Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls' Organizations in America 9780813541563

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Growing Girls

The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies is dedicated to increasing our understanding of children and childhoods, past and present, throughout the world. Children’s voices and experiences are central. Authors come from a variety of fields, including anthropology, criminal justice, history, literature, psychology, religion, and sociology. The books in this series are intended for students, scholars, practitioners, and those who formulate policies that affect children’s everyday lives and futures. Edited by Myra Bluebond-Langner Advisory Board Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Cornell University, New York City Perri Klass, Boston University School of Medicine Jill Korbin, Case Western Reserve University Bambi Schiefflin, New York University Enid Schildkraut, American Museum of Natural History

Growing Girls The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America


Susan A. Miller

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Susan A., 1961– Growing girls : the natural origins of girls’ organizations in America / Susan A. Miller. p. cm.—(The Rutgers series in childhood studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–8135–4063–4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–8135–4064–1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Girl Scouts of the United States of America—History. 2. Camp Fire Girls—History. 3. Girls—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. HS3359.M55 2007 369.460973—dc22 2006031260 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2007 by Susan A. Miller All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Manufactured in the United States of America

For Andrea, and my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: What Is the Matter with Jane? 1 Fashioning Girls’ Identities

1 13

2 “A Splendid Army of Women”:

Mobilizing Girl Soldiers

48

3 The Landscape of Camp

83

4 Naturecraft: Restoring Pioneer Heritage

122

5 Homecraft: Primitive Maidens and

Domestic Pioneers

158

6 Healthcraft: Measuring the Modern Girl

Epilogue: A Tale of Two Girls Notes 231 Bibliography 255 Index 265

vii

192 221

Acknowledgments

The author’s guidelines that I have consulted while completing this manuscript list acknowledgments as optional. Not so. They are the first thing we read, and the last we write, and are, in truth, essential. All historians owe a great debt to the librarians and archivists who make our work possible. I am grateful to staff at the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Girl Scout Councils in Washington, DC, and Orlando, Florida; the University of Maine, Orono; Temple University’s Urban Archives; the Minnesota Historical Society; and the National Board of the YWCA. Mary Levey, Mary Degenhardt, and Yevgeniya Gribov at the National Historic Preservation Center of the Girl Scouts in New York and Debra Huwar and Mary Kay Robertson of Camp Fire USA in Kansas City were unfailing helpful. Closer to home, my special thanks to Eileen Honert and all the ladies at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council, who cheered this project from its very beginnings. Good friends generously put me up while I was visiting all these fine archives. I would like to thank Margaret Reiser and Missy Meyers; Dave Whitaker and Becky Gunn; Sharon Groves and Ann Steinecke; Jennifer Gunn; and Elizabeth Cooper, my oldest and dearest friend, who always keeps the light burning for me in Brooklyn. Although one of the great comforts of finishing a first book is the sure knowledge that no one will now read your dissertation, I would be remiss if I did not thank those who helped me complete that project. The Women’s Studies Program at Penn honored me with a fellowship, and the faculty and staff there—Demie Kurz, Rita Barnard, Ann Matter, and Luz Marin—have long been my staunch supporters. Jennifer Gunn, Betsy Hanson, Katie Janssen, Susi Jones, Erin McLeary, and Elizabeth Toon made graduate school a ix

x

Acknowledgments

memorