Guiding Modern Girls

Alexander paints a complex image of the organization, which was the epitome of the simultaneously dynamic and traditional nature of British society in the interwar period, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Girl Guides through this thought-provoking transnational study.

Kristine Moruzi:

Kristine Alexander makes a significant contribution to the intertwined histories of girlhood, imperialism, and the international Girl Guide movement.

Mischa Honeck, Historisches Institut, Universitat Duisburg-Essen:

Guiding Modern Girls unveils how the early Girl Guide movement carved out spaces of intergenerational female homosociality that were neither fully empowering nor exclusively oppressive. On a larger scale, it gestures at the untapped potential buried in the history of youth organizations for charting the stony and serpentine trails that led to the emergence of a global modernity.

Jane Nicholas, author of The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, The Body, and Commodities in the 1920s:
Kristine Alexander offers up a razor-sharp analysis of Guiding in the interwar period as a force for shaping conservative modern girlhood in Canada, India, and Britain. This is a brilliant book.

Karen Balcom, author of The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930-1972:
Impressively researched and enlivened with the voices of local leaders and even some young guides, Guiding Modern Girls draws attention to guiding as an important childhood institution that connected Canadian children (across race and region) to a transnational network that extended throughout the British Empire.