When Leah Vola’s son Jack joined Cub Scouts two years ago, his younger sister Audrey started tagging along to pack meetings. From the start, Audrey showed interest in the den activities and would happily join if there were extra supplies, her mom says. But when it came to more formal outings, it was less clear whether Audrey should participate.
“It’s sort of this weird gray area,” Vola says. “She knows the scout oath, she knows the scout law, she’s been out selling popcorn, but she’s never been formally recognized like my son.”
There are multiple parents in Vola’s pack with daughters who regularly attend meetings and participate with their brothers. The welcoming, family-friendly atmosphere is part of what attracted Vola to the group, but the fact that the girls don’t have the same status as the boys creates “sort of an interesting dynamic,” she says.
The Boy Scouts of America recently announced that starting in 2018 it will allow girls to join its Cub Scout program for the first time in the organization’s more than 100-year history. Girls who join can work toward the prestigious rank of Eagle Scout, an award often used to bolster college applications and even professional resumes. For Vola — who had been encouraging her daughter to join Girl Scouts next year as a way to have an activity all her own — the announcement came as a welcome surprise. Beyond giving Audrey and others like her the opportunity to be fully-fledged members of a group that they already enjoy, it makes things easier for parents. “Instead of selling popcorn and cookies, we’d do just one fundraiser,” Vola says.
Last month’s announcement marks the latest move toward inclusion for the Boy Scouts, a famously conservative organization with deep religious ties. The organization banned openly gay scouts until 2013 and prohibited openly gay scout leaders until 2015. Transgender children were not allowed to join ranks until earlier this year. Alex Tyms, CEO of the Glacier’s Edge Council, says the decision to allow girls has received an “overwhelmingly positive response.”
“This is something that was decided within our scouting family by polling our membership,” Tyms says, noting that individual Cub Scouts dens will be same-sex. But he doesn’t see the policy shift as bringing about dramatic change to the organization, pointing out that girls have been participating in Boy Scouts programs in some form since the 1970s. Instead, he says it’s about offering more options for families and children.
“Girl Scouts do an outstanding job, but there’s a segment of their market that’s more interested in what their brothers are doing,” Tyms says. “If this helps bring more girls to the program and we’re able to serve more kids, I see it as a win-win for everybody.”
But not everyone is congratulating the Boy Scouts on their sudden embrace of progressive values. A letter from Girl Scouts USA national board president Kathy Hopinkah Hannan — published by BuzzFeed in August, before the new policy was announced — accused Boy Scouts leadership of conducting a “covert campaign to recruit girls into programs run by Boy Scouts.”
Marci Henderson, CEO of Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Badgerland Council, also suspects the move is about growing membership numbers for Boy Scouts and is less about inclusivity. “Basically, this just means that Boy Scouts will be part of a long list of coed organizations,” she says of the change. “Girls deserve a lot better than being added to the rolls as a tagalong.”
Tyms says the Glacier’s Edge Council, which covers Madison and other parts of southcentral Wisconsin and northern Illinois, has seen declining membership over the last several years, which he attributes to the rise in “millennial parents who are strapped for time.” The opposite is true for the Badgerland Council, which is one of 112 councils across the country where membership has increased, Henderson says. She is not worried about the Boy Scouts’ new coed policy affecting those numbers. “Our position is, we’ve been around for 105 years — for girls, led by girls. If anything, I think this is giving us an empowering position to say who we are.”
Vola’s father, who was a Boy Scout during the 1950s, was skeptical about the change at first. “He said, ‘I don’t like this change, I think it will be different with girls there; [boys] should have these male role models and have the chance to be male all together’” Vola recalls. “But then I pointed out to him that my grandma was his den leader. In our pack, a lot of the leaders are women, and female siblings are already there. So [Boy Scouts] as a men’s club? I don’t really see it existing that way.”
Vola’s daughter, in an ironic twist, is now leaning towards joining Girl Scouts next year. And while Vola is hoping for logistical reasons that Audrey will choose Cub Scouts, she understands her daughter’s hesitation. “Maybe it would have been different if she had been validated as an official member [of Cub Scouts] since the beginning,” she says. “But I think she wants to have something to call her own.”