If you been have n following this series you know that writing this tour has taken much longer than I'd hoped, but enjoy this third sneak peek!
The Scouts on the Confederation Building - 229 Wellington St (10 mins)
The Confederation Building is a large government office that was completed in 1932 and designed in a picturesque Chateau style. What people may not know is that there are some sculptures of boy scouts carved into it above one of the doors. According to a display at the old Scouts Canada National Museum in Ottawa, these sculptures were placed on the building to recognize the location of the former national headquarters once stood and to thank the Scouts for their national service during the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.
So why am I showing you the carvings of members from another youth group? Well, Guiding and Scouting used to share a much closer relationship, even almost sharing a name. Due to the popularity of Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell organized a rally to bring the Boy Scouts of England together. What he didn’t expect was a patrol of Girl Scouts to show up and demand their place in the movement, having created their own makeshift uniforms, sneaking into the rally, and using Baden-Powell’s book Scouting for Boys for their own scouting adventures. The re-telling of this day has become a popular Guiding activity. However, we tend to focus on the victory of the Girl Scouts standing up to Baden-Powell at the Crystal Palace rally in the fight for their place in the movement. We don’t recognize the disappointment of those same members for losing the title of Scouts.
“A Guiding Life” is an autobiography by Nesta Maude Ashworth that shares her memories of life as an early Girl Guide and her service on the English home front in the First and Second World Wars. In 1975, at the age of 81 and after a stay in the hospital, Nesta was encouraged by her Guiding community to write down her story. Her writings were later collected, edited, and organized by her daughters, Mary Ashworth and Margent Spencer, and then published by FriesenPress in 2015. Nesta was actually at the Crystal Place rally and was one of the Scouts who stood her ground against Baden-Powell in 1909 asking to be recognized as Scouts. Her book is a great account of the day but one area where I wish she went into more detail was her feelings about the name change from ‘Girl Scouts’ to ‘Girl Guides’. Baden-Powell changed the name because he feared boys would resent girls using the word ‘scout’. He also felt that the word ‘guide' had a more traditionally feminine meaning as it was the girl’s role to guide society towards the better. Nesta says on page 26 that “we accepted the new name but not the fact that the chief was no longer our chief, for he had handed leadership of the infant movement to his sister”. It’s clear that she was frustrated by the name change but it was overshadowed by her frustration with Agnes taking over leadership. Throughout the book, she’s very much about women's empowerment and promotes the capability of girls in all fields of life. Having the name changed and then Baden-Powell being taken away must have been demeaning.
We know that the name change wasn’t a fully accepted choice from Kristine Alexander’s book “Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s”, as it says that many early English members were disappointed and angered by the forced name change as they had been attracted to Girl Scouts because of their access to experiences that normally they would be unable to access because of their gender. While still being able to do the camp programming they loved, this name change came with the promise of shifting the organization to more domestic and childcare skills. According to an article by Ann Robertson, a Girl Scouts of America historian, across the sea in America, Juliette Gorden Low, founder of the Girl Scouts of America, called her first troop the Girl Guides but quickly changed it to ‘Scouts’ after her youth members stated that they preferred. Gorden Low followed their lead and fought for the name to be changed. Early Girl Scout leaders continued to defend use of the name ‘Scouts’ stating they had equal rights to it since women won voting rights in the States in the 1920s.
It’s possible that the debate of ‘Girl Guides’ vs ‘Girl Scouts’ did happen in Canada. The first Guide group in Canada did use the book ‘Scouting for Boys’ by Robert Baden-Powell and two Girl Guide information pamphlets written by Agnes. The company was officially registered in England on January 11th, 1910 by Agnes Baden-Powell, so the name of Guides may have already been cemented and they could have been unaware of the name debate happening in the States. But given that Mary Malcolmson, Canada’s first Guide leader was a member of the St. Catharines’ chapter of ‘Independent Order of the Daughters of the Empire’, a group founded in 1900 to promote and support the British empire, it could have been a given that they would follow the English lead and adopt the name of ‘Girl Guides’. I wonder how the movement would have changed if we had been the ‘Girl Scouts of Canada’.
Thanks for Reading! - Em
(This tour is written in the fall of 2022 and any Guider who leads it should do additional research to make sure the information is up to date and still culturally appropriate.)