Abstract
According to Jennifer Helgren's newest book, Camp Fire Girls—an extracurricular weekly girls’ group similar in many ways to the Girl Guides—tried to instill the values of beauty and usefulness into twentieth-century American girls. Helgren shows that the question of how these girls responded to such teachings is much more complicated. The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980 demonstrates that girls in the organization found a “space to develop their own identities,” identities that at times were “consistent” with its general principles, but at other times directly challenged Camp Fire's “vision of twentieth-century American girlhood” (6). Through her examination of Camp Fire, Helgren shows how studying an extracurricular girls’ organization not only informs us about girls’ experiences in the program, but also uncovers the ways that the girls themselves actively shaped and redefined a broader American girlhood.
The Camp Fire Girls traces the evolution of Camp Fire as an organization from its earliest informal years in the 1910s, to its explosion as America's largest girls’ organization, and then to its eventual fading in the 1970s and 80s. Through a chronological and thematic approach, Helgren argues that Camp Fire was both empowering and exclusionary. Camp Fire assumed and esteemed girls’ future roles in the family and home, while simultaneously providing space to explore “civic” and “outdoor” life in ways that were otherwise closed to them (14). This understanding of the complicated dichotomy of essential feminism informs Helgren's analysis and helps her to situate the organization within the earliest years of the women's movement.
The sheer numbers of children Camp Fire reached makes the subject worthy of study. But Helgren goes further by weaving the evolution of American society in the twentieth century through her work, making the book a masterful and widely applicable contribution to historiography. This is not just a study of the history of girlhood (although more such studies are needed); it describes nearly an entire century through the lens of one organization, showing the dramatic ebbs and flows of American society and culture in the twentieth century.
The second chapter of the book examines how Camp Fire used romanticized and condescending notions of Indigeneity and “Gypsy” culture as the foundation for girls’ connection to nature. Until well after World War II, Camp Fire girls were required to don European versions of Indigenous regalia when participating in any special ceremony. These ceremonies, most often centered around a campfire, were used to connect girls to their “primitive emotions” and thus help them to better respect and understand nature and the “great mystery” of life (60–61). Camp Fire organizers believed this inclusion of Indigenous customs and apparel would show respect and an appreciation for Indigenous cultures, while simultaneously reducing any differences of race, class, or religion between girls. However, Helgren argues that the appropriation of Indigenous culture simply “magnified racial hierarchies” and excluded genuine Indigenous culture by situating it firmly in the past (56).
Helgren also maps out the complicated position that Black, disabled, and poor children held within the organization. From its very origins, the national organization advertised Camp Fire as a place for all girls, yet the reality was often in stark contrast to this ideal. Locally, the vast majority of clubs remained segregated as groups tended to organize around church or neighborhood communities. Therefore, Camp Fire considered segregation “natural” as it was developed based on local practices. Helgren shows how the organization as a whole was complicit with segregation and exclusion, and therefore responsible for encouraging racial and class-based prejudices.
Importantly, Helgren challenges our understanding of Camp Fire as an optional after-school program by highlighting the ways it was forced upon certain vulnerable children. Camp Fire was often used as a citizenship training tool in settings such as boarding schools for Indigenous girls, institutions for children with physical or mental disabilities, and institutions for girls of Japanese descent who were interned during World War II. The promotion of Camp Fire in these contexts aligned with positive eugenic goals of the time as well as nationalistic beliefs in what made the ideal citizen. But Helgren shows how, even in these institutions where girls were inculcated with assimilatory goals, participants were still able to “generate hybrid identities” based on their own ideas of selfhood (77).
Throughout the book, Helgren highlights the organization's complicated relationship with established religion. Helgren's research contrasts with much historiography on religious history in the twentieth century by showing how Camp Fire Girls was more explicitly religious in the 1940s and 50s than it was at the outset of the twentieth century. In 1942, Camp Fire added the instruction to “Worship God” to one of its rules to combat the feared threat of fascist youth groups seen in other countries (142). With this change, Camp Fire officially became affiliated with a generic notion of Christianity or religious pluralism that made more room for girls who were not from Protestant families but did not extend to faith traditions beyond Catholicism and Judaism. Helgren argues that Camp Fire was not alone in this shift, but rather simply responding to a broader “cultural shift” toward greater recognition of Christian values during the Cold War period (143). Camp Fire, as did much of American society around it, attempted to use this shift to increase its members’ religious commitment, which was believed to increase their commitment to a democratic society as well.
Arguably the most significant contribution Camp Fire Girls makes to the field of study is its demonstration of the differences between official organizational goals and the beliefs of individual girls and leaders. Throughout the book, Helgren shows how the goals of the group were lofty and often progressive, yet those ideals did not permeate the everyday teachings of individual groups or experiences of the girls who attended. Sometimes these differences were also reversed, with the organization emphasizing more traditional values and girls challenging those teachings based on their lived experiences. For example, in the Cold War period, Camp Fire as an organization argued that girls would find their “happiest career” as a homemaker. Yet program materials and public statements released around the same time showed “that girls were challenging the message of domesticity” (174). These contradictions between official curricula and lived experience show the complicated influence of Camp Fire in American history more generally.
Helgren's book is brilliant, yet would have benefited from a few minor changes. Helgren did an impressive job of finding girls’ and women's voices within the archives. Further, in the acknowledgments she notes that she interviewed sixteen women to learn about their experience in Camp Fire. However, these 16 women's voices are buried within the narrative, and we do not get a clear sense of their individual experiences within the program. By highlighting these interviews, Camp Fire Girls could have increased our understanding of the influence of Camp Fire beyond structural and institutional understandings to the everyday lived experience. While the interviews would have mainly been with attendees in the postwar period and could not have illuminated the earliest years of the program, they might have played a more important role in helping readers understand how girls experienced the tumultuous time of the 1960s and 70s.
Secondly, the thematic and chronological approaches of the book struggled to work together. The chronological approach clearly showed the evolution of the program and helped to highlight cultural changes that affected Camp Fire throughout the twentieth century; the thematic approach allowed the reader to understand different concepts vital to the history of the organization. However, placing themes within the chronology of the organization at times oversimplified changes happening in society while simultaneously complicating the themes discussed. For example, four separate chapters speak specifically to race and racism in different decades, meaning the conversation about race seems choppy, stopping and starting rather than flowing throughout. Keeping to a purely chronological or thematic structure would have been a better, more seamless way to organize the book.
This book helps to fill an important void in the historiography of girls’ extracurricular activities. Helgren's work supplements a wide variety of research, including Wendy Kline's work on eugenics, Kristine Alexander's work on the Girl Guide movement and Mary Jane McCallum's work on Indigenous girlhood. With its wide scope, yet detailed analysis, The Camp Fire Girls would be a useful addition to any upper-level history class studying gender, education, childhood, race, colonialism or social or twentieth-century American history. I challenge educators to consider how a multidimensional and important book such as this could bolster their classes’ syllabi. Further, the writing is sufficiently accessible for a general audience, especially for those who attended the program as girls, led it as adults, or are curious about its influence in society.
The Camp Fire Girls ends by describing the trajectory of the program since the 1980s. While it blossomed over the 1920s and 30s, and held considerable influence into the 1940s and 50s, the 1960s proved to be a difficult time for Camp Fire as it attempted to define its relationship to the ever-changing society around it. As a relatively progressive girls’ organization, Camp Fire continually redefined the goals and priorities of the program and by 1975 became an organization for “all genders” (211). By the time of printing the book, Camp Fire had a national membership of only 3,000 children, and Helgren describes its outreach as “more diverse and attuned to social justice but less prominent as a national organization” (257, 266). Camp Fire's future as an organization is uncertain. However, Helgren's work shows Camp Fire's history is significant, informative, problematic, inspiring and more than anything, complicated.