practice the skills necessary for scouting.

Most of the previous work on Girl Scouts and Guides and their manuals explores either their militarism or their domesticity. For example, historians Anne Summers, Allen Warren, and John Springhall have examined the correspondence and executive decisions of the British Boy Scout and Girl Guide programs to determine their commitment to militarism before and during World War I. Richard A. Voeltz has chronicled the expansion of the Girl Guides during World War I, linking the organization’s improved social status to its members’ war work, which gave Guides a reputation for curing girls of flapperdom and of “act[ing] in unrestrained, even bold and brazen ways” (“Antidote” 627).

Examinations of Scouting’s domesticity include an earlier Voeltz essay, which suggests that Guide manuals hold out motherhood and wifedom as the last hope for the British Empire (“Adam’s Rib” 91). Sally Mitchell demonstrates that the first Girl Guide manual (published in 1912) gained a girl audience for instruction in traditional feminine pursuits such as childcare, self-improvement, and cooking by exploiting girls’ yearning for boyish activities and arranging “the more adventurous activities” first in the manual (125). Consequently, the sections on tracking, woodcraft, first-aid, self-defense, and camping precede those on home life, health, and patriotism. Carol Dyhouse also traces a Girl Guide agenda of providing domestic training for girls, but she does not refer to the manuals. Inness brings a brief discussion of Girl Scout manuals into a larger consideration of the socializing agenda of juvenile fiction about Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and Woodcraft Girls.

My argument mediates between the militaristic and domestic focuses of early work on Girl Scouting and its predecessor Girl Guiding. I contend that Girl Scouting’s military overtones enabled the program to attract a girl audience that might have rejected yet another cooking and sewing club. The first Girl Scout manuals, published in 1913 and 1916, demonstrate the organization’s attempts to address the perceived needs of future wives and mothers while at the same time interesting girls and volunteers eager to participate in “male” pursuits. The Girl Scout manuals do this by inviting girls into Scouting, an undertaking seemingly analogous to the “scouting” presented to readers of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys.

Scouting for Boys calls boys into scouting, lowercased, establishing a universal brotherhood with scouts of all ages and religious creeds since the beginning of mankind. Although the Girl Scout manuals make a similar appeal to universality, their preference for the capitalized term Scouting implies a contemporary, institutionally linked group that includes both boys and girls. The Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts were in reality unconnected; Boy Scout officials, in fact, periodically campaigned to stop the girls’ group from imitating the Boy Scouts (D. Macleod 183). Even so, the girls’ manuals sustained an impression of sympathy between the two programs by using the term “Scouts” at least as frequently as “Girl Scouts,” tracing the Girl Scouts’ origin to Baden-Powell’s British Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, and retaining many of the badges and much of the language of Scouting for Boys. The American girls’ manuals, aided by the American use of the name Girl Scout rather than the British Girl Guide, advance an unspoken argument for similarity to the boys’ program at the same time that they assert the program’s suitability for girls and incorporate domestic badges and training.

The Girl Scouts in the United States developed as a direct offshoot of the Girl Guides in Great Britain: Baden-Powell recruited the American-born Low as a Girl Guide leader in England, where she lived after her marriage and subsequent widowhood. She started Girl Guide patrols in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, on a visit to the United States in 1912. Low left the new patrols in charge of friends and family to return to England, and about a year later she revisited the United States to establish the Girl Scouts, a name she then favored, nationally. Low and Savannah naturalist W. J. Hoxie rewrote the Girl Guides’ manual, which Savannah troops had used till then, to reflect American concerns, and Low sold the Americanized book, badges, and uniforms from Girl Scout headquarters in Washington (Johnston 109–11).

Low adopted the name “Girl Scouts” for her American Guide troops when negotiating with the Camp Fire Girls to unite all the girls’ organizations in the United States under one name and organization: the Girl Scouts (Shultz and Lawrence 323). The Camp Fire Girls held out, refusing to accept the Scout Law, which Low insisted upon as fundamental to a character-training program. Low adapted the British Boy Scout Law to develop a code of conduct for Girl Scouts, ten tenets the girls would memorize and promise on their honor to try to obey. In the 1913 manual, the Girl Scout Laws stated:

1. A Girl Scout’s Honor Is to be Trusted.

2. A Girl Scout Is Loyal.

3. A Girl Scout’s Duty Is to be Useful and to Help Others.

4. A Girl Scout Is a Friend to All, and a Sister to every Other Girl Scout no Matter to what Social Class she May Belong.

