Wittenberg University

Wittenberg Professor Writes First Global History
of Girl Scouting and Guiding

Springfield, Ohio — Wittenberg University Professor of History Tammy Proctor has written a global history of Girl Scouting and Guiding titled Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, which comes out Sept. 25. Published by Praeger/ABC-CLIO, the book becomes available as the organization in Britain kicks off the celebration of its 100th year.

Commissioned by the British publisher to write a 100th anniversary "global" history of Girl Guiding/Scouting for its centennial in 2010, Proctor performed much of her research in the Girl Guiding/Scouting archives.

"Their archives in London were great places to work," Proctor said. "The only big challenge was trying to get the voices of children themselves. I relied on logbooks and oral histories, and I traveled to several places in Britain in order to get some variety in experiences."

The book presents not only a unique global history, but also a scholarly examination of the popular and voluntary youth movement. Proctor examines Scouting and its efforts to define women's roles through 100 years of social change, and the movement's growth from a national to international organization.

"With groundbreaking research and lively writing, Scouting for Girls not only provides the first objective history of an important hundred-year-old international organization but also considers challenging society," writes Sally Mitchell, Emerita Professor of English and Women's Studies at Temple University.

Proctor's interest in youth and youth movements began when she entered graduate school.

An unofficial group of Girl Scouts from 1909 in Bristol with their leader, Miss Wise.

"My advisor had written an influential book on youth movements, and I was surprised to find that little academic work had been done on the Boy Scouts and virtually none on the Girl Guides," Proctor said. "That made it easy to decide to work on those movements."

Proctor was also asked by a friend to help organize a conference at Johns Hopkins University on the history of Scouting for the Boy Scouts' 100th anniversary in 2008.

"We decided to publish papers from the conference to mark the centennial and to provide a snapshot of some of the academic research on Scouting," Proctor said. The book, which marked 100 years of Boy Scouting, Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movements First Century, was published July 2009.

Proctor has been teaching world, modern European and women's history at Wittenberg since 1998. She received her bachelor's degree in journalism and history from the University of Missouri in 1990 and her master's and doctoral degrees in history from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She has also published on the First World War, including Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (2003).

Written by: Phyllis Eberts
Photo published by kind permission of GirlguidingUK

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