The Boy Scouts and the `Girl Question'

Abstract

This article examines the attitude of the early Boy Scouts movement to sexual relationships between boys and girls. The Scouts were founded by Baden-Powell in 1907 to try and reverse the perceived physical and moral deterioration of British youth. Though he was not involved with the subsequent `girl problem', the episode was in keeping with his attempt to instil order and respectability in British youth, especially the working class. Going further than other Edwardian youth organizations, a number of Scoutmasters proposed that girls were unsettling and distracting boys and contributing to the decline of the nation. In part they perceived the Scouts and the Guides as a means to constructively occupy British youth, given the temptation of `walking out'. Although the attempt to stop boys and girls going out with each other was abandoned by the Scout Association in 1917, Baden-Powell took up the issue of heterosexual relationships in his writings of the early 1920s. His advice to boys recognized sexual pleasure but warned of the dangers of certain `girls' and counselled against pre-marital sex. The article concludes by reiterating what the episode reflected: class snobbery, fears surrounding the city, the invention of adolescence, a fear of female sexuality, eugenics and social purity.