Boy Scouts Keep to Men-Only Rule for Leaders

Last June, Phyllis Gibson, an administrative assistant at University of California, Santa Barbara, was preparing for a week at camp with Boy Scout Troop 129, which has long absorbed her energies and those of her two sons, Ron, 18, and Chad, 15.

For five years, she had served as a temporary adult supervisor at Camp Rancho Alegre near Lake Cachuma across the Santa Ynez Mountains. Gibson liked the break from the telephone and television. Her sons, whom she had raised alone since her divorce in 1978, loved camping. It was an experience the three of them could share.

Several other Scouts in the troop also came from single-parent homes, and the shortage of available camp supervisors this year was so great that Gibson had been forced to set up a rotation for the week. Three fathers and three mothers, including Gibson, each agreed to take one day and one night. Then Gibson saw the letter from the county Boy Scout Council:

‘Men-Only Situation’

“As you plan your camp leadership schedules, bear in mind the national BSA policy that adult troop leadership is a men-only situation. . . . Anyone who may be a temporary substitute for the scoutmaster in camp must also be male and over 21 years of age.”

A January memo from the national organization’s chief Scout executive, Ben H. Love, to the council had noted the “important role” women had played in American Scouting from its beginning in 1910 and said “virtually all volunteer positions in the Scouting movement are open to adult females.”

But the organization insisted that scoutmasters and den leaders in the Webelos (the last step before Scouting), as well as Scout and Webelos camp supervisors, be men under “the principle that developing boys (of that age) need a close association with adult males who can provide models of manhood.”

Psychologists and “other child development professionals” backed the policy, Love said. David K. Park, the national Boy Scout legal counsel, said in a recent interview that the organization felt it had the right to offer such an opportunity to boys and parents who wanted it.

“If a woman wants to go camping with her kids, she can go camping with her kids” on her own or with some other program, Park said. “But we want to be able to offer something unique.”

Distressed and enraged, with only two days before the week at camp began, Gibson called every family in the troop in a frantic search for three more men. She said a Scout executive told her the female supervision at previous camps had been winked at, but now the Scout national headquarters in Irving, Tex., was “cracking down.” She joked about considering marriage if that would solve the problem. But in the end the troop’s week at camp had to be canceled for lack of men. Gibson and her sons felt cheated--and angry.

“It had never occurred to me I couldn’t do something I wanted to do and was capable of doing,” she said.