I was delighted to discover this book, which explores important intersections of gender, race, class, nation, and disability in the oldest organization for girls in the USA in the twentieth century. With sources ranging from oral history interviews to Camp Fire publications and speeches, as well as girls’ letters, photographs, and scrapbooks, Jennifer Helgren shows how the Camp Fire Girls created a model for girls’ citizenship emphasizing “usefulness and beauty” and then “grappled with the structural barriers and limiting, gendered imagination that had made the organization an emblem of early twentieth-century girlhood but had foreclosed a more inclusive membership” (2). Her thorough, insightful analysis makes us think about the powerful impact of youth organizations on young women during changing times.
For both Helgren and for me, girls’ organizations mattered during childhood and graduate school. Helgren joined a Blue Bird group in elementary school and stayed with the Camp Fire Girls for seven years, making lifelong friends and finding “new ways to see the world” (xi). Later, during graduate school, she found her old Camp Fire workbooks and started to think about the organization’s history. I was a Girl Scout rather than a Camp Fire Girl, because that was the only girls’ organization in my elementary school in Washington, D.C. My mother had been a proud Camp Fire Girl in the 1930s. As a folklore graduate student at Indiana University, I became a Girl Scout leader and decided to write my dissertation about the troop members’ storytelling. John McDowell, a member of my dissertation committee, wisely advised me to view the Girl Scouts as a cultural group that needed as much analysis as a group in a different country would. Helgren has taken a similar approach to Camp Fire Girls, explicating key aspects of the organization in depth and detail.
Both the Boy Scouts of America and the Camp Fire Girls were founded in 1910. According to the recent Camp Fire CEO Cathy Tisdale, “In 1910 Camp Fire offered the radical notion that young girls had as much right to camp in the woods as young boys. That young girls could shoot an arrow from a bow and guide a canoe across a lake as well as a boy. That girls had as much to contribute to society as boys. In an era when the norm was teaching young women about ‘managing hearth and home’ and ‘baking that perfect loaf of bread,’ Camp Fire changed the conversation” (261-62). There were, however, some gendered assumptions about proper activities for young women. Luther Gulick, who founded the Camp Fire Girls with his wife, Charlotte Vetter Gulick, stated that their organization would train “the girls to be womanly just as the boy scout [sic] activities train the boys to be manly” (19). Helgren argues, “Like eugenic discourse, Camp Fire prioritized and positioned girls’ reproductive and familial contributions as responsibilities to the nation and race” (20). Her contextualization of the organization’s beginnings in eugenic theory makes us think about people’s motivation for founding youth organizations in the early twentieth century.
One of this book’s many strengths is its multi-layered look at what was happening in youth organizations at various points in the twentieth century: not just in the Camp Fire Girls, but also in the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other groups. In chapter 2, for example, the author explores racial mimicry practiced by both Camp Fire Girls and Boy Scouts. The founders of both organizers were “Indian fanciers” who found American Indian people appropriate for formation of a new identity for young people (56). Popularization of “Indian” mimicry and mythologizing influenced many camps founded in the 1920s and 1930s. The Girl Scout Camp May Flather, which I attended in the early 1960s, was one of the many camps in which girls recited “Indian” cheers and lived in units with “Indian” names. Closely examining Camp Fire Girl scrapbooks, Helgren notes that some “white Camp Fire Girls used the Indian Maiden role to criticize feminine consumption and display” (68). Camp Fire Girls also had access to “Gypsy” images and costumes that were unrelated to Roma culture (56).
Chapter 6, “Disability, Disease, and Inclusion in the Camp Fire Girls,” makes important points about the organization’s inclusion of marginalized girls within two years after its founding. In institutions in the United States and in Hansen’s disease treatment-centers (previously known as leper colonies) in the Philippines, Camp Fire Girls “broadened the definition of modern girl citizenship even as Camp Fire’s strategies of inclusion continued to mark differences and privileged those girls who could readily make use of the Camp Fire program” (117). Helgren persuasively argues that “examining these two groups side by side reveals several shared themes with regard to the treatment and expectations of those separated by disability or disease” (117).
Chapter 9 and the epilogue explain how the Camp Fire Girl organization has adjusted to changing times. In the 1970s, multiculturalism and second-wave feminism caused major changes. Boys were admitted to the Camp Fire organization, which changed its name to “Camp Fire Boys and Girls” and is currently known as “Camp Fire.” Instead of dressing as American Indians or “Gypsies,” Camp Fire members can dress in “costumes that were meaningful for their culture” (234). As awareness of the need for inclusivity has grown in the United States, Camp Fire has declared its support of young people of all gender and sexual orientations. Helgren notes that “Camp Fire’s acceptance of LGBTQ youth has outpaced peer organizations” (256). Although Camp Fire is now active in less than half of the states in the USA, it continues to make significant contributions to young people’s growth. Helgren’s book provides an excellent model for study of youth organizations over time. I hope that more studies of this kind will emerge in the future.
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[Review length: 961 words • Review posted on May 13, 2023]