ASU Research E-Magazine: Girlhood in America

There is much more to the Girl Scout movement than the mastery of selling cookies on a massive scale. Mary Rothschild believes a comprehensive history of Girl Scouting might provide a window on girlhood in modern America. The ASU professor of history has more than 17 years invested in the project to create that window.

Rothschild currently is completing work on her history of the Girl Scouts. “There are shifting visions of what girls and women in America should be,” she says. “On one hand, this work is a straight narrative history of Girl Scouting. But it also is an inquiry into a changing world of visions for girlhood and women in the 20th century United States.”

Rothschild started looking at the subject in 1974 when she needed a research project. She began by trying to find the records of groups such as the YWCA, Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, and other institutions dedicated to girlhood. “I found nothing,” she says. “Everybody knows about Girl Scouts, yet this organization of 28 million members had never been studied by a historian.”

Work on the history has taken Rothschild across the country and to London. She has compiled notes from more than 100 interviews. She also has done extensive research on the founder of Girl Scouting, Juliet Low, whose birthplace in Savannah, Ga., is a national historical site.

“I’m not going to hold that they are on the cutting edge of social change, but I think Girl Scouts always have worked for good, particularly in terms of integration,” Rothschild explains.

The ASU researcher was a Brownie during her own youth in western Washington. But she never belonged to a Girl Scout troop. “I was a Brownie and just about ready to advance to the Girl Scouts. Then we moved to a farm in a very rural area,” she says. “There was no Girl Scouting there, so I got into 4-H activities instead.”

During the years of research for her book, Rothschild says she found many parallels between the Girl Scout and Boy Scout organizations.

“Both groups are sort of the children of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Boy Scouting in England,” she says. “Still, a level of tension has always existed between the two groups, especially in earlier times when James West headed the Boy Scouts of America. West resented Girl Scouts and felt they should be Campfire Girls. The coldness did not begin to thaw until West retired in 1943.”

The Girl Scout organization is funded by several sources, including membership dues, the United Way and, of course, the sale of millions of boxes of cookies.

“The organization is a big business. And the American influence on the world organization is very strong,” she says. “I didn’t realize just how strong until I began my London research. The world group actually sprang from the American movement, not from England as I first believed.” Rothschild admits that involvement in such a massive project has its drawbacks.

“People will look at my results and say the findings do not reflect their own Girl Scout experience,” she says. “However, I’m really looking at the history of a national program. What someone experienced as the member of, say, a Madison, Wisconsin Girl Scout troop 20 years ago may bear no relationship to what I am writing about.”—John Matthews