Inventing American Girlhood: Gender and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Camp Fire Girls
by
Jennifer Hillman Helgren
Claremont Graduate University: 2005
In 1910, a group of progressive reformers began to plan and create a national organization for adolescent girls. The Camp Fire Girls, the most popular girls' organization in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, provided a unique, feminine corollary to the recently formed Boy Scouts. This dissertation has a two-fold purpose. First, it examines, through Camp Fire publications such as handbooks and magazines, the models of girlhood and womanhood Camp Fire promoted. Secondly, it analyzes girls' scrapbooks, diaries, and other personal reminiscences to better understand the formation of girls' cultures in response to the Camp Fire program.
In their vision of girl citizenship, early twentieth-century Camp Fire officials struggled to uphold the nineteenth-century concept of a female sphere of nurture, domesticity, and service to family while they expanded opportunities for girls in education, careers, outdoor activities, and civic reform. Camp Fire taught girls through a maternalist philosophy that regarded traditional feminine characteristics as inherent and the basis for female contributions to family, community, and nation. I contend that Camp Fire's leadership found in maternalism an adaptable model of girl citizenship that could be applied to changing American social and political concerns through the mid-twentieth century.
Thematic chapters examine Camp Fire's founding philosophy, its early efforts to grapple with modernity through the use of Indian imagery, its claims to serve all girls through an inclusive organization, its militarization of American girlhood through war work during World War I and II, and its sponsorship of homemaking as the basis for global citizenship in the conservative post-World War II era. The study ends with Camp Fire's decision to become co-educational in the early 1970s. For their part, many girls adopted the Camp Fire language and activities. Others created their own, often ambivalent, meaning and identity through the mixture of traditional and forward-looking roles Camp Fire offered. Importantly, Camp Fire provided a space for the formation of girl friendships, activities, and shared values on both local and national levels.
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