Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA

Women’s and gender studies scholar Farrell (Fat Shame) offers an elegiac, if somewhat dry, tribute to the Girl Scouts that probes the organization’s controversies as well as its successes. Farrell, who joined the Scouts in the fourth grade, recalls feeling her troop was a place of nurturing safety: “I could continue to be a child, free of the pressure to look good for boys, encouraged to continue ‘playing.’ ” But her copious research tackles uncomfortable truths. These include the gender and racial inequities that undergirded the organization’s founding—she tracks the early pushback from the Boy Scouts (who thought being associated with girls caused a “lowering of prestige” that might lead their own organization to be “classed as sissies”) and the Girl Scouts’ initial white racial homogeny. She notes, though, that troops of Native American girls and Japanese American girls (at Japanese internment camps!) existed as early as the 1940s, leading to the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy targeting the Girl Scouts for its liberal attitudes on race. Farrell traces the ways politics continue to affect the organization today, profiling politically motivated separatist groups on both sides (the American Heritage Girls teach “Christ-centered” family values; the Radical Brownies offer a badge in Black Lives Matter). While somewhat academic and flat in its presentation, this contains copious historical tidbits that will intrigue Girl Scouts aficionados. (Oct.)