Scouting And Guiding In Britain

This book explores the prevailing role of rites of passage, ritual, and ceremony in contemporary children’s lives through the lens of modern-day incarnations of uniformed youth movements. It focuses on the socialising ritual and customary practices of present-day grass-roots Scout and Guide groups, asking how Britain’s largest and best-known uniformed youth organisations employ ritualised activities to express their values to their young members through language and gesture, story and song, dress, and physical artifacts. The author shows that these practices exist against a backdrop of culturally-constructed beliefs about what constitutes the ‘good child’ and ‘good childhood’ in twenty-first century Britain, with in-movement practices intended to help children develop positively and prepare for social life. The book draws on case study accounts of group performances, incorporating the voices of children and adults reflecting on their practices and experiences.

Arising in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements came into existence in Britain in an era of social and political unrest and were initially the center of intense controversy. Through the years, Guiding and Scouting broke down class, race, and gender distinctions and helped youth cope with an emerging mass culture and allowed boys and girls to stretch gender and generational boundaries. Using official documents, logbooks, diaries, and oral histories, Tammy Proctor explores the formation of the Scouts and Guides and their transformation during and after World War I. The interwar period marked a departure for the two organizations as they emerged as large multinational organizations that targeted not only adolesents, but also smaller children and young adults.

This volume examines scouting—the largest voluntary movement for girls—in its first century of existence, seeking to understand how the organization has lasted and how it has changed. Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts is the first global history of Girl Scouting and Guiding that addresses the successes and pitfalls of the 100-year-old organization from its beginning in Great Britain through its international expansion. Since 1910, millions of girls worldwide have been exposed to Scouting. While much has changed since 1910, the core values of Scouting/Guiding are still recognizable in today's programs, namely the empowerment of girls through adventure, character-building, home skills, outdoor pursuits, and active learning. But has Scouting's very willingness to change with the times undermined its original ideologies and fundamentally changed the movement? As Girl Scouts and Guides move into their second century, their challenge will be to remain true to their founding values while remaking themselves on a regular basis. Given the changing nature of today's societies and the serious problems girls face on a daily basis, Girl Guides and Girl Scouts will need to be true to their motto, "Be Prepared," in order to march forward successfully into the future.

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

Across the British Empire and the world, the 1920s and 1930s were a time of unprecedented social and cultural change. Girls and young women were at the heart of many of these shifts. Out of this milieu, the Girl Guide movement emerged as a response to modern concerns about gender, race, class, and social instability. In this book, Kristine Alexander analyzes the ways in which Guiding sought to mould young people in England, Canada, and India. It is a fascinating account that connects the histories of girlhood, internationalism, and empire, while asking how girls and young women understood and responded to Guiding’s attempts to lead them toward a “useful” feminine future.

Conceived by General Sir Robert Baden-Powell as a way to reduce class tensions in Edwardian Britain, scouting evolved into an international youth movement. It offered a vision of romantic outdoor life as a cure for disruption caused by industrialization and urbanization. Scouting’s global spread was due to its success in attaching itself to institutions of authority. As a result, scouting has become embroiled in controversies in the civil rights struggle in the American South, in nationalist resistance movements in India, and in the contemporary American debate over gay rights. In Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa, Timothy Parsons uses scouting as an analytical tool to explore the tensions in colonial society. Introduced by British officials to strengthen their rule, the movement targeted the students, juvenile delinquents, and urban migrants who threatened the social stability of the regime. Yet Africans themselves used scouting to claim the rights of full imperial citizenship. They invoked the Fourth Scout Law, which declared that a scout was a brother to every other scout, to challenge racial discrimination. Parsons shows that African scouting was both an instrument of colonial authority and a subversive challenge to the legitimacy of the British Empire. His study of African scouting demonstrates the implications and far-reaching consequences of colonial authority in all its guises.

Despite the fact that Scouting has touched the lives of a quarter of a billion boys and girls and their leaders around the world in the past century, its history has been largely ignored. Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement’s First Century is the first book to discuss the history and principal themes of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements on an international scale. Inspired by presentations at the ground-breaking 2008 Johns Hopkins University symposium, "Scouting: A Centennial History," the authors examine the world's greatest youth movement through the diverse experiences of its members and their organizations. From Muslim Scouts in Wales to French Scouts in Syria to Girl Guides in colonial Kenya, Scouting has responded to the challenges of international expansion and transformed itself to address cultural, political and social diversity. Scouting Frontiers focuses particularly on the intersections between Scouting’s origins and its transformations over the last century as it faced frontiers of nation, empire, religion, race, class, and gender.