by Sheila Ray
She had read every book about Camp Fire on which she could lay hands, including some half-dozen of Elsie Oxenham’s stories. She remembered that in one three girls had begun a private camp of their own, since there was not enough of them to form an official camp. She had decided to try to get up the same sort of thing out here . . . 71
The book in question was evidently Oxenham’s The School Torment (Chambers, 1920), which — given that it was 40 years old and long out of print — seems an unusual book for Audrey, a modern young woman, to have been reading.
Elsie Oxenham also wrote several books which focused on the Guides, notably the series about Jinty; and several about schools which had both Guides and Camp Fire, including The School of Ups and Downs (1918), Patience Joan, Outsider (1922) and The Crisis in Camp Keema (1928). The lengthy comparisons and rivalries indulged in by members of the respective organisations make these among the most interesting of her books. It’s probably fair to say that, of the two, she was temperamentally most in sympathy with Camp Fire; but the argument as to their individual merits eventually runs out of steam when the reader grasps that all these organisations are essentially the same in their aims and their effects on girls. Guides, Camp Fire and Guildry were all amalgams of ideals both progressive and reactionary for women. Like the school stories in which they featured, they promoted an anti-feminist message about women’s nature and role; yet, like the stories, they could also have a liberating effect.
A mixed message
Each of the crafts or skills or achievements for which awards were given in the various organisations can be interpreted as both good and bad for women. “Home Craft”, for example, was expressed in terms which exemplified the general trend in society to extend domestic knowledge throughout the female population, equipping middle-class girls as well as their social inferiors with the necessary skills in the face of a declining servant population. In Guildry and Guides, girls won badges for every conceivable aspect of housework and childcare (for example, recognising three different sorts of baby’s cry); Camp Fire gave beads for the same. Camp Fire’s shameless glorification of the most tedious tasks was particularly insidious:
The work of the home, if it be only the washing of dishes or the making of beds, is dignified and made interesting by being made worthy of recognition and praise when it is well done. The awarding of “honour” beads for doing these tasks well not only keeps them from becoming humdrum and sordid, but it also clothes them in romance, and stimulates new interest.72
The effect was to school future wives and mothers in tasks which a patriarchal society wished to ensure they would continue to carry out in adulthood — but then, of course, without reward. In trying to make women’s domestic role more attractive, all three movements were in tune with the anti-feminist drive to get women back into the home after the First World War. On the other hand, all three showed by rewarding it that women’s work is work and deserves public recognition.
Health, too, another ideal common to all three, had its positive side: the prioritisation, at last, of girls’ right to grow up as strong and fit and free as boys. But the negative side is not far to seek; the new science of eugenics, with its emphasis on the purity of the “race” and its need for healthy mothers to carry it on, underpinned all the strictures on exercise, diet and so on.
And if the idea of Guides and Camp Fire was to turn young women into good wives and mothers of men, the reality was to cement the bonds between women.
As faggots are brought from the forest,
Firmly held by the sinews which bind them,
I will cleave to my Camp Fire Sisters,
Wherever, whenever I find them.73
History has shown that girls and women have repeatedly taken control of movements intended to ensure their subordination and have been able to use them for their own ends. We all negotiate within the social, physical and practical constraints placed upon us. In contrast to the Victorian period, when young women were restricted to relationships within the patriarchal family, the Guildry Maids, Guides and Camp Fire girls of the first half of the 20th century enjoyed a sense of community and “sisterhood” outside the actual control of men, which allowed them to subvert the patriarchal ideology of the movements for their own ends.
Leadership was an important element in sisterhood. Torch Bearers in Camp Fire, Patrol Leaders in Guides, Maids in Waiting in Guildry existed not to rule over but to lead the way so that “your younger sisters may follow in your steps”.74 “The Guide movement was very popular with schools in the first half of the century as a method of teaching leadership,” runs the caption to a photograph of “Early Girl Guides at St James’s, West Malvern” in Gillian Avery’s history of girls’ independent schools, The Best Type of Girl (1991).75 The stories of famous women served as models to those seeking to emulate them.
For single woman in particular — and there were more single women in Britain in 1921 than ever before76 — the skills learnt and qualities developed in girls’ schools and organisations fitted them excellently for participation in adult women’s groups like the Women’s Institutes and, in addition, for leadership of girls in schools, Guides, Guildry or Camp Fire. In Elsie Oxenham’s Abbey books, the “Writing Person” confides to Joy and Jen about the women at the English Folk Dance Society’s evening classes that:
If you talk to them for long, you find they have “girls” in the background . . . Sometimes it’s the children in their day-school classes; most of them are teachers, of course. But very often it’s big girls, Guides, or a club, or Guildry, girls to whom they’re teaching folk-dancing in the evenings, mostly just for the love of it.77
Sisterhood also meant service. However condescending its expression, the reality of carrying out one’s duty to those less fortunate than oneself brought many middle-class young ladies into contact with the way the rest of society lived, as they would perhaps never have done otherwise. The interwar years in Britain mark the move away from Victorian notions of philanthropy towards the principles of social welfare. That women played an important part in the shift may well have been due, in part, to the girls’ movements and the ideas and practical experience that they gave their members.
Finally, “Love is comradeship”.78 All three movements fostered the ideal of friendship, the love of girls for their girl friends and of women for their women friends. Camp Fire with its greater tolerance of emotion provided most scope for the explicit expression of this. Here, for example, is Elsie Oxenham describing the Guardian’s ceremonial dress in The Crisis in Camp Keema (1928):
Across her forehead was a band of green beads, and woven into it was a white glittering pathway with little diamond designs, which stood for people, and which were in couples, as signs of friendship. In the front were two triangular Indian figures of women, hand in hand; a row of these, stencilled in various colours, encircled her skirt, all with joined hands.79
Here were the symbols of friendship, in pairs and rows, the true motivating force behind all the girls’ organisations.
The decline and the achievement
By 1954, when Elinor Brent-Dyer dropped Guides from her Chalet School stories, girls’ organisations seemed to be in decline. In the late 1930s and during the war many countries replaced them with national youth organisations, and there was even talk of doing this in Britain. Camp Fire ceased altogether in Britain at about the same time (I do not know exactly when), though it still exists in the United States in an attenuated form, appealing to much younger girls.80 Other movements began to lose their hold on older girls. As far as the Guides were concerned, membership levels did not really fall as much as one might have expected; the real problem was one of image.
With the dawn of the 1960s a murmuring that had been heard for some time grew to a crescendo. The question was being asked loud and clear “Is the Movement out of date?” Statistics did not appear to support the view that Guiding was old-fashioned as numbers were creeping up year by year . . . The great British public, however, wer
e slow to appreciate the fact that Guiding had been progressing steadily if unspectacularly for many years. “You don’t mean to tell me the Guides are still going? How interesting! You tie knots, don’t you?”81
What is very clear is that the move towards “social realism” in children’s literature, which was anti-middle class and anti-single sex, led to fewer and fewer stories about girls’ organisations being published after the Second World War, as a glance at the catalogues of second-hand dealers in children’s literature will reveal.82 Guildry’s literary spokeswoman, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, gave up both her involvement in the movement and writing about it when she retired to Scotland in 1949.83 Elsie Oxenham’s interest in Guides and Camp Fire waned somewhat earlier when she married off her Abbey girls Joy (who previously, as a young widow, had been a Ranger Captain) and Maidlin (a Camp Fire Guardian).84 Neither organisation features in the three books she published between 1954 and her death in 1959, though to be fair the action in the two last Abbey books focuses on her own fictional girls’ association, the Hamlet Club.85
Guide stories endured longer than stories about any other girls’ organisation. But while a number of novels with a Guiding theme appeared in the 1950s and 1960s (and stories with a Brownie theme into the late 1980s), together with annuals, magazines and diaries, still, the heyday of the genre had passed. Critics must agree that little of this post-war literature matches the classics of Dorothea Moore, May Wynne, Ethel Talbot, Christine Chaundler, Winifred Darch, Mrs Osborn Hann, Catherine Christian et al, dating from just before the First World War to just after the Second. A novel like Kevin McGarry’s Blue Goose East (World Distributors, 1965), for example, one of a series about a “World Guide” called Marty who travels the world in company with her father, a Special Agent for the British government, is realms away from the Guide stories of Elinor Brent-Dyer and Elsie Oxenham. It’s not a bad book, but not only is it apparently written by a man, it involves a lone girl, of necessity separated from her patrol, staying with three boy cousins (for whom she does all the cooking), while helping them to solve a thrilling mystery in Cape Cod. This kind of family-based, mixed-sex adventure tale (which Elinor Brent-Dyer herself tried her hand at, following the prevailing fashion, in her Fardingales and Chudleigh Hold series in the 1950s) illustrates the post-war reaction against the idea of a separate literature for girls; but it also represents a clear attempt to modernise the image of an organisation which was suffering from its single-sex status.
In recent times, the Guides have removed the word “Girl” from their title to try to attract more older young women and have modernised their uniform. In truth, the Guides remain strong, with three-quarters of a million members in January 1994 (down from 800,000 in 1975), surely because they still offer girls and young women something which is hard to find in other areas of their lives today.86
And what is that? The achievement of the girls’ organisations lies in the fact that they offered girls an opportunity to undertake meaningful activity, chaperoned by responsible adults and in the apparent service of patriarchal ideals of women’s role. So much was intended. What had not, perhaps, been foreseen was the degree of confidence girls gained simply from mastering the tasks set for them and from access to male preserves like camping, para-military uniforms and rituals and the acquisition of “masculine” skills. At the same time they laid claim to their own space, rules, symbols and ceremonies. The girls’ organisations were very successful in helping to diminish what had hitherto been seen as “natural” differences between girls and boys in terms of strength, initiative, abilities and interests. They were radical in providing women with leadership roles, models and training.
In short, they gave girls self-assurance, independence and pride in their abilities, qualities which tended to conflict with the notion of women’s subordinate role in society, led many to question it and helped some of them to challenge men’s dominance. And as this was easier to do in a group than as individuals, the most significant aspect of the girls’ organisations was surely the fact that they brought together so many girls and women and gave them a sense of sexual solidarity and common cause as well as an appreciation of and respect for women’s nature, abilities and ways of doing things.
This threat to patriarchal society is of course removed when girls are absorbed into mixed organisations or, as is happening with the Scouts and the boys’ schools, into boys’ organisations on boys’ terms. But the process began long ago, as far back as the 1950s and even earlier, when the attack on single-sex institutions began. Girls’ schools, girls’ clubs, girls’ fiction were all called into question, and progressive thinking advocated replacing them with co-education, mixed clubs and so-called uni-sex (in which boys just happened to dominate) children’s literature. Girls were encouraged to focus their attention on boys, rather than their girl chums, and friendships among women were subordinated to the higher priority of heterosexual love.
One could hardly claim that Elinor Brent-Dyer fell a total victim to this tendency, as the continued existence of the single-sex Chalet School till her death in 1969 demonstrates. Yet she was not immune to it. Len’s mercifully understated love affair with Reg Entwistle and their precipitous engagement, while Len is still at school, may well be seen as a capitulation to the new heterosexual ideal.87 I suppose it could also be read as a return to past values, since Len’s mother married at a relatively young age herself; but Jo had at least seen something of the world and had established herself in a career by the time she decided to settle down with Jack Maynard. Nevertheless, the loss of all-girls’ organisations like the Guides goes hand in hand with the greater emphasis on healthy friendships between boys and girls within the extended Maynard family that characterises so many of the Swiss books. The triplets who dress in shorts and wear their hair in pony-tails clearly have no time for old-fashioned pursuits like Guides. Whereas their mother left school and became Lieutenant to the Tiernsee 3rd,88 Len, Con and Margot are headed for universities and careers. The chain of influence has been broken, as women, gaining greater access to men’s world, abandon women’s.
That Brent-Dyer valued women’s friendships is not in question. When Jo moves to Switzerland she rejoices that she will thenceforth be closer to her three best friends, who live in France, Austria and Swizerland respectively: “they ought to be able to meet much more often now”.89 But the links are now firmly family-based, and the chain of influence, where it exists, lies not from Guider or Guardian to Guide, Guildry Maid or Camp Fire Girl, but from mother to daughter. After 1953, like many people of her time, Brent-Dyer ceased to regard organisations like the Guides as a significant factor in the socialisation of girls. From 1954, again like most people of her time, she came to rely on the family to perform this function, aided and abetted by the school itself — which, isolated in the Swiss Oberland, took on almost the character of an autonomous moral world, and no longer needed Guides.
NOTES
1. Joey Goes to the Oberland (1954), p.83.
2. The Chalet School and Barbara (1954), p.121.
3. The School at the Chalet (1925), p.235.
4. Jo of the Chalet School (1926), p.260.
5. Ibid., p.261.
6. Vronwyn M Thompson, 1910 . . . and then? A Brief History of the Girl Guides Association (Girl Guides Association, 1990), p.12.
7. Helen McClelland, Behind the Chalet School (New Horizon, 1981), p.111.
8. Thompson, ibid., p.12.
9. Friends of the Chalet School Newsletter 22 (Nov. 1993), p.3.
10. The Princess of the Chalet School (1927), pp.109-10.
11. Ibid., p.224.
12. The Rivals of the Chalet School (1929), p.134.
13. Ibid., pp.164-5.
14. The Chalet School and Jo (1931), p.69.
15. Ibid., p.248.
16. The Rivals of the Chalet School, p.111.
17. Ibid.
18. Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (1930), p.165.
19. The Chalet Girls in Camp (1932), p.90.
20. The Exploits of the Chalet Girls (1933), p.273.
21. The New House at the Chalet School (1935), p.48.
22. The New Chalet School (1938), pp.303-4.
23. The Chalet School in Exile (1940), p.142.
24. The Chalet School In Exile (1940), pp.227, 286.
25. The Chalet School Goes to It (1941), p.75.
26. Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School (1943), p.153. “The Robins Make Good” is the title of a story by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer which appeared in Girls’ Own Vol. 57 — another example of Brent-Dyer’s life imitating her art.
27. McClelland, ibid., p.144.
28. The Highland Twins at the Chalet School (1942), p.185.
