From “Bringing up Good Children” to “Making a Difference in the World": Examining Gender, Motherhood, and Career in a Century of Girl Guide Manuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
You’ve eaten their cookies and heard their campfire songs and seen the sashes full of badges. But have you ever thought about which badges girls are asked to earn, and why? In light of the 100th anniversary of the Girl Guides of Canada in 2010, this presentation questions previous interpretations of the organization’s history. Gender historians have long considered Guiding to be a bastion of prescriptive femininity, citing the organization’s stated aim of teaching girls womanliness. Meanwhile, historians focusing on the Boy Scout movement have placed Scouting’s genesis within the context of a crisis of masculinity, leaving no space for a discourse of femininity and writing Guiding off as Scouting’s uninteresting younger sister. A closer look reveals the situation to be far more complex. Through the analysis of a representative sample of Guide manuals, handbooks, and program books throughout the twentieth century, and drawing on research done about Girl Guides in the UK, this presentation seeks to complicate both the movement’s historic origins and its relationship with traditional femininity. Topics examined include the imperialist origins of Guiding and Scouting, the influence of the Baden-Powell family over Guiding manuals, the use of historical Canadian heroines in Guide manuals, the manuals’ mixed messages about gender roles and future careers, the evolution of Guiding over the course of the twentieth century, and the Girl Guides of Canada’s pro-feminist redefinition in the early 1990s. The presentation contends that Guiding in fact had a complex and nuanced relationship with gender, motherhood, and career options.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".