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The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps explores how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured to respond to shifts in culture and society as well as to new understanding of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual identity through a study of the popular Farm & Wilderness camps. To illustrate this change, Emily Abel and Margaret K. Nelson draw on over forty interviews with former campers, archival materials, and their own memories. This book tells a story of progressive ideals, crisis of leadership, childhood challenges, and social adaptation in the quintessential American summer camp.
List of contents
Chronology
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Founders
2 Ruggedness
3 “Camping from the Neck Up”
4 Gender and Sexual Orientation
5 Sexual Abuse
6 Race
7 Social Class
8 Indian Lore
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Index
About the author
EMILY K. ABEL is a professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health. She is the author of many books including Prelude to Hospice: Florence Wald, Dying People, and Their Families (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Elder Care in Crisis: How the Social Safety Net Fails Families.
MARGARET K. NELSON is A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emerita of Sociology at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. Most recently she is the author of Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s.
Together, they have also authored Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children's Nurse in a Northern White Household.
