The Forgotten History of the Babysitter

Some people think that the study of girls' literature and culture is somewhat frivolous or pointless. Others, including one grant assessor I recall, feel that researching girls reveals nothing that we don't already know from studies of women. Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell (New York University Press, 2009) is a compelling counter to such ideas. It takes the topic of the teen girl as child minder and, in turn, unravels the history of girls' employment (including their formation of babysitter unions), the development of youth consumer and print culture, theories of child development, and the tension between competing discourses of sexual "threat" in the home and girls as victims of sexual harassment. The book  explores both the lives of actual girl babysitters, who contribute their own little-heard voices —often with indignation about their working conditions—cultural imaginings of the babysitter in film, television and literature.

Forman-Brunell approaches babysitting as "a cultural battleground where conflicts over girlhood—especially regarding sexual, social, cultural, and economic autonomy and empowerment—are regularly played out" (4). She shows that adults were uncomfortable with "modern" girls from as early as the 1920s, when babysitting was a only new concept. In this period, girls were redefining female adolescence, especially through their part in the burgeoning youth commodity culture by wearing make-up, reading magazines, and going to the movies, amusement parks and ice-cream parlours (often on a "double-date"). Girls' new-found independence and interest in socialising at night made the task of caring for other people's children less desirable. Babysitting therefore held little appeal to many American teens at this time. Child development experts also advised parents to be cautious about babysitters, describing these "flirtatious girls" as posing a threat to helpless children.

Barbie embodying the myth of babysitting as
"easy" labour

The Great Depression, as Forman-Brunell argues, provided financial incentive for girls to become more enthusiastic about sitting, as their own families were no longer able to provide generous allowances and constraints on employment meant that other jobs were not available. More than 750,000 high-school aged girls became "mother's helpers" or babysitters, in part, Forman-Brunell explains, because of significant cultural shifts such as the number of teenagers becoming a larger part of the overall population, the growth in high school attendance (which enabled fads to spread rapidly) and the growth of commodity youth culture.

Adults nevertheless remained suspicious of girl babysitters, at first over their contested use of the home telephone, and later over crimes such as raiding food from the refrigerator. There were also numerous urban myths of wild parties, drug use and child neglect. Forman-Brunell punctuates her history with the various ways in which this suspicion has been made manifest through fears about "bobby-soxers" in the '40s, who were scandalised for "pursuing their social and sexual pleasures" (42) and sexually unstable girls who might spread communicable diseases, as well as fictional representations of crazy, murderous vixens out to destroy happy marriages. The "disorderly babysitter" becomes a prominent figure in the 1960s when American culture "simultaneously stimulated girlhood rebellion but also stifled it" (121). While from the 1970s, the babysitter is heavily eroticised in slasher movies, including Halloween, and pornographic novels.

Throughout their history, babysitters have consistently complained about poor and unfair working conditions: adults regularly failed to provide sufficient emergency information, girls were left stranded for hours when parents did not return home at the agreed-upon time, sitters were commonly underpaid (or received no payment at all), and, in the Depression-era, girls were required to complete extensive housekeeping tasks in addition to childcare. Sylvia Plath is perhaps the most famous babysitter of the 1940s who recorded her cynicism about child minding. As a fourteen-year-old she declared that "little children are bothersome beings that have to be waited on hand and food" (56). The discontent among sitters, primarily about overwork in comparison with meagre remuneration, grew to the point where girls began to form their own babysitter unions in the Midwest and Northeast to demand fair working conditions and payment.

Iowa State College "Y" members, 1955

World War II opened up many employment opportunities for girls, not only in after-school positions, but in jobs that lured them away from school altogether. The growth in new occupations for girls, an increasing birth rate, and the movement of many families away from cities (and grandparents) to the suburbs created a chronic sitter shortage. Forman-Brunell shows how many magazines therefore presented babysitting as a patriotic duty for girls, in which a girl might "guard the home front" in a mother's absence.  Parents attempted to find their own solutions, such as sitter exchanges or co-ops where groups of parents would take it in turns to mind each other's children. Inevitably, some parents did not pull their own weight and these co-ops failed to provide the answer to the sitter shortage.

An unexpected aspect of the history of babysitting in America is the cultural support for boy sitters, who were viewed as more reliable and authoritative than their female counterparts. During the Depression, the scepticism about girl babysitters contributed to the popularity of hiring boys to mind children and, similarly, during World War II, the sitter shortage meant that boys actively pursued jobs as child minders. Male college students even formed their own babysitting services, such as Princeton's "Tiger Tot Tending Agency". Male sitters also answered fears about the feminisation of boys while their fathers were busy working 50-hour-weeks: "boy sitters could pry loose the 'skirt-clinger,' and by playing 'rough-and-tumble' games outdoors, instill the manly hardiness experts anxiously promoted" (107).