5. A Girl Scout Is Courteous.

6. A Girl Scout Keeps herself Pure.

7. A Girl Scout Is a Friend to Animals.

8. A Girl Scout Obeys Orders.

9. A Girl Scout Is Cheerful.

10. A Girl Scout Is Thrifty. (Hoxie 4–6)

Except for some changes in capitalization, the laws remained the same in the 1916 manual. Low insisted upon retaining the Girl Scout Laws because she considered them “very clear and practical, and besides they followed the Boy Scout laws closely” (Schultz and Lawrence 323).⁵

Although the Camp Fire Girls refused to accept the Scout Laws and the Girl Scout name, Low was able to unite other girls’ outdoor groups under the Girl Scouts banner, including the Girl Pioneers of America, the Bee Hive Girls, the Girl Guides of America, and the separately organized Girl Scouts of America, all started between 1910 and 1915 (Hinding 746). Low incorporated her group as the Girl Scouts Inc. in 1915; the group retained that name until it dropped the “Inc.” in 1943, subsequently becoming the “Girl Scouts of the United States of America” (Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., Highlights 6, 16, 18). Low successfully established a national Girl Scout organization, in contrast with previous efforts to create a nationwide girls’ character-training program. Other people’s attempts to unite isolated troops calling themselves Girl Scouts failed, probably for lack of a strong central organization and public sympathy. Low was able to supply both, employing the political networking and media saturation strategies Baden-Powell had used to establish the British Boy Scouts.

The daughter of a prominent Southern family with highly placed relatives in Chicago and Washington, Low drew upon her family’s vast political, social, and military connections—her father had been a general in the Spanish-American War and her mother had established a convalescent hospital for American soldiers in Florida—to garner support and draft volunteers for the Girl Scouts. According to her biographers, Low’s status as a member of an influential Southern family gave sanction to the tom-boyish activities Low and her handbook promoted (Shultz and Lawrence 321). Low’s and her mother Nellie Gordon’s ability to make friends and engage in witty repartee also contributed to the success of the Scouts, as did Low’s persuasive tactic of offering a friend a job and then catching a train without acknowledging the refusal. Knowing whom to ask also helped. One coup of Low’s included interesting First Lady Ellen Axson Wilson in becoming honorary president of the organization in 1917 (Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., Seventy-Five Years 10). The White House endorsement, still in effect today, helped the organization gain national prestige.

Low’s program drew opposition, however, from officials in the Boy Scouts of America who feared the encroachment of girls on the boys’ program (D. Macleod 183). These officials envisioned the Boy Scouts of America as reestablishing a standard of manliness, an antidote to the increasing feminization of American schooling and American society (Baden-Powell had similar concerns in England). While delineating a masculine sphere and fitting boys to fill it, national Boy Scout leaders kept a jealous eye on the boys’ preserve: “Lee F. Hanmer of the BSA executive board was adamant that Scouting must be different for boys than for girls” (D. Macleod 46). Hanmer believed boys should be raised to be fighters and girls to be homemakers.

The Girl Scout program, which David I. Macleod recognizes as endorsing the domestic values of other girls’ organizations, nonetheless aroused the ire of some BSA officials as too close to Boy Scouting. In 1911, in fact, three national Boy Scout officials helped establish the Camp Fire movement, which made no attempts to compete with the Boy Scouts (50). Camp Fire Girls founder Luther Gulick, “anxious to maintain sex difference,” considered it “ ‘fundamentally evil’ to copy Boy Scouting” (qtd. in D. Macleod 50). The Camp Fire Girls initially outnumbered the Girl Scouts, but war work during World War I benefited the latter’s public image (183). Girl Scouts plunged into a round of patriotic activities including “working in hospitals, staffing railroad station canteens for trains supporting servicemen, growing vegetables, selling bonds, and collecting peach pits for use in gas mask filters” (Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., Highlights 6). Girl Scouts sold more than $9 million in war bonds, which the U. S. Treasury Department rewarded by minting a Girl Scout Liberty Medal. Membership growth during this period was substantial. The Girl Scout publication Highlights in Girl Scouting, 1912–1996 charts prewar membership at roughly 5, 000 in 1915, without distinguishing between girl and adult members, and then records nearly double that number in January 1918, with 9, 714 members, 8, 400 of them girls and 1, 314 of them adults (6–7). By November 1918, Highlights reports, the Girl Scouts experienced “[a] membership increase of nearly 20, 700” (7). The publication does not say whether the increase dated from January or from the previous year, but by December 1919, the membership count was at 36, 846, so that “the total number of Girl Scouts has doubled in a year” (7).

Noting the war-era boom in Girl Scouting, Boy Scouts of America officials again promoted the Camp Fire Girls (D. Macleod 184). Scout Executive James West tried to get the Girl Scouts to change their program or name, and some BSA officials tried to persuade the Girl Scouts to become Camp Fire Girls. However, the khaki-clad Girl Scouts, selling war bonds and marching in parades “just as the boys did” (D. Macleod 184), attracted media attention and public approval; the group’s membership reached 50, 000 in 1920, finally outnumberin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Law, Discipline, and Socialization
• Part II The Girls Consumer
• Part III Re-imagining Girlhood
• Contributors
• Index