Friday, January 16, 2004

True Confessions of a Girl Scout

In January, when most sane people are nobly cleansing their holiday-binged bodies with clear soups and anti-oxidant teas, I find myself lumbering fatly through a house full of cookies – boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of cookies with bright little girls’ faces on them and names like Samoas, Do-Si-Dos, Tag-a-longs, and Thin Mints. They are crammed in our cupboards, teetering on our tables, and jammed in bags to be delivered to neighbors. They dance across my eyeballs during restless REM sleep, when I wring the sheets and moan, “No ... no more cookies!” Yes, I am a Girl Scout leader, and, with two Scouting daughters currently in peak cookie-distribution mode, I am on the anti-Atkins’ plan – all carbs, all the time.

I admit, the frenzy of cookie-sales tests the limits of my devotion to Scouting. I do believe heartily in the goals of Scouting – after all, who could find fault with Scouting’s commitment to teaching respect for oneself and others, respect for the environment, being friendly, helpful, courageous, and strong? And I’ll grudgingly concede that our girls learn plenty from selling those zillions of cookies, as they set their own budget goals for the troop and learn with horror how much activities actually cost in what one scout called “the big grown-up world.” But I’m not much of a role model of entrepreneurial enthusiasm for my daughters or my troop. When we go door to door, I wear the same pained, apologetic expression I’ve seen on the faces of friends when their children come to call, peddling Catholic school chocolate bars or ungainly tins of caramel corn for the school band.

Perhaps because I experience these moments of ambivalence about some aspects of Scouting life, I find myself vulnerable and defensive about others’ attacks on Scouting. I’ve had a friend say, “don’t those quasi-military uniforms give you the creeps?” and I confess that while I bask pridefully in my children’s scouting accomplishments, the march of badges and star-shaped pins across their little chests sometimes strikes my pacifist mother’s eye as not quite ... seemly for children. And while the call of tradition in Girl Scout camping has its merits, I cringe a bit at the appropriated Native American names issuing from my daughter’s mouth when she tells stories of life at Camp “Shawadasee” and the “Owa” troop house. This is tradition that harkens back to a simpler time, to be sure – a time when whites didn’t think twice about inventing an “Indian” culture that suited the marketing of organized camping a century ago.

Not long ago I was at a university-sponsored lecture by a well-known feminist, and during happy talk in the lobby afterward, a colleague studied the round green pin on my coat lapel with the gold initials “G.S.” “Cool!” she said, “Does G.S. stand for Gender Studies?” “Nope,” I said, bracing myself; “It stands for Girl Scouts. I’m a leader.” There was a pause while the chicly dressed scholars around us sorted through this information, and it was clear that the Scouts’ version of girl power was, in the black turtleneck world of gender theory, a bit, well, square. This particular colleague was gracious, even warm, about Scouting, but others have not been. “Isn’t it all about sewing and cooking?” one complained; another remembered her own Scouting experience as little more than lanyards and lectures on hygiene.

But those are largely complaints about a bygone era. Today’s Girl Scouting ain’t your mother’s Girl Scouts, and it ain’t even your childhood Scouts, most likely. Today’s Scouts still master knot-tying and fire-building, but sewing projects have largely given way to learning astronomy and how to fix bicycle chains. (These girls will grow into women who will change their own oil without blinking, and then twirl wrenches on the tips of their fingers and tune up the engine.) Girl Scouting actually strums the same chords as the fanciest gender theory – the conviction that we can reinvent what it means to be a female person. Girl Scouting today places values on skills that press at the constraining limits of traditional feminine gender codes, and question worn conventions. This would please American founder Juliette Gordon Lowe, whose own emergence in 1912 from a sad, bad marriage and widowhood into the energizing world of Scouting is self-reinvention lore that even the youngest Scouts understand.

Recently, the Singing Sands Council, of Northwest Indiana and Southwest Michigan, has experienced an explosion of membership, with troops reaching out into after-school programs that bring Scouting’s girl power message to increasingly diverse populations. Who, but the Grinchiest anti-cookie Atkins devotee, could grump about this news?

Meanwhile, I’m planning on perfecting a new diet consisting entirely of good coffee and Thin Mints. In name, at least, I think that counts as slimming, don’t you?

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on January 16, 2004
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