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

5. ROBERT BADEN-POWELL
In this section, I briefly outline aspects of the life of Baden-Powell so that the
discourse behind his writing can be located in a social context for the purposes of
analysis later.
Baden-Powell was educated in Charterhouse, a public school in late Victorian
Britain, when “the public schools emphasized those conservative virtues of conformity
and obedience that would best guarantee the continuation of the status quo” (Rosenthal:
1986:91). These ‘virtues’ were valued by Baden-Powell who later argued that the aim of
the Boy Scout movement would be “to give the mass of boys something of the sense of
honour and tone that are at present the attributes of the Public School boy” (1910-24,
British Scout Archives: cited in Rosenthal: p91). Devising the Scout Law was a means
by which he could engender a degree of conformity within the movement and implant a
corporate ideology which aimed to create the uniformity of character that he wanted
(Rosenthal: p105).
After school, he joined the army in which he stayed for thirty four years. He
became famous for his role as commander in the defence of Mafeking during the Boer
war, and was celebrated as a hero on his return home (especially as the popular press,
set up in 1896 in the form of the Daily Mail, had been able to publish images of the war
(Black, 2000)). In the same way that the public school ‘values’ absorbed him, so too did
those of the military life. The regulatory way of life was all Baden-Powell knew and he
“would have found difficult the notion that civic society might properly esteem values
different from those cherished by the army” (Rosenthal: p192).
Baden-Powell developed through two very controlling institutions: the public
school and the army. The ideals he took from them implanted his sense of discipline
and patriotism, which he believed ensured good citizenship. Thus the youth movements
he founded were inevitably ideologically invested with the ideals of these institutions too.
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