Girl Guides

Girl Guides and Girl Scouts are a Scouting movement, originally and still largely for girls and women only across various national associations. These organisations evolved from as early as 1908, with girls wishing or demanding to take part in the then grassroots 'Boy Scout' Movement.

In different places around the world, the movement developed in diverse ways. In some places, girls joined or attempted to join Scouting organisations. In other places, girls' groups were started, some of them later to open up to boys or merge with boys' organisations. In other instances, mixed groups were formed, sometimes to later split. In the same way, the name Girl Guide or Girl Scout has been used by groups at different times and in different places, with some groups changing from one to another.

The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) was formed in 1928 and has member organisations in 145 countries. WAGGGS celebrated the centenary of the international Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting Movement over three years, from 2010 to 2012. There are now more than 10 million Guides worldwide.

There has been much discussion about how similar Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting should be to boys' Scouting programs. While many girls saw what the boys were doing and wanted to do it too, girls' organizations have sought to avoid simply copying or mimicking the boys. Julie Bentley, appointed chief executive of the United Kingdom Girl Guides in 2012 and head of the Family Planning Association since 2007, described the Girl Guides in an interview with The Times as "the ultimate feminist organisation". Even when most Scout organisations became mixed-gender, Guiding has remained separate in most countries to provide a female-centred programme. For example, the UK Scout Association introduced mixed-sex provision in 1976 with the Venture Scout programme, for all age-based sections in 1991 (optional), and became fully co-educational in 2007. Girl Guiding in the UK remains limited to girls. In regard to transgender girls, they are allowed to join Girl Guiding, and transgender women are allowed to become leaders (Brown Owls).

Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell was a British soldier during the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). While Baden-Powell was the commander during the Siege of Mafeking, when the town and British soldiers were besieged by Boer soldiers, he noticed how young boys made themselves useful by carrying messages for the soldiers. When he came home, he decided to put his Scouting ideas into practice to see if they would work for young boys, and took 21 boys camping on Brownsea Island, near Poole in Dorset. The camp was a success, and Baden-Powell wrote the book Scouting for Boys, which covered tracking, signalling, cooking, etc and outlined a Scout method for an 'instruction in good citizenship'. Soon boys began to organise themselves into Patrols and Troops and called themselves "Boy Scouts". Girls bought the book as well and formed themselves into Patrols of Girl Scouts while other girls and boys formed mixed Patrols.

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