So Long God and Liz: The New Australian Girl Guides Promise

Girl Guide salute, as used when making the promise,
demonstrated by a Canadian Guide and Brownie (1985)

For an organisation with a small membership, Girl Guides Australia has attracted local and international media attention in the past week. Though there are fewer than 30,000 girls and women involved in Guiding in Australia today, down substantially from a peak of 80,000 and despite a century-long legacy in which one million Australian women are former Guides, the very idea of changing a traditional organisation still excites public opinion. This week the more than century-old Guide promise was revised to remove reference to a “duty to God” and service to the Queen. The change is clearly intended to stem the decline in Guiding in Australia. This downward trend is not reflected in the United Kingdom where there are more than half a million Guides and one in every three girls of the appropriate age is enrolled in Brownies. For an organisation teetering on the edge of becoming unviable in its current form, the change in the Australian Guide promise is a major, and controversial, step in demonstrating that an organisation built out of British imperialism is still relevant to 21^st century girls in a postcolonial nation.

Across the past decade or more, Guiding in Australia had already begun moving away from many of the traditions that defined it during the mid-20^th century. Uniforms became more casual, with mix-and-match polo shirts and other casual wear. Overall the new look is less reminiscent of a 1970s QANTAS flight attendent crossed with a sailor in full regalia in an attempt to lose some of the daggy connotations associated with being a Guide. In what I thought was a sad moment, the Brownie section of the movement was merged with Guiding such that there is no separate uniform for Australian girls in the younger age group (and no toadstool, Brown Owl, skipping around mirrors, or Woorails, Tintookies or Lullagullis).  

Australian Guiding has been eager to show that it is modern and progressive and a cool place to be. Witness this television advertisement from three years ago that was clearly not impressive to the one Guide who chose to comment on it. The logic of tween and teen years means that anything that girls need be told by adults is "cool" is, in fact, the farthest thing from being so. Even I knew that I was flirting with danger as a Brownie in 1988 and did not make the transition to Guiding when I became too old for my brown dress and yellow skivvy.

Changes in uniform and name, coupled with attempts to promote Guiding on television, seemingly did little to attract more girls to an organisation that was nevertheless making great efforts to provide a relevant and challenging program for today's girls. Guiding in Australia has an image problem. As in the UK, the shifting cultural make-up of Australia's population has prompted some of the changes to Guiding. In 2007, Girl Guides UK introduced a headscarf to the official uniform to encourage Muslim girls to feel welcome in Guiding. Last year a Muslim Guide unit was established in New South Wales in an attempt to draw in girls from communities who have not traditionally been part of Guiding in Australia.

Ismaili (a sect of Shia Islam) Girl Guides circa 1920s holding a portrait
of Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan

Nevertheless, any idea that Guiding was or is a solely Christian organisation is untrue. A substantial number of units, especially in the United Kingdom, had associations with church groups, but an equally substantial number were run from neutral community halls or purpose-built huts. From the beginning, Scout and Guide founder Robert Baden-Powell made it clear that girls must believe in a higher being in order to join, but the notion of God did not preclude girls of faiths other than Christianity from becoming Guides. Indeed, it was the imagined relevance of Guiding and Girl Scouting to girls from every kind of background that meant that it was adopted in one-hundred-and-forty-five countries, with Hindu and Muslim nations among those that formed affiliations with the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts not long after its formation. Guiding began in India in 1911, Turkey in 1923, Lybia in 1958 and the United Arab Emirates in 1973, to give just a small number of examples.

Without denying some of the missionary efforts underlying the establishment of Guiding in some of these countries, or the historical separation of Indigenous girls from white girls in some places, Guiding did set out with goals of being relevant to, and inclusive of, girls of all faiths and races. Olave Baden-Powell, the World Chief Guide from 1930 until her death in 1977 (and Baden-Powell’s wife), visited over one hundred countries to meet with Guides, and spent a substantial amount of time in places such as Kenya.

How curious, then, that it is imagined in 2012 that steps need to be taken to ensure that girls of all faiths and backgrounds are welcome in Guiding: this idea has been at its core for more than a century. The recent change is oriented around the “promise”, a brief paragraph that is generally only spoken once in a Guide’s time in the organisation, unless there is an extraordinary situation in which the promise is renewed (as at the Guiding centenary celebrations recently). In this way, it’s reminiscent of a marriage vow—symbolic, but of little ongoing importance in day-to-day living.

