Full Description
American Girls and Global Responsibility brings together insights from Cold War culture studies, girls' studies, and the history of gender and militarization to shed new light on how age and gender work together to form categories of citizenship.
Jennifer Helgren argues that a new internationalist girl citizenship took root in the country in the years following World War II in youth organizations such as Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, YWCA Y-Teens, schools, and even magazines like Seventeen. She shows the particular ways that girls' identities and roles were configured, and reveals the links between internationalist youth culture, mainstream U.S. educational goals, and the U.S. government in creating and marketing that internationalist girl, thus shaping the girls' sense of responsibilities as citizens.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "What Kind of World Do You Want?": Preparing Girls for Peace and Tolerance in the Atomic Age
2. "Hello, World, Let's Get Together": Building Global Conversations through Pen Pals and Care Packages
3. "Famous for Its Cherry Blossoms": Reimagining Japan and Germany in the Postwar Period
4. "Playing Foreign Shopper": Consuming Internationalism
5. "We Hand the Communists Powerful Propaganda Weapons to Use against Us": Defending Global Citizenship during the Post-World War II Red Scare
Epilogue: The Watchers of the Skies
Notes
Index