Ann M. Martin's
The Baby-Sitters Club series

The latter part of the book concentrates on the increasing popular cultural representation of the babysitter from the 1970s and offers some intriguing insights into how this figure comes to be blamed for the destruction of the domestic ideal (especially by maniac male stalkers). For girls themselves, however, series such as the Baby-sitter's Club, which began in 1986 with Kristy's Great Idea, promoted sitting as a means to a career and a demonstration girls' competency. The books also presented sitting as an enterprise among a confident sisterhood of friends, well in advance of the concept of "Girl Power". Forman-Brunell argues that the cultural construction of the "Super Sitter", which the Baby-sitter's club espoused, "appropriated feminist ideologies but neutralized empowerment so that girls would not become too powerful" (177).

The Babysitters (2007), a babysitter transforms her child-
minding business into a call-girl service 

Babysitter: An American History necessarily charts the "fall" of babysitting, as girls became more preoccupied with after-school activities and part-time work in malls than minding children in private homes. While girls have always shown some reticence about sacrificing their social life during their teens, Forman-Brunell includes the perspectives of girl sitters that show that discontent with parents sometimes turns girls away from sitting. This history uses the practice of babysitting as a focal point for mapping changes in girls' education, employment and popular culture across the past 90 years. While babysitting may be a less popular form of employment among American teen girls today, the cultural resonance of the babysitter, however, lingers on, as both a trope of forbidden teen sexuality in pornography and a potential threat to children themselves in the horror genre. 

The Colonial "Dolly" Magazine: Ethel and Lilian Turner's Parthenon

The Parthenon, 11 August 1890

The age of the print magazine may be over, especially for younger readers who are not as familiar with the idea of traipsing down to the newsagent each month, as I once did, to seek out a copy of the newest Smash Hits. Magazines are nevertheless still considered influential on girls in particular. In the past few weeks, a petition to encourage Cleo magazine to stop their practice of using Photoshop to erase blemishes or bodily imperfections from the images it publishes has gathered over 13,000 signatures. Earlier in the year, Dolly, a magazine with a younger readership,  drew criticism for resurrecting its model search competition. The competition ran throughout my girlhood, but was put on hold ten years ago. The editor of the time, Mia Freedman, felt that the quest for cover girls fuelled the pressure that girl readers feel to live up to a particular ideal of beauty and also launched girls into an industry that she described as "all about rejection".

The history of British and American girls' magazines is a developing and exciting field, but the girls' magazines of Australia and Canada have been barely examined. In part this is because fewer magazines were produced in the colonies and those that do exist are not easily accessible. My colleague Kristine Moruzi has spent hours in church archives in order to read some of the Canadian girls' magazines, which were mostly published by religious organisations. Because magazines such as the Girl's Own Paper were readily imported from Britain, there is really only one example of a nineteenth-century Australian girls' magazine, the Sydney-based Parthenon (1889-1892).

The writers Ethel and Lilian Turner, who were still in their teens, began publishing the Parthenon in January 1889. Ethel edited a magazine at her high school, the Iris, but after her graduation soon moved to build a viable commercial venture. The sisters not only edited the magazine, but wrote most of its content, managed subscriptions and sought out advertisers. There are only two complete sets of the magazine in Australia, so when I finally saw copies of the Parthenon I was surprised by the professionalism of the design and the quantity of advertising that the sisters managed to attract as the magazine established itself. It is an astonishing and unique achievement for young women of the period.

Masthead, 1 February 1889

While the Parthenon includes some of the traditional fare of women's magazines, such as fashion and society news, it set out to be most especially a literary magazine. It sought to transform a situation in which Australian readers tended to prefer to import English and American magazines, and to foster locally produced print culture. Though the Turner sisters were trailblazers in their publishing venture, the magazine is not radical in its gender politics. It actively supports better conditions for women journalists and higher education for women (so long as it does not interfere with the duties of home: see article about aligning your tablecloth with mathematical precision), but does not support women's suffrage without reservation. I've written an article recently that compares the Parthenon's attitude on these issues with the feminist women's magazine the Dawn, and ultimately the kinds of beliefs they share about women's careers and responsibilities are not too dissimilar in most areas.

