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

7. CONCLUSIONS
7.1 Discussion of Findings
Baden-Powell, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, represented girls
and boys differently, and represented their actions and activities within the Scout and
Guide movement in ideologically loaded ways. As a middle-class, public school
educated and military man, Baden-Powell represented his ‘view’ of the world, and
therefore the view of the dominant bloc, through the discourses of the handbooks for
Scouts and Guides. However, it cannot be assumed that Baden-Powell was aware of
how ideologically invested his discourse practices were as “Ideologies built into
conventions may be more or less naturalized and automatized, and people may find it
difficult to comprehend that their normal practices could have special ideological
investments” (Fairclough, 1992: 90). The youth movements he founded were based on
the institutional practices he took from public school and the army and thus represent the
reproduction and naturalization of the dominant bloc’s attitudes and ideals. As Foucault
(1984) argues, “any system of education is a political way of maintaining or modifying
the appropriation of discourses, along with the knowledges and powers which they carry”
(p.123: cited in Fairclough, 1992: 51). Thus, the Scout and Guide movements, as
systems of education, further naturalized the dominant bloc’s social perceptions of
gender and the notions of what constituted appropriate masculine and feminine
behaviour. In so doing, women were further subordinated by such practices in the way
that they were positioned to achieve citizenship through marriage and motherhood, while
men were positioned to achieve citizenship independently of their marital status.
Bristow (1991) looked at the representation of boyhood in pieces of literature
dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and reported that “no other
document promulgates such a range of British imperialist ideals of boyhood than Baden-
Powell’s ‘Scouting for Boys’” (p.171). The present study also recognized the mutually
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