ABSTRACT
In April 1916 the Girl Guide commissioners for London met together in conference. It was not an event immediately significant in itself, but it turned out to be a relaunch of their Movement. Girls had immediately linked themselves to the Boy Scouts on the founding of that organisation in 1908 and had had a separate training provision from the following year. However, growth had been slow before 1914 and numbers had remained relatively small. The outbreak of war had further exposed the structural and ideological weaknesses of the headquarters organisation in London, so much so that in mid-1915 the central executive committee seems to have ceased to function altogether. At this point the movement's founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who had given little time to the training of girls or to his Guiding Movement since 1909, resumed control of its committee and set about its redirection. The London commissioners’ meeting was the first public evidence of this and proved to be the start of a rapid restructuring of the organisation, which itself heralded a great expansion in numbers over the next decade and a half. By 1930 the Association had become an equal partner of the Boy Scouts as one of the two largest voluntary uniformed movements for young people in Britain, each having an imperial as well as an international dimension. 1 At that 1916 conference Baden-Powell laid down the aims and methods of the Girl Guides and it is worth dwelling on them as they expose clearly some of the ambiguities in attitude towards women in early twentieth-century Britain.
