Intrepid Girls
The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girls. Shy by nature, she dreaded her long, unhappy days at school. But a few years later, Farrell found an escape from bullying, the promise of sisterhood, a rising sense of confidence, adventure, and—best of all—lifelong friendship when she joined a Girl Scout troop. Decades later, award-winning author Farrell returns to those formative experiences to explore the complicated and surprising history of the Girl Scouts of the USA.
Drawing from extensive archival research, visits to iconic Girl Scout sites around the world, and vivid personal reflections, Farrell uncovers the Girl Scouts intricate history, revealing how the organization has shaped the lives of more than 50 million girls and women since its founding in 1912. With Farrell as our own intrepid guide, we travel to American Indian boarding schools, Japanese American incarceration centers, segregated African American communities, middle-class white neighborhoods, and outposts throughout the globe. Intrepid Girls unpacks how the Girl Scouts navigated tensions over feminism, race, class, and political differences, carving out extraordinary opportunities for girls and women—even as it participated in the very discrimination it promised to transcend.
For anyone who has ever worn a uniform or wondered about the hidden history behind this iconic American institution, Intrepid Girls will surprise, inspire, and challenge what we think we know about the Girl Scouts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
