A01=Jennifer Helgren
American Girlhood
American History
Author_Jennifer Helgren
Black Girls
Caring
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSP1
Category=NHK
Children's Studies
Children’s Studies
Class
Class Studies
Disability
Disability Studies
Disabled Girls
Diversity
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Gender
Gender Studies
Girlhood
Girls Organization
Habit Formation
Hard Work
History
Hygiene
Immigrant
Marginalized
Minority
National Organization
Native American
Nurture
Protestant Ideals
Protestantism
Race
Race Studies
Service
Twentieth Century History
Women's Studies
Women’s Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781496233080
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2022
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
Jennifer Helgren is a professor of history at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She is the author of American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War.
