The Camp Fire Girls : Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910-1980 (Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality)

Helgren, Jennifer

University of Nebraska Press（2022/12発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 277 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781496233080
• DDC分類 369.47

Full Description

As the twentieth century dawned, progressive educators established a national organization for adolescent girls to combat what they believed to be a crisis of girls' education. A corollary to the Boy Scouts of America, founded just a few years earlier, the Camp Fire Girls became America's first and, for two decades, most popular girls' organization. Based on Protestant middle-class ideals-a regulatory model that reinforced hygiene, habit formation, hard work, and the idea that women related to the nation through service-the Camp Fire Girls invented new concepts of American girlhood by inviting disabled girls, Black girls, immigrants, and Native Americans to join. Though this often meant a false sense of cultural universality, in the girls' own hands membership was often profoundly empowering and provided marginalized girls spaces to explore the meaning of their own cultures in relation to changes taking place in twentieth-century America.

Through the lens of the Camp Fire Girls, Jennifer Helgren traces the changing meanings of girls' citizenship in the cultural context of the twentieth century. Drawing on girls' scrapbooks, photographs, letters, and oral history interviews, in addition to adult voices in organization publications and speeches, The Camp Fire Girls explores critical intersections of gender, race, class, nation, and disability.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Camp Fire Girls Confront a Crisis in American Girlhood
1. "Preparing for Sex Equality": Gender Ideals and the Founding Years
2. "Wohelo Maidens" and "Gypsy Trails": Racial Mimicry and Camp Fire's Picturesque Girl Citizen
3. "All Prejudices Seem to Disappear": Race, Class, and Immigration in the Camp Fire Girls
4. "There Are Lots of Other Camp Fire Things We Can Do": Disability, Disease, and Inclusion in the Camp Fire Girls
5. "Worship God": The Camp Fire Girls, Antifascism, and Religion in the 1940s and 1950s
6. Being a "Homemaker-Plus": Gender and the Spiritual Values of the Home
7. "Prejudices May Be Prevented": Race, Tolerance, and Democracy in the 1940s and 1950s
8. "The War on Poverty Is Being Waged by Camp Fire Girls": The Metropolitan Critical Areas Project
9. "It's a New Day": Camp Fire's Reckoning and Restructuring in the 1970s
Epilogue: An All-Gender Organization for the Twenty-First Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index