The Girl Scouts helped Amy Erdman Farrell survive a lonely, bullied childhood.
Decades later, the historian said the organization still needs to reckon with the parts of its past it taught her not to see.
Farrell will discuss that history, laid out in her award-winning book Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA, at Illinois Wesleyan University next week.
Farrell holds a professor and chair of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The book was published last October by the University of North Carolina Press and won the Ray and Pat Browne Award for best monograph in popular and American culture. After six months of bookstore events, Farrell said, she has turned her attention to colleges and institutions.
Farrell said she hopes the book speaks to their questions about equality, race and whether or not institutions as lauded as the Girl Scouts can be trusted.
A gap in the history books
Farrell said an estimated 50 million living Americans count themselves as Girl Scout alumnae. But when she began the project, she found little scholarship on the organization, compared with a large body of work on the Boy Scouts.
“I think it’s the old story, where things that are connected to girls are really dismissed and not seen as worthy of our attention,” she said.
Even during her research fellowships, she said, colleagues often laughed uncomfortably when she described the project.
“Why would I have chosen something so niche, or something so inconsequential, something so silly — Girl Scout cookies?” Farrell said, describing their reaction.
Then she would explain. The organization is chartered by Congress. Every first lady since Edith Wilson has served as its honorary president. It ran troops in Japanese-American incarceration camps during World War II and in federal Indian boarding schools. And it was accused of communism in the 1950s.
“It has been at the forefront of social change at the same time as it was also sometimes holding back social change,” said Farrell.
Farrell was a Girl Scout herself. After her family moved from Cleveland Heights to Akron, Ohio, in 1971, she was bullied at school. A troop gave her a safe space, a lifelong best friend and a new confidence.
‘Intrepid,’ not ‘feminist’
The book’s title is deliberate, Farrell said.
“It’s not called Feminist Girls because Girl Scouts, from its origins, really walked a really narrow tightrope,” she said.
The organization encouraged girls to be courageous, competent and adventurous, and in recent decades to pursue science and technology.
But it avoided calling itself feminist, Farrell said, because it feared losing families and inviting attacks from the political right.
“You want to encourage girls to get into these things, but you don’t want to actually claim the space of feminism, because it’s too dangerous,” she said.
She saw that caution firsthand when she interviewed Frances Hesselbein, who led the Girl Scouts as national executive director from 1976 to 1990.
Farrell said when she asked about leading the organization at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, Hesselbein shook her head.
“And then I realized it was me using the word feminism,” Farrell said. “She said, ‘Oh, you don’t use that word.’”
That strategy led the organization to reach families who might otherwise have kept their daughters out, she said. One colleague told Farrell her family would never have allowed her to join if they had known how feminist it was, and she credits scouting with helping her become a scientist.
But the approach also had limits. Scouting gave Farrell a safe space as a child, she said, but it never helped her understand the harassment she faced at school.
“It comes with strengths, and it comes at a cost, too,” she said.
‘Dangerous innocence’
Farrell said that cost was sharpest on race. Her troop was almost entirely white, and the girls were taught to see that as natural.
In 1975, her troop traveled to Savannah, Georgia, birthplace of Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low. Her research later showed the site had kept Black and white troops apart when it was dedicated in 1956. On the way to Savannah, the girls stayed at a camp outside Charleston, South Carolina, that they called the “Girl Scout Plantation,” where she said they were encouraged to imagine themselves as Southern belles.
Working with a Dickinson student, Farrell later traced the site’s history as a rice plantation. They found records of the enslaved people held there, including girls about her age when she visited, and an overseer’s journal.
“It took my breath away, even as I knew all of that material intellectually, to actually realize where we had been staying, which was right on the slave quarters,” she said.
Farrell calls it an “active education in forgetting.”
“We were taught not to ask things,” she said.
The book documents how, for decades, Black girls had to fight their way in. Under national policy, Black troops generally could form only under the oversight of white local councils. Camps were largely segregated, and when Black troops were admitted, it was often only at the end of the season.
The book also traces the founder’s family wealth to slavery and the cotton trade. Low’s family owned enslaved people and ran cotton and railroad businesses, and her husband was a cotton merchant.
Farrell said the Girl Scouts has had inclusion policies under various names since the 1930s, and one council CEO in South Carolina recently told her the organization now has an explicitly antiracist policy. What’s still needed, she said, is a public reckoning with the past.
“I think that we can’t move forward until we acknowledge this past,” she said.
In a previous interview with WGLT, Girl Scouts of Central Illinois CEO Jennifer Sedbrook said the council’s membership remains predominantly white, and that doing better may mean strengthening community partnerships and going “where girls are.”
Farrell said that starts with acknowledging history. Without that, she said, families of color are left with their own stories of an organization where they weren’t welcome.
Girls-only spaces
Farrell said girls-only spaces still matter, including now that the former Boy Scouts of America, renamed Scouting America, accepts all genders.
She said the Boy Scouts spent decades suing the Girl Scouts over the word “Scout,” arguing that girls using it was emasculating.
When the Boy Scouts announced in 2017 that it would admit girls, its leaders said the organization’s values were important for both boys and girls.
Farrell said the national organization was driven to accept girls by falling membership and the cost of sexual abuse lawsuits. The organization reached a $2.46 billion abuse settlement in 2023.
“It didn’t do it because it was actually caring about girls,” Farrell said.
She was careful to say she wasn’t judging individual families or leaders, and noted that many older girls belong to both groups.
Farrell said her larger concern is safety.
“If they can’t keep boys safe, how can they keep girls safe?” Farrell said.
The Girl Scouts focuses on the question of growing up as a girl in a male-dominated culture, even when it won’t use the word feminism, Farrell said.
“If Girl Scouts won’t say it, they’re thinking about it," Farrell said.
Amy Erdman Farrell speaks at 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5, in the Beckman Auditorium of the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University, 1 Ames Plaza, Bloomington. Bobzbay Books will sell copies of Intrepid Girls for signing in the Beckman Rotunda after the talk.
