Girl Scout Collection

A time capsule of American girlhood during the first World War, this collection gathers the voices of the earliest Girl Scouts and their supporters from 1917 to 1921. Here are the original pamphlets, articles, and stories that defined a movement: detailed accounts of girls learning to sew their own uniforms, grow victory gardens, tend the sick, and run small businesses. The documents pulse with a remarkable energy, a generation of young women being explicitly prepared for independence, not as an exception but as an expectation. Of particular significance is the war work: Girl Scouts mobilized with a purpose that went well beyond cookies and camping, earning their place in the national effort. The collection also preserves "The Brownies," that mischievous little story that has haunted the Brownie program into the present day. For historians of American women, for anyone curious about where girl power started, this is a primary source that reads less like archival duty and more like finding a lost diary.