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Through the lens of America’s first and most popular girls’ organization, Jennifer Helgren traces the role and changing meaning of American girls’ citizenship across critical intersections of gender, race, class, and disability in the twentieth-century United States.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Camp Fire Girls Confront a Crisis in American Girlhood
1. “Preparing for Sex Equality”: Gender Ideals and the Founding Years
2. “Wohelo Maidens” and “Gypsy Trails”: Racial Mimicry and Camp Fire’s Picturesque Girl Citizen
3. “All Prejudices Seem to Disappear”: Race, Class, and Immigration in the Camp Fire Girls
4. “There Are Lots of Other Camp Fire Things We Can Do”: Disability, Disease, and Inclusion in the Camp Fire Girls
5. “Worship God”: The Camp Fire Girls, Antifascism, and Religion in the 1940s and 1950s
6. Being a “Homemaker—Plus”: Gender and the Spiritual Values of the Home
7. "Prejudices May Be Prevented": Race, Tolerance, and Democracy in the 1940s and 1950s
8. “The War on Poverty Is Being Waged by Camp Fire Girls”: The Metropolitan Critical Areas Project
9. “It’s a New Day”: Camp Fire’s Reckoning and Restructuring in the 1970s
Epilogue: An All-Gender Organization for the Twenty-First Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
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.
Summary
Through the lens of America’s first and most popular girls’ organization, Jennifer Helgren traces the role and changing meaning of American girls’ citizenship across critical intersections of gender, race, class, and disability in the twentieth-century United States.
