| Summary: | The aim of this study is to examine the gender effects of the introduction of coeducation in the Swedish scout and guide movement in the late 1960’s. Using Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of transcendence and immanence, the study initially focuses on the differences between and characteristics of the two social communities formed by the female-only Swedish Girl Scout Association (Sveriges Flickors Scoutförbund) and the male-only Scout Association of Sweden (Sveriges Scoutförbund). The focus is on how the two associations constructed gender, and how the differences are to be interpreted. It is clear from the study that the transcendence of the individual girl was an important educational goal in the Girl Scout Association’s construction of gender. With the organization’s intellectual roots in the reform-pedagogics’ movement, it stressed independence and self-reliance, and fostered an egalitarian, non-hierarchical outlook on the Girl Scout movement nationally and internationally. The individual Girl Scout’s ability to act morally was presumed to be intrinsic. The male Scout Association, on the other hand, being pedagogically closer to the original ideas of Scouting’s founder Baden-Powell, focused on discipline, adventure, physical training and regulation by external, universal rules in its construction of gender. These differing educational approaches fit in well with the results of the gender based research on scouting. Subsequently, the study compares these results with the new, coeducational programme launched in 1968, seven years after the merger of the two single sex associations into the joint Swedish Scout and Guide Association (Svenska Scoutförbundet). The questions in focus in this part of the study are which characteristics of the respective single sex associations prevailed, and how the merger can be understood from a gender perspective. The coeducational programme mainly reflected the previous values of the male-only Scout Association of Sweden. However, the new programme was not just a brush-up of the previous Boy Scout approach, but rather the thitherto-greatest break with the educational tradition carried on and step by step developed from Scouting for Boys. The need for such radical changes was most likely prompted by the fact that the Boy Scout movement of Sweden was finding itself increasingly out of touch with the post-war society.
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