- Opening
- Who knows what the Eagle Scout is? (show of hands)
- Who knows what the Gold Award is? (show of hands)
- The Gold Award is the Girl Scout equivalent to the Eagle Scout, an award that honors Girl Scouts for achievement in leadership and civic engagement
- It has changed over the years, but one thing has been kept constant: its unwavering belief in girls’ ability to achieve.
- Thesis: The Girl Scout Gold Award argues that teenage girls are equally capable of making a difference in their community as teenage boys through exigence to the Eagle Scout, the kairos of the modern feministic movement, and the commonplaces present in the requirements to earn the award.
- Exigence of a girls’ equivalent to the Eagle Scout
- Juliette Gordon Low modeled the Girl Scouts after the Boy Scouts, including the Golden Eaglet, the equivalent of today’s Gold Award, as a response to the Eagle Scout
- Original requirements for the Golden Eaglet involved both domestic skills and skills that were considered “men’s jobs” at the time, which angered some Boy Scouts (Rothschild).
- Like the Eagle Scout, the Golden Eaglet required a mix of various skills, many of which overlapped
- The two awards require about equal amounts of leadership and civic engagement
- Kairos of the modern feminist movement
- Girl Scouts’ motto is “building girls of courage, confidence, and character”
- Gold Award “made feminist history happen” by getting women elected to Congress (Sheber).
- Modern Gold Award recipients fight for feminist causes, such as one Girl Scout in Saint Paul who earned it for creating a support group for LGBT teens (Lopez).
- Girl Scouts advertising says that “Gold Award Girl Scouts are inspiring leaders who are working on a broad range of the most challenging problems facing our world today” (“Gold Award”).
- Ideologies/commonplaces
- Earning the Gold Award involves seven steps, each of which contains a commonplace that fits into the wider ideology (“Gold Award”).
- Identify an issue
- Investigate it thoroughly
- Get help and build your team
- Create a plan
- Present your plan and gather feedback
- Take action
- Educate and inspire
- The commonplaces present include the idea that teenage girls should be civically engaged in their community, the idea that civic action occurs through collaboration, and the idea that making a difference involves taking action on an issue
- The wider ideology is that Gold Award candidates, teenage girls, are capable of making great change with the right project.
- Earning the Gold Award involves seven steps, each of which contains a commonplace that fits into the wider ideology (“Gold Award”).
- Exigence of a girls’ equivalent to the Eagle Scout
- Conclusion
- Women have made great strides since the Golden Eaglet was first introduced in 1916
- This generation of Gold Award recipients will continue the fight for equality, taking it farther than the original Girl Scouts could ever imagine.
Works Cited
“Gold Award.” Girl Scouts, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, https://www.girl scouts.org/en/our-program/highest-awards/gold-award.html
Lopez, Kathryn Jean. “The Cookie Crumbles: The Girl Scouts go PC.” National Review, Oct. 2010. http://old.nationalreview.com/23oct00/lopez102300.shtml
Rothschild, Mary Aickin. “To Scout or to Guide? The Girl Scout-Boy Scout Controversy, 1912-1941.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 1981, pp. 115–121. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3346224.
Sheber, Victoria. “How the Girl Scouts Helped Make Feminist History Happen in the Midterms.” Ms. Magazine, Nov. 2018, https://msmagazine.com/2018 /11/16/girl-scouts-helped-make-feminist-history-happen-midterms/