‘A frank and free comradeship between the sexes’: The Woodcraft Folk and the second wave of feminism

What the paper says

This article explores the extent and nature of feminist influence on the educational theory and practice of the Woodcraft Folk in the 20th century. It starts by examining Woodcraft’s ideas on “the relations between the sexes” as outlined by Leslie Paul (1938, p. 55). It then examines in detail his understanding of co-education, and his claim that the organisation had achieved a “frank and free comradeship between the sexes” (Paul, 1938, p. 55). It argues that the equating of sex equality with a formal equality of opportunity, coupled with the lived experience of its co-operative camping communities, led to the belief that equality of the sexes had been achieved within the Woodcraft Folk. This outlook, which remained largely unchanged until the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s and 70s, came into conflict with attempts to adapt to that new type of feminism. Rather than making the Woodcraft Folk’s membership more receptive to ideas of the Women’s Liberation Movement, these earlier ideas proved to be a barrier to exploring its ideas on gender as a social construct, resulting in a missed opportunity to re-work Woodcraft’s educational practice at a time when the second wave of feminism was at its height.