A History of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts: Brownies, Rainbows and WAGGGS by Julie Cook

Book Review by Ruth A Symes

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If your ancestor was a Girl Guide at any time since the inception of the movement in 1910, this book will enable you vividly to imagine what that experience would have been like. Cook skilfully interweaves Guiding history with the wider histories of women’s progress towards emancipation, and the two World Wars. Each decade is rigorously inspected . In the 1960s, for instance, the well-being of children had been so improved (by the establishment of the National Health Service  in 1948), that, for many, puberty now started at an earlier age. This, coupled with the advent of distracting television and pop music, led to a decline in popularity for the Guiding movement amongst teenage girls.

Written during the Covid pandemic, this book does not purport to investigate archival resources in any depth.  You will not, therefore, find information on individual guides, guide leaders or guiding troops within its pages. Nevertheless, other resources familiar to family history research are successfully employed: extensive interviews with former Brownies and Guides on both sides of the Atlantic, and local and national newspaper reports, for example. The result is a refreshingly different look at the youthful activities of our ‘plucky’ foremothers as they negotiated the sexual politics of the twentieth century.

[This review appeared in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine UK]