Intrepid Girls: Inside the Girl Scouts’ Complicated History
Amy Farrell's new book about the Girl Scouts is part lively social history, part personal reflection. Photo by Dan Loh.
New book explores Girl Scouts rich legacy
by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson
Amy Farrell was a smart, shy and chubby child—and, after her family moved to northern Ohio, she was also the new kid in town. Bullied and not fitting in at her new school, she tried something new—the Girl Scouts. Her film-noir world turned Technicolor bright.
“My parents didn’t know quite what to do with me, but the Girl Scouts absolutely did,” says Farrell, a professor of American studies and women’s, gender & sexuality studies and author of Fat Shame (NYU Press, 2011). “They provided an avenue for all my curiosity—my love of learning—and my drive for achievement. It saved me, as a kid.”
Farrell’s new book, Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA (A Ferris and Ferris Book/University of North Carolina Press) traces the history of the Girl Scouts from a local organization to an international powerhouse that’s served roughly 50 million girls since its founding in 1912. Ahead of a book tour with stops in D.C., Massachusetts, Georgia and Chicago, the book has been named to the influential NYC bookstore Book Culture’s “most anticipated” list.
Complicated histories
The project provided ground for scholarship, since few scholars have studied the Girl Scouts, compared to its counterpart for boys. Farrell’s decade of research took her to the Girl Scout National Historic Preservation Center, formerly in New York City, and to the Girl Scout First Headquarters and Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace Museum in Savannah, Ga. She visited the Girl Scouts’ first international center Our Chalet in Adelboden, Switzerland, and the Pax Lodge in London, and dug into local archives as well—including in her former Ohio hometown.
That yielded little-told stories about the organization’s founder as well as fascinating episodes, such as when the Girl Scouts were (falsely) accused of communist leadings. In some of the darkest corners of American history, Farrell even found the Girl Scouts: troops established in World War II era Japanese internment camps and at residential Indian schools.
"The word 'feminist' was never uttered, but we were learning to tackle challenges, build skills and become independent."
Throughout, the professor of American studies examines ways this apolitical organization has interacted with social-justice movements across time.
While empowering countless girls of color, the Girl Scouts also upheld the segregationist policies of many local councils. And in past decades, Farrell notes, the organization sometimes presented whitewashed versions of American and Girl Scout history. Retracing her own troop’s 1970s trip to the Juliette Gordon Low birthplace in Savannah, which included a stop at the Girl Scout Plantation, Farrell notes that the scouts never learned the stories of the enslaved persons who lived there. That omission became all the more striking when the author discovered that she and her fellow scouts had stayed overnight in the very spot where enslaved people had once lived.
Farrell connects the Girl Scouts’ implicit feminist legacy with her own experiences as a scout, during the height of the second-wave feminist movement. “The word ‘feminist’ was never uttered, but we were learning to tackle challenges, build skills and become competent and independent,” she explains. “For girls who were taught not to take up space, culturally or socially—and were told that some things were too scary or dangerous for them to do—it was empowering to hear, ‘You can figure this out.’ ”
The gift of competence
Ultimately, although Farrell is critical of the Girl Scouts, Intrepid Girls is warmed by its author’s enduring affection. She’s grateful for the skills, friendships and sense of protection and possibility that scouting provided her.
That appreciation even shines through in the book’s cover. It pictures Farrell’s Girl Scout badges—carefully preserved, with her own stitching, and carried by the author through decades and across several cross-country moves.
“The Girl Scouts was important in my life, and it was not just about finding community and a lifelong friend. It was about building competence,” she says. “That’s something I come back to now, when I’m teaching. I try to frame learning new skills not as winning something, but as becoming competent in it. And that is a very good thing to become.”
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Published October 14, 2025