- 380 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
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 idealsâa regulatory model that reinforced hygiene, habit formation, hard work, and the idea that women related to the nation through serviceâthe 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.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. âPreparing for Sex Equalityâ
- 2. âWohelo Maidensâ and âGypsy Trailsâ
- 3. âAll Prejudices Seem to Disappearâ
- 4. âThere Are Lots of Other Camp Fire Things We Can Doâ
- 5. âWorship Godâ
- 6. Being a âHomemakerâPlusâ
- 7. âPrejudices May Be Preventedâ
- 8. âThe War on Poverty Is Being Waged by Camp Fire Girlsâ
- 9. âItâs a New Dayâ
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- About Jennifer Helgren
- Series List