The magazine ran for 39 issues and in its time it featured early versions of some of the works that Ethel Turner would go on to publish during her long writing career, including Miss Bobbie. She was assigned responsibility for writing the serials for the children's page by Lilian, a serendipitous delegation that no doubt contributed to Ethel taking up a lucrative post writing for the children's pages of the Illustrated Sydney News soon after their enterprise could not find a buyer and was forced to cease publication in 1892.

Girls, "Tramps" and "Hookers": Target and the Girls' Clothing Debate

Target leopard print girls' shorts

We hardly ever hear public fretting about what boys are wearing. No railing about whether a boy is dressing in clothing that is not "age appropriate" or that might entice paedophiles. Yet the subject of what girls are wearing, as the recent media attention given to Target's clothing line for girls attests, is one that many parents feel strongly about. The debate began when a school teacher and mother, Ana Amini, posted the following message on Target's Facebook page:

''Dear Target, Could you possibly make a range of clothing for girls 7-14 years that doesn't make them look like tramps … You have lost me as a customer when buying apparel for my daughter as I don't want her thinking shorts up her backside are the norm or fashionable.''

Amini's comments resonated with tens of thousands of parents who "liked" her post or added their own supportive responses. When the social media backlash became a news story, a chorus of parents agreed that many of the clothes on the racks in Target for girls aged from seven to fourteen resembled those of "hookers" and "prostitutes".

The outrage spawned many opinion pieces. Dannielle Miller rightly pointed out that we shouldn't be shaming girls by labelling them "trampy" regardless of what they might be wearing, while others emphasised that it is adults who place any sexualised connotations on clothing choices. The heroine of my undergraduate years, Helen Razer, and Clementine Ford both offered up stories of their own girlhoods in their calls for the virtual lynch mob to calm. Together the articles suggest that for some time girls have innocuously worn revealing clothing, like crop tops or lycra pants, and that girls don't perceive a sexual element to this: it's just like a game of dress-ups.  Razer writes that "kids just see cloth and it is we who see meaning" and Ford proposes that "Clothes can't make children's look 'sexy'. They're inanimate objects." 

I agree with Razer that very young children don't derive significant meaning from clothing—although by the time they hit primary school, you won't find many boys who want to wear skirts or pink in public— but in the age group that is relevant here, from around seven-years-old and upwards, there is a major awareness of the various meanings of clothing. To not see any meaning in clothing, kids would have to be raised apart from our society and culture, with no access to the internet, magazines, advertising, video clips, movies, television or books. 

Branding is just one of aspect of clothing that children understand. I recall desperately wanting a pair of Converse All Stars in grade five but being forced to suffer the indignity of wearing an imitation brand. The shoes were practically identical to the much-longed for Cons, but the logo on the side panel was tellingly different to me and every other kid in my grade. But at least the merciless teasing was reserved for the boy whose family was so poor that he had to wear beaten-up Dunlop Volleys (this was prior to their hipster, ironic reclamation). Even children under 10 know that particular brands are authentic and are "cool" in comparison with generic items or house brands from Big W.

In addition to knowing about how clothing helps to communicate their gender and cultural savvy, girls also understand that clothing plays a part in how attractive or pretty they are seen to be. Cordelia Fine has noted how much more often people compliment young girls on what they are wearing or their prettiness, whereas comments about appearance are rarely delivered to boys. Girls are taught to understand that how they look impacts upon how they are valued. We know that even primary school aged girls are concerned about their weight and understand that being overweight makes them unattractive according to the thin body ideal.

We ought to think about girls' awareness of the importance of being attractive in tandem with the fact that girls are reaching puberty at an increasingly younger age. Breast development—the onset of puberty— is now beginning at an average age of nine years and ten months, according to a Danish study in 2006. Girls absorb from the culture around them what an ideal woman looks like and, as they develop physically, it is unsurprising that they seek to emulate the fashion that is popular for young women, or seen as attractive to boys and men. Girls may have always loved to play with Mum's make-up in the mirror or stalk around in high heels, but the age at which girls actually start wearing these tools that are intended to accentuate feminine attributes seems to be lowering. Or at least mainstream stores like Target seem to offer more clothing that mimics women's fashions without modification for the pre-teen market. So why is it a problem if girls wear all kinds of women's clothing styles? And need this imply sexual readiness to anyone?

What the History of Girlhood Can Tell Us

Richard Westall, Queen Victoria as a Girl

Razer makes a nod to the history of childhood by noting that children were once dressed in the same clothing as adults. Medievalist Philippe Ariès influentially claimed that childhood itself was not "invented" until the modern period, as before this time they were seen, and treated, as miniature adults. (Although there is much debate on this subject, and Ariès' assertion that children were dressed like adults seems to rely on the evidence of family portraits, which is the equivalent of looking at wedding photographs and suggesting that all little boys wore suits in the 20th century.)

