YouthLink Scotland · 2017
This report examines the contribution of youth work to the women's movement in Scotland from 1850 to the present day. Drawing on original oral history interviews with youth work practitioners, academics, and members of organisations such as the Girl Guides, as well as a review of historical archives, the report traces how girls-only clubs, feminist youth work practice in the 1970s–80s, and voluntary sector organisations empowered successive generations of girls and young women. It finds that while an explicitly feminist approach to youth work largely disappeared by the early 1990s due to funding pressures and policy shifts, the voluntary sector continues to champion girls- and young-women-only spaces, and calls for renewed attention to gender dynamics in youth work today.