The Politics of the Golden Eaglet: Girl Scouts of the USA and the Making of an Ideal American Girl

Josephine Daskam Bacon’s 1918 silent film The Golden Eaglet holds legendary status among contemporary Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA), part of the permanent exhibit at the Girl Scout National Historic Preservation Society. More than nostalgic vintage cinema, however, The Golden Eaglet is actually an extraordinary window into the ideological and affective origins of the largest and, arguably, most important U.S. organization for girls, founded in 1912 by the wealthy, white Southerner, Juliette Gordon Low.  

            Low largely transferred the goals of the British Girl Guide movement to the newly born American Girl Scout movement, simply transposing the title of the original guidebook, How Girls Can Help to Build Up the Empire to How Girls Can Help Their Country.  Nevertheless, the shift to the term “scout” from “guide,” strongly condemned by the Boy Scouts who claimed the masculinist term for themselves, signaled a new kind of agency and possibility for girls, even if Low never publicly broached the terms “feminist” or even “suffragist.” 

            Through a reading of The Golden Eaglet, this paper explores the contours of the ideal American subject Girl Scouts was attempting to create and the crucial place of racialized identities, class divisions, and the affective power of “helping others” within that construct. This powerful narrative of “helping others” allowed the Girl Scouts to evade challenges posed both by the more conservative Boy Scouts, but also constructed a liminal, exclusionary space for the African American, indigenous, immigrant and poor troops who sought for more inclusion in the nascent organization.