In the 1970s, women were slowly gaining recognition, training and representation on the Cub Scouting level. In 1974, Catherine N. Pollard of Connecticut filed a state level discrimination complaint against the BSA, because they refused to let her register as Scoutmaster for her troop, a leadership position she had filled for three years. Female Scoutmasters are still in the minority, but ever more women hold positions on the committees that run scouting. Merit Badge Counselors, Treasurers and Advancement chairpersons are frequently female. Females are teaching training sessions, running the monthly Scouter meetings called Roundtables and doing a variety of other important jobs for BSA.
There was a time when females could not earn Scouting’s highest awards or hold jobs as Scout Executives. Those days are a faint memory now. Scout Executives are full time employees of BSA who administer the daily business of the national, regional, council and district levels of the organization“Boys will be boys” is an old saying and one frequently heard in Scouting circles. Men understand in ways that women can’t what it means to be a boy and to survive the process of becoming a man. It is important for boys to have that experience and to have men as role models. It is less certain, but anecdotally true, that women in the neighborhood of boys being boys will bring a different point of view.
A case in point: where there are rocks on the ground, boys will pick them up and throw them. This is a universal truth that every mother knows and watches for. A group of men with a troop camping out found themselves dealing with a boy who needed stitches after the universal truth came to pass. There were no female leaders on said campout.
No one can prove it wouldn’t have happened if a female leader had been present. The point is this, at the next committee meeting, the discussion was not about what could be done to prevent the recurrence; it was about boys being boys. Female Scouters present in the room were appalled.
The real world contains not just males, but also females. It behooves young men to learn to deal with the different world view of women. It is no longer true that their future boss will definitely be a male. It is no longer true that all their college professors will be male. It is still true that most of them will date or marry a female and interaction with females on a daily basis is an absolute certainty.
The oldest of male Scouters still see the advent of women in the Scout troops as unnecessary, even intrusive. Discrimination against women in the BSA has gone underground and it is not generally a public topic of discussion. Female Scouters find varying degrees of acceptance depending on the troop or even the area of the country in which they find themselves.
It would be difficult to run the BSA without women now. Camping and hiking are not activities that only men enjoy, but women frequently know as much as or more than their male counterparts. Modern families often have no male in residence at a home. Families with two parents with both working struggle to find the time to volunteer with the Scouts.
It is difficult enough to fill the volunteer needs of the organization without eliminating 51% of the available adults. Women add a new dimension to Scouting. Now if only the sisters and daughters could participate, the whole organization might find itself in the twenty-first century.
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