Yet, apart from this one comment, the history of how girls appearance has been regulated and how girls are supposed to transition to womanhood have been absent from the discussion. If we look at the policing of girls' dress across the past century and a half, we find that there has always been anxiety about girls being appropriately covered and restrained by their clothing. As I have blogged about previously, make-up was also seen as fraught in the 19th century, especially for young girls who still had their virtue to preserve. (Married women were less susceptible to the risk of damage to their moral character through the sexual associations of cosmetics).

Franz Winterhalter, Queen Victoria, 1842 

When you read girls' books from the nineteenth century, as I do, you'll notice many references to girls "putting their hair up". Young girls wore their hair loose, but when girls of the middle and upper classes reached an age at which they were considered mature enough to be available for marriage they generally wore their hair up in public. This transition carried a great deal of ideological baggage. It was somewhat "trampy" for a girl of marriageable age to continue to wear her long hair loose because of its sensual associations. Just as Islamic women often reserve the sight of their hair for their husbands in the home, so would the proper Victorian woman keep her hair "modest" in public. By putting her hair up, a girl was signalling that she was ready for marriage, but also that she was a good, virginal type. At the same time, a girl might also begin to wear longer skirts. So clearly the protocols for entering womanhood worked to cover more of girls' bodies and contain their sexual appeal, unlike the general movement of today's girls into wearing more revealing clothing and accentuating their sex appeal as teenagers.

These changes in what girls wore and how they styled their hair would usually happen in advance of their "coming out", where they were introduced to "society" and might be presented to suitable bachelors. This would happen at around the age of eighteen, and debutante balls, which were still popular at high schools in Australia until fairly recently, continued some of the old-fashioned traditions associated with a girl "coming out" or being presented to eligible men.

Most cultures have some form of ritual associated with coming of age that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood. In Australia today, most of us don't practice any of the formal rituals that once helped to demarcate girlhood from womanhood and clearly identify the moment of transition. When we see thousands of parents reacting to "short shorts" for girls in Target, perhaps it also owes something to the haziness of where girlhood ends and womanhood begins, rather than solely being a paranoid reaction to perceived paedophilia or sexualisation. I would argue that clothes are more than just "inanimate objects" and that children do understand the meanings that our culture ascribes to them. The confusion among adults, however, about what girls should wear says much about our own uncertainty about girlhood and girls coming of age in a culture that is increasingly fixated on women's sexual attractiveness.

The Empire in the Toy Cupboard: The V & A Museum of Childhood

'Excursions on Land & Sea', panorama, c. 1880

People sometimes comment on the academic study of children's literature and childhood as if it is a frivolous pursuit with no potential to tell us anything about history or culture. It would no doubt make some people gasp to know that some scholars even study children's toys. The toys in this post are part of the current V & A Museum of Childhood's exhibitions, and I've chosen them because of what they might reveal to us about the British Empire.

People don't tend to think of toys as carrying any particular meaning, perhaps apart from gendered ones, but the toys of the past record many complicated ideas, even if unintentionally.

L'Orient or the Indian Travellers; A Geographical and
 Historical Game, c. 1847

The panorama pictured above is designed to look like a toy theatre. The child would roll a long piece of paper along so that its movement gradually reveals a story (a candle could be placed behind the paper to add extra drama to the scene). This panorama bears a crest with the words "The World's Wonders", encouraging the toy owner to see English shipping--in this frame the ship is "full steam" across the English channel-- as a modern marvel. Without being able to see the full roll and with little knowledge of Europe in this period, I am still a little mystified as to why the Pan-Slavic flag sits alongside the Union Jack.

It was seagoing ability that made global exploration and colonisation possible. The L'Orient board game shows three different sailing routes to India, with the watchful eyes of British monarchs from George I to Queen Victoria running across the top. While the rule booklet for this game has been lost, the V & A speculates that players would use a form of spinning top (teetotum) to advance around the squares, with a requirement for the player to match the situation illustrated in each square with the ruling monarch of the period.

Telescopic panorama of the
Great Exhibition, 1851

'All the World at the Great Exhibition' , c. 1860

TheAGreat Exhibition of 1851 was the first World's Fair (today known as world expositions)  intended to exhibit milestones in culture and industry. The 'Crystal Palace' exhibition, as it is also known, primarily sought to show British achievements and those of its colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and India, though there were exhibits from European nations.The telescopic panorama of the Great Exhibition allows a child to peer through nine layers of card to take in a somewhat three-dimensional view of the Exhibition. The ongoing significance of the Great Exhibition in Victorian Britain is evident in the continuing production of products celebrating and recalling the event, such as this puzzle from around the 1860s. The guide picture that shows the child how the puzzle ought to look and the puzzle itself include the caption "All the World and His Wife at the Great Exhibition." The caption is a little unclear to me. Does it mean that the male figure, presumably English, represents "all the world", and his wife has no connection with the imperial realm of trade and industry? Or are the other figures represented, including those in Asian dress, being acknowledged as part of the fabric of that world?                          
         

