Girl Scouts of the USA: Race, Feminism, and American Empire

FAIN: FT-291268-23

Amy Farrell
Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA 17013-2896)

Research and writing leading to a book on the history of the Girl Scouts of the USA, exploring its struggles over race, civil rights, feminism, and the legacies of empire and colonialism.

This proposal seeks funding for an NEH Summer Stipend to complete the writing of the final two chapters of my book, Girl Scouts of the USA: Race, Feminism and American Empire, which is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. This book focuses on the little studied yet extraordinarily important history of the Girl Scouts of the USA, from its origins in 1912 through the present, exploring its complex struggles over race, civil rights, feminism, and the legacies of empire and colonialism. Focusing on particularly evocative moments of its history, such as the founding by Juliette Gordon Low, the presence of Girl Scouting in off-reservation American Indian boarding schools and Japanese American incarceration centers, the battle by African American women for inclusion, and accusations of Communism, this project illuminates the ways that the Girl Scouts worked to shape girls’ and women’s lives in the U.S. during decades of extraordinary cultural and political change.