Internationalism alongside Ethnic Exclusivity: The Girl Guides in Egypt in the Years Surrounding the First World War

The events of the First World War proved pivotal to reshaping the politics of twentieth-century Egypt. The war’s onset brought the declaration of a British protectorate — the country’s most significant imposition of formal imperial power up to that time. In turn, the Egyptian nationalist movement, under the Wafd Party’s leadership, experienced considerable growth, staging a nationwide revolution in 1919. Amid these major political events, it can be challenging to gauge the more subtle social and cultural ways that the people of Egypt navigated their ever-changing surroundings. I posit that the history of the Girl Guides, which saw their first troop formed in 1913 and were firmly established in Egypt by the 1920s, offers a focused means for interpreting the uneven social and cultural changes at work in the country after the war.

Egypt’s original Guides formed as an explicitly all-British troop of girls in Alexandria. By 1916, the city added an all-Jewish troop, and later became home to Guide troops listed as “Italian” and “mixed.” A similar pattern unfolded in Cairo, and subsequently in Egypt’s smaller cities. While this expanding network of Guides and their increased diversity points to shared patterns of sociability among not only Britons and other foreigners, but also girls from Egypt’s growing upper middle-class. For expatriates and Egyptians alike, for instance, the Guides’ message of athletic girlhood appealed to shared notions of forward-looking modernity. Yet, how did the Girl Guides shape a broadly approachable ideal of girlhood in Egypt, while also highlighting the country’s complex social divisions? In what context were some troops “mixed” and others defined by ethnic or confessional exclusivity? My study addresses the terms on which the Girl Guides found their broad appeal, while also asking why some troops continued to rely on ethnic and confessional divisions.