Junior Lecturer Series, 1900-1910

The importance of the colonies is evident in a set of 'Junior Lecturer' slides that were produced from 1900-1910 in order for British children to become acquainted with the geography and peoples of places such as Canada and South Africa. The possessive title encourages children to see that these countries belong to them as British people. As good citizens of Empire, children ought to acquire knowledge about common practices in the colonies, just as the first explorers and settlers observed, categorised and documented these "new" lands.

The History of Dolls: V & A Museum of Childhood

Jem and Stormer of Jem and the Holograms c.1986

During the past week in London, I've managed to fit in some unofficial research about childhood around my real work at the Bodleian Library and the British Library, where I have been reading girls' school stories. One thing I won't be listing on my university travel diary is a visit to Hamley's, an amazing toy store on Regent St. I braved four floors of frazzled parents, hyperactive kids, and enthusiastic staff demonstrating products in a zany fashion. Though the "zaniness" of the staff interacting with toys seemed confined to the boys' floor, with more sedate happenings on the girls' floor. Although technically they're not "boys'" and "girls'" floors since the "gender apartheid" of such labelling at this iconic store was pointed out last year. 

Nevertheless, the "not-just-for-girls" floor was a pink wonderland of Barbie, fairies and Hello Kitty. Astonishingly, there is even a beauty salon, at which girls can nag their parents into paying for them to have their nails, make-up or hair done, with glitter an optional extra. The salon is called Tantrum, and the website of the concept store doesn't give any sense that a boy would want to tangle with glitter tattoos or nail polish (after all, it's "the ultimate girls' experience): 

Shirley Temple cut-out doll, 1935

The current trends in toys make an ideal contrast to the history of toys and children's play that is recorded in the exhibits at the V & A Museum of Childhood. The Bethnal Green building once housed an odd mixture of items including collections from the Food and Animal Products displays at the Great Exhibition, as well as art works intended to bring culture to London's East End. Since 1973, however, all of the V & A's objects relating to childhood have been held here. With thousands of items dating from the seventeenth century onwards in the collection, only a fraction is able to be displayed. I gravitated toward toys from the nineteenth century and to those of my own childhood in the 1980s, hence the Jem photograph above (though I was more of a Barbie & the Rockers girl, despite it being a blatant copy). All of the periods represented have much to tell us about how childhood, manufacturing and branding have changed, and to reveal the fine strands that connect the toys of the past with those of the present.

Lillie Langtry soap ad

The Shirley Temple cut-out doll from 1935 is a good example of how celebrity crossed over media platforms long before the Olsen twins. Of course, celebrity association with brands began decades before Temple's dimples charmed the world, with the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising showing some of the products endorsed by music hall performer Lillie Langtry from the 1880s. While images of children, such as Millais' Bubbles, were used to sell products such as soap in the Victorian period, Temple is perhaps the first actual child to spawn her own merchandise.

Walking doll c. 1885

It is miraculous that many of the early toys survive at all, let alone with their accompanying packaging and tiny accessories in some instances. The care taken with them indicates the precious nature of children's toys in the 18th and 19th centuries, and differing ideas about their disposable nature today. The skill and patient labour required in the manufacture of many early toys is evident in the walking doll picture here: a mechanical device that made the doll perambulate was concealed beneath her large skirts. The Museum's amazing display of dolls' houses (which were originally the preserve of adults) shows the extent of the painstaking labour devoted to crafting these miniature replicas. 

Amy Miles dolls' house 1890

Though the V & A collection includes a royal dolls' house, the one pictured here from 1890 belonged to a girl named Amy Miles, who is believed to have helped in its construction. There are other objects on display that show how children and parents created or crafted their own amusements. I'm surprised my father didn't design his own board game like the very elaborate home-made game created by one family. A faultless girls' embroidery sampler from the nineteenth century shows the crossover of leisure time with the acquisition of practical skills for homemaking.

There were also amazing displays of optical toys, such as panoramas, shadow theatres and lantern slides, many of which promoted Britain's achievements or explained the customs of its colonies. In my next post, I'll show some of these toys that introduced ideas about the British Empire to children in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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.