The original British Guide promise read:

“On my honour, I promise that I will do my best-,

To do my duty to God and the King,

To help other people at all times,

To obey the Guide law.”

The promise that I made in Brownies in Australia in the 1980s was very similar:

“I promise that I will do my best,

To do my duty to God,

To serve the Queen and my country,

To help other people,

and to keep the Brownie Guide law.”

It is also how the Australian Guide promise read (minus the word “Brownie”) until the following  promise was adopted:

“I promise that I will do my best:
To be true to myself and develop my beliefs
To serve my community and Australia
And live by the Guide Law.”

Queen Elizabeth II inspects a Girl Guide

Much of the media response has focused on the removal of God and the Queen from the promise. Australian Scouts have the option of mentioning the Queen or leaving her out, but God remains. In the UK, the Guide promise wording is still in the vein of the original promise, but “to love my God” replaces “do my duty to God”. This retains the spirit of Baden-Powell’s intent that Guides should believe in a higher being (though some countries were originally permitted to replace the term God with an alternative), but that this could accommodate girls of any religious faith. While Australian Guiding could have similarly changed “duty to God” to “love my God” to more clearly show the inclusion all kinds of religious belief, they have instead opted for the vague “develop my beliefs”.

I think this wording indicates that there is no longer a requirement to have any kind of faith in a god, rather than being an attempt to accommodate girls of all religious faiths, who have been welcome from the outset. As an atheist, the removal of reference to God does not bother me, but it is intriguing that this change has been presented as a way of accommodating different religious backgrounds rather than acknowledgement of Australia’s increasing secularisation, or at least of declining participation in formal religious attendance. There has been critique of UK and US Guide and Scout organisations for discriminating against atheists in their membership terms, and this change in Australia has successfully removed reference to God in a way that seems more accommodating of religious diversity rather than being irreligious.

Though the removal of reference to the Queen has been of most interest to monarchist and republicans, the changes to the accompanying Guide Law are striking for the way they mark of changes in how we perceive childhood. The original Guide Law was composed in 1910:

"A Guide is loyal and can be trusted.
A Guide is helpful.
A Guide is polite and considerate.
A Guide is friendly and a sister to all Guides.
A Guide is kind to animals and respects all living things.
A Guide is obedient.
A Guide has courage and is cheerful in all difficulties.
A Guide makes good use of her time.
A Guide takes care of her own possessions and those of other people.
A Guide is self-controlled in all she thinks, says and does."

The new Law bears little relationship to the original:

"As a Guide I will strive to:
Respect myself and others
Be considerate, honest and trustworthy
Be friendly to others
Make choices for a better world
Use my time and abilities wisely
Be thoughtful and optimistic
Live with courage and strength."

While it is admirable that girls are encouraged to think about their potential to change the world, some of the deletions are revealing. To be “cheerful in all difficulties” does suggest a kind of outdated model of the uncomplaining housewife, yet the notion of staying positive despite adversity still seems relevant, especially in a world in which children are increasingly shielded from disappointment and its by-product, resilience. In the brief discussion of the changes in the Law in the media, the use of the words “loyal” and “obedient” were seen as especially inappropriate for girls and women. Loyalty is a valuable quality in all humans, and for girls who develop through contemporary hurdles to coming-of-age, such as cyberbullying, being a trustworthy friend is surely still important. “Obedience” is much more fraught in that the notion of women “obeying” their husbands that was embedded in the marriage oath suggested a gendered obligation to subservience. Nevertheless, it is telling that we no longer expect children to “obey” or do as they are instructed by parents, teachers, or community leaders, as in Guiding.  We also lose specific reference to being kind to animals, which is disappointing in an age of factory farming, animal testing, and wholesale destruction of habitat that is entwined with environmental degradation. What better way to "make choices for a better world" than by "respect[ing] all living things"?

I understand that the girls and leaders involved in Guiding all feel some kind of ownership over the organisation and that agreeing on a new promise and Law must have involved inevitable compromise and concession. The intent of the changes are no doubt worthy, in that they aim to make Australian parents and girls see Guiding as a worthwhile place to socialise with other girls and to develop leadership and practical skills that they might not undertake in school. The removal of God and the Queen from the promise removes much that was symbolic of Guiding throughout its first century. The test will be whether a new model of Guiding, without these traditions, retains sufficient meaning and identity, or whether holding on to these traditional signs, in modified form, and with attempts to modernise, as in the United Kingdom, is a better strategy for the survival of Guiding.

'Home and Away: Girls of the British Empire' Exhibition

Screenshot of the Girl Museum exhibition home page

Phew! I survived the 'Colonial Girlhood/ Colonial Girls' conference  and the Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research (ACLAR) conference in Canberra last week. It was a bustling two weeks and was exciting to meet so many historians and literary scholars working on girlhood in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We had not one, but two papers on Girl Guiding! Not one, but two, papers on Irish girls' literature! Regular conferences don't often provide for such girlhood riches.

As part of the conference, Associate Professor Cecily Devereux from the University of Alberta delivered a public lecture, 'Fashioning the Colonial Girl: 'Made in Britain' Femininity in the Imperial Archive'. You can listen to the lecture recording and view the slides here. (It's also not every day that a conference keynote speaker discusses Bessie Marchant's adventure fiction in detail.) Our other special event was the launch of the online exhibition 'Home and Away: Girls of the British Empire', which was curated by Ashley Remer, Head Girl at the Girl Museum, with a team of helpers, including Bronwyn Lowe (a PhD candidate in History who assisted us with the conference organisation).

I am indebted to Ashley for being so willing to prepare an exhibition that related to our conference theme and was so pleased to see such a beautiful looking virtual exhibition. One idea that resonated throughout the conference was the lack of archival material documenting the experiences of actual colonial girls: their voices and writings are most often missing from what we can reconstruct. Kristine Alexander's paper on Girl Guide photography unveiled the untapped resource of photographs taken by Guides, who were encouraged to document their activities with specially manufactured Kodak cameras. She also showed how Guiding captured Indigenous girls in photographs, often topless, in ways that reinforced the civilising mission that underwrote the British Empire. The Girl Museum also uses photographs or, more specifically, photographic postcards, to create a global picture of colonial girlhood. While the girls have been posed and framed by  adult photographers, the collective impact of these images imparts a powerful sense of the lives of girls in a diverse range of colonial sites.

Our conference endeavoured to enable comparison of the differing manifestations of colonialism around the Empire, and so we were pleased to have papers about girls in Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ireland, New Zealand, Malaya and Zimbabwe. 'Home and Away' exhibits postcards of girls from all of these areas (with the exception of Ireland), as well as drawing in regions we were unable to cover, such as the Caribbean and South Pacific.

There are several striking elements that become visible as you travel across the map of the Empire "on which the sun never set" during your virtual tour. The stories of Indigenous girls, whose lives were irrevocably transformed by colonialism, whether in white settler colonies or colonies of occupation, intertwine with those of the British daughters of the families who performed the work of Empire. In the instance of India, for example, a photograph of young girls from Madras in the 1870s (one of whom appears to be wearing wedding jewellery) shares a page with ringlet-haired, British girl Marjory, who poses in front of a distinctly non-European Christmas tree in the Andaman Islands in around 1908. On the exhibition page about Africa, a young Tanzanian woman, Salima, is charged with brushing the hair of "Gwenneth at seven months" as her ayah. Below this image, six-year-old British girl Elspeth Grant (author of Flame Trees of Thika, a book about her African childhood) feeds her pet antelope calf, while wearing what looks like a pith helmet, in Kenya.

As the stories that accompany the photographs explain, colonialism brought with it both oppressive changes for native girls and, within these enforced cultural shifts, some opportunities new to girls and women, like formal education. For British girls, colonialism could enable and excuse modes of behaviour that would not have been acceptable "at home", but images such as that of a girl of perhaps no more than three-years-old wearing her father's Canadian mounted police uniform reinforce the limits of the gendered work of Empire.

The reverse of Ah Moy's postcard

When you click on the photographs themselves, the reverse of a postcard is displayed, on which is printed further information about each image, or speculation about its context where no details have survived. The culture of photographing native peoples for circulation via postcards to the metropolis, as well as the photographing of Indigenous servant girls, is explained throughout these descriptions. While a number of these images are disturbing for their framing according to the anthropological theories of the time, the most upsetting image is perhaps that of Ah Moy, an eight-year-old girl who was reportedly the last slave sold in Hong Kong in 1929. For all of the reasons offered for imperial intervention in India because of child brides and condemned practices such as suttee, the continuation of female slavery in Hong Kong throughout British "ownership" from 1842 to 1922- at which point Winston Churchill announced that the practice would be abolished- showed the varying degrees of concern for colonial girls and their use as justifications for expanding British territory ever further across the globe.