Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Racism also shadows the early years of the Girl Scouts of America, another women’s organization that was formed in this era. It was founded by Juliette Gordon Low in 1912, two years after the Boy Scouts, and like its male counterpart, it initially had a policy of racial segregation. Though neither explicitly restricted membership to white children—an independently run scout troop for African American boys was set up in North Carolina almost immediately, in 1911, and a social worker named Josephine Holloway created one for girls in Nashville, in 1924—the leadership of both organizations stubbornly resisted Black participation until well after World War II. The scouting movement also had at its very center a problematic appropriation of Native American culture, which has survived right down to the present day. This aspect of the movement had its roots in an organization called the Woodcraft Indians (later renamed the Woodcraft Rangers), founded in 1902 by Ernest Thompson Seton. His thinking was right in line with Theodore Roosevelt’s worship of the “strenuous life,” ideally lived out of doors. Seton’s innovation was to adopt Native American society (as he imagined it) as a template for preparedness.