American Girls and Global Responsibility

Jennifer Helgren

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813575810
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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. 

1

“What Kind of World Do You Want?”

Preparing Girls for Peace and Tolerance in the Atomic Age

In 1948, a girl from Altona, Illinois, wrote a letter to Seventeen magazine that called for political action to deal with her fears: “Everyone talks about another war. They talk about an atom bomb with all kinds of bacteria in it.” Rather than succumbing to despair, she wanted her peers to “think of all the suffering and disaster that we could prevent by spreading tolerance and brotherly love. . . . I’m willing to do all I can to help. I’m sure many of my fellow teenagers are. Couldn’t we get some sort of national organization started in our schools to preserve peace?” The editor’s response, typical of those from girls’ magazines and organizations, pointed her to an article in the same issue about joining United Nations Youth, thus giving girls specific direction to act on their internationalist impulses, one part of preparing girls for peace and tolerance in the atomic age.1

After World War II, concern about the atomic bomb shaped the approaches of child experts and educators to both child rearing and education. In children’s cultural spaces, images and information about the bomb were constant reminders of a possible World War III, one presented as far more destructive than any war that had come before.

Girls’ organizations and media committed themselves to training their members as global citizens. Such institutions took girls more seriously than in earlier generations, treating them as world citizens and training them to play a role on the international stage. They provided them with information about atomic energy’s dangers, but by also offering information about its potential for good, tried to instill hope for the future. They told girls ways they could take part in keeping themselves and the world safe; these included engaging in civil defense drills, supporting the United Nations, and increasing their intercultural awareness.

Although girls shared much with their male peers, girlhood was treated as a special space for the cultivation of relational solutions to global conflict. Broad training in internationalism, new leadership skills, a healthy personality, and, above all, teachings about democracy and the United Nations would help the internationalist girl citizen triumph over the dual threats of atomic war and the spread of communism. Girls themselves reflected this duality, and their creative and expository writing captured not only their pervasive fear of the bomb’s destructive powers, of catastrophe and death, but also the hope that this threat to humankind might be countered through international understanding, world federation, and love.

Child Experts and the Atomic Age

Girls needed a new relation to the world because, child experts believed, they faced unprecedented stresses growing up. As Dorothy Baruch, a psychologist who specialized in juvenile delinquency, put it, “Ever since the bursting of the fearful bomb in Hiroshima, we have known that our children are facing an age different from any previous age.”2 Children and adolescents seemed prone to maladjustment, juvenile delinquency, fatalism, and inadequate self-identity formation. Citing Anna Freud’s studies of evacuated British children in World War II, psychologists saw prolonged exposure to uncertainty and fear as one root of long-term psychological maladjustment. Fears and the lack of hope inherent in the inability to envision the future disrupted the psychological well-being of children and youth and threatened the very way of life Americans sought to protect.3

To many experts, juvenile delinquency appeared as potentially dangerous as communism or the bomb itself. As Senior Scholastic warned its readers, their generation’s delinquent behaviors threatened to undermine the nation from within even as atomic war threatened it from without.4 Children’s Bureau reports indicate that along with other social disruptions such as the rise in crime and familial breakdown, there were marked increases in juvenile delinquency during the war, followed by a slight decline in the late 1940s, with rates again climbing after 1949. Media tended to blame permissive child-rearing practices for the perceived uptick in vandalism, shoplifting, truancy, drug and alcohol use, resistance to authority, and sexual promiscuity.5 Many child experts, however, believed that getting to the root of delinquency and other maladjustments required addressing anxieties associated with the atomic age.

Although the degree to which atomic fears shaped daily behavior remains controversial, Gallup polls in the first decade of the Cold War showed that most Americans (at some points as many as 70 percent) thought they would see another world war in their lifetimes, one with “a new level of horror and destruction.”6 Children also worried. Months before North Korean forces crossed into South Korea, a twelve-year-old African American Girl Scout in Seattle wrote to the president, “I hope no Americans won’t have to go to war again. . . . I keep praying and saying, ‘Peace on earth good will to men.’”7 Although one canvass showed that people under thirty were slightly more optimistic than older adults, polls of young people revealed marked apprehension.8 Regional and national surveys recorded that young people believed that their chief problem was the “draft and threat of war” (followed by “finding the right girl or boy” and family, school, and job-related concerns).9 In the early 1960s, prior to the Cuban missile crisis, psychologist Sybil K. Escalona’s research showed widespread knowledge and fear among ten- to seventeen-year-olds. In response to Escalona’s open-ended questions about the future, 70 percent of the children surveyed spontaneously mentioned war or peace. One fourteen-year-old expected “either complete peace or total destruction.”10

Training adolescents to engage and act offered some reason for hope. Baruch advocated “emotional education” in schools using clubs and youth organizations to foster cohesiveness; offer leadership opportunities; and inculcate a sense of belonging, confidence, and individuality.11

These were the basic selling points of 1950s citizen-building youth organizations. Escalona found that young people who worked alongside adults in activities that those young people and adults hoped would ensure peace formed strong personal identities in relation to their work, thereby escaping fatalism or delinquency.12 Child psychiatrist Milton Schwebel proposed that “opportunities to participate in the social act of protecting one’s community and achieving peace” might have a “therapeutic” effect.13 Indeed, the educators who brought civil defense training into their schools and classrooms had embraced the activities as a way to offer a plan of action and a sense of security to students and parents.14 Knowledge about atomic science, foreign diplomacy, and the effects of atomic blasts, although likely to produce more initial anxiety, might lessen youthful denial and apathy if channels were provided for constructive action.15 Camp Fire publications argued that it was not helpful to shelter children entirely from the problems of the world. It would be more constructive to give them ways to be “a part of a constructive force.”16

Among educators, a broad consensus developed that young people needed authoritative information to produce a matter-of-fact attitude about the new reality of atomic weapons. Equally matter of fact was the assumption that new political structures, such as world governance, were required responses to the atomic threat. Young adults would need to rise to the challenge of implementing them. School and Society, an educational journal, advised teachers to institute a psychologist-approved curriculum developed in consultation with the Federation of American Scientists, which offered candid assessments of the possibility of another war and the absence of any sufficient military defense as well as the need for international control of atomic energy, international friendship, and peaceful adaptations of atomic energy.17

Most youth workers agreed that the best way to ensure the development of healthy personalities was democratic education, equipping young people with knowledge about democracy and its ideals as well as the skills and frame of mind to enact democratic citizenship, and politicians endorsed this method too. Indeed, many adults argued, the way to secure a safe future at home and abroad was for the United States and its institutions, including the Girl Scouts and its peer agencies, to live up to their stated democratic ideals.

President Truman routinely charged educators with the responsibility of developing the “human brotherhood that alone will enable us to achieve international cooperation and peaceful progress in the atomic age.” In 1949, he explicitly connected democratic education and internationalism, declaring that the National Education Week theme “Making Democracy Work” meant “broadening our vision to give thought to children of other lands with whom our children must live in increasingly closer relationship.”18 Six years later, Oveta Culp Hobby, the secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Eisenhower administration, called “democratic education” the best hope to protect the nation as it faced not only “obliteration . . . by atomic weapons” but also challenges to the core political values of freedom of speech, opinion, and inquiry.19

Girls’ institutions followed the research of child experts who advocated democratic education. National Camp Fire executive Ruth Teichmann explained the contribution that these organizations stood to make through teaching about democracy, cultivating spiritual ideals, and promoting the recognition of the dignity of every human being. “Our basic problem is not wholly physical survival,” she explained. “What is being consistently threatened and attacked is intangible.” Youth organizations could help young people learn to think more clearly about “our democratic way of life, with all its spiritual values” and promote “a real conviction about human dignity and worth.”20

Martha Allen, the director of the Camp Fire Girls and member of Truman’s famine relief committee, agreed that youth organizations had an immense responsibility in “the struggle between the ideals of democracy and totalitarianism . . . especially communism.” She elaborated that “an organization which seeks to train girls for citizenship cannot ignore this struggle or operate on the assumption that if we teach children to tie knots, build a campfire and give service, all will be well. Any program which does not help a young person to understand the realities of his world is irrelevant and useless.” Not only did girls’ organizations need to teach about “the real differences between a free society and a totalitarian one,” but they also needed to teach girls, by example, “to value human dignity, democratic practices, free inquiry, and truth even when truth goes counter to some of our cherished prejudices and uninformed opinions.” To this end she pledged to make certain that the Camp Fire Girls lived up to its democratic ideals by giving members real experience in democratic practice and the privileges and responsibilities of freedom.21

A Relational Approach to Democratic Citizenship

Although programs for boys and girls shared much, gender-based expectations shaped youth leaders’ approaches to citizenship training in the atomic age. With girls lay the responsibility for building relationships for peace.

The YWCA’s Gladys Ryland, a social worker and professor, believed that gender confusion was super-added to the anxieties about nuclear war and this made the gender-based citizen training fitting. American girls lived in a social context filled with uncertainties unique to them as they struggled to establish their identities. The program directors whom Ryland spoke to believed the first of these was “fear of war and the H-bomb,” which led to “frustration, insecurity, apathy, and lack of concern for tomorrow.” Girls, however, were also rendered uncertain about proper family and gender roles in a world in which more mothers were going to work, families were moving away from kin, and fathers were commuters and not as often at home.22 The answer developed in postwar programs for girls was to foster feminine gender identity formation as part of the larger process of producing well-adjusted young people, even as the age called for expanded civic roles for girls and women.

In addressing the problem of juvenile delinquency, Allen did not cast girls as actual delinquents. Rather, she wanted to understand the “role that girls play in setting values for boys as sisters, future wives and mothers.”23 Allen’s relational model for combating delinquency reflected the larger social understanding of girls’ civic contributions as a product of their relationships.

Most child experts, including consultants for girls’ organizations like Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher, director of the Eliot-Pearson School at Tufts University in Boston, favored relational approaches for girls. Pitcher’s research on children’s storytelling showed that boys created adventure stories set in forests and outer space, whereas girls created home-centered stories that focused on relationships. Pitcher concluded that boys’ fantasies prepared them to tackle larger questions of good and evil and to serve as future diplomats and leaders. Girls’ stories, however, marked a pathway to motherhood and the important relational role of being the “first educators” of their children. “Men are more likely to be the ones who set the policies in law and labor and diplomacy,” she wrote, “while questions of social and personal morality and ethics are more often handled by women.”24 In this context, it was without irony that Seventeen promoted heroic leadership to its girl readers in a selection of articles by girls that featured only male leaders but highlighted how girls were trained to help in international community development through traditionally feminine work for others in home economics, sewing, and nutrition.25

Girls’ duties to the world, then, were based on feminine roles originating in familial and domestic relationships. The Camp Fire Girls’ director of field operations, Lou B. Paine, linked homemaking to a girl’s patriotic duty, calling a girl “an indispensable member of the most important institution of American life—the home. Girls must continue, therefore, to learn responsibi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: “Encouraging Friendships between the Girls of All Nations”
• Chapter 1. “What Kind of World Do You Want?”: Preparing Girls for Peace and Tolerance in the Atomic Age
• Chapter 2. “Hello, World, Let’s Get Together”: Building Global Conversations through Pen Pals and Aid Packages
• Chapter 3. “Famous for Its Cherry Blossoms”: Reimagining Japan and Germany in the Postwar Period
• Chapter 4. “Playing Foreign Shopper”: Consuming Internationalism
• Chapter 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”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authour