A Discussion of the Representation of Masculinity and Femininity in ...

3. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Data Collection
The ‘Scouting for Boys’ handbook had been in my family for many years, having
originally belonged to my granddad, so the task was to obtain the Girl Guiding handbook
from the same year. This was achieved when the Guiding Archives allowed me to view
and photocopy the handbook with them at the Guiding Association Headquarters in
London.
3.2 Data Selection
The handbooks were of too great a length to compare in their entirety given this
study’s constraints on space and time. I initially proposed to analyse four comparable
texts from each handbook, however, this proved to be too much to analyse efficiently
within the study’s space constraints and thus three texts were selected from each
handbook.
Both the handbooks contain elements of what is now considered to be patently
sexist language, but which, at the time of Baden-Powell’s writing, would have been
viewed as less starkly unacceptable. On closer reading of the handbooks, however, it is
apparent that particular excerpts are not so obviously sexist, but do construct and
represent gender differently in subtle ways. It is this subtlety that I wanted to explore
within this study, I thus selected the texts which shared the common themes of ‘loyalty’,
‘smiling’ and ‘doing a good turn’ from each handbook as these did not appear to be
gendered activities in an immediately obvious way (unlike the sections entitled ‘child
nursing’ or ‘sewing’, for example).
The Guiding handbook, unlike the Scouting one, is divided into sections aimed at
all the divisions of the Guiding movement (i.e. the Brownies, the Second Class
Brownies, the First Class Brownies, the Guides, the Second Class Guides, the First
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