The Catholic Guides of Ireland, an all-female organization, was founded in 1928 in Dublin and soon spread throughout the thirty-two counties. This colorful history is essentially a history of women in Ireland during the 20th and early 21st centuries. It moves through the formative years of the 1930s, charting its sometimes fractious relationship with the Catholic Church, to the war years of the 1940s, when the Girl Guides, through participation in activities not normally open to them, grew in confidence and camaraderie, sowing the seeds for the women's liberation movement of the next generation.