Description
Book SynopsisBy analyzing how the Girl Guide movement sought to maintain social stability in England, Canada, and India during the 1920s and 1930s, this book reveals the ways in which girls and young women understood, reworked, and sometimes challenged the expectations placed on them by the world’s largest voluntary organization for girls.
Trade ReviewGuiding Modern Girls unveils how the early Girl Guide movement carved out spaces of intergenerational female homosociality that were neither fully empowering nor exclusively oppressive. On a larger scale, it gestures at the untapped potential buried in the history of youth organizations for charting the stony and serpentine trails that led to the emergence of a global modernity.
-- Mischa Honeck, Historisches Institut, Universitat Duisburg-Essen * H-SOZ-KULT *
Kristine Alexander makes a significant contribution to the intertwined histories of girlhood, imperialism, and the international Girl Guide movement.
-- Kristine Moruzi * Canadian Historical Review *
Alexander paints a complex image of the organization, which was the epitome of the simultaneously dynamic and traditional nature of British society in the interwar period, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Girl Guides through this thought-provoking transnational study.
-- Sian Edwards, University of Winchester * Historical Studies in Education, Vol. 31, No. 1 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1 Guiding’s Beginnings: Victorian Antecedents and Early Twentieth-Century Growth
2 Guiding Girls toward the Private Sphere: Training for Homekeeping, Mothercraft, and Matrimony
3 “We Must Give the Modern Girl a Training in Citizenship”: Preparing Girls for Political and Social Service
4 Moulding Bodies and Identities in the Outdoors: Religion, Gender, and Racial-National Narratives at Girl Guide Camps
5 “The Mass Ornament”: Rallies, Pageantry, Exercise, and Drill
6 Imperial and International Sisterhood: Possibilities and Limits
Conclusion
Note; Bibliography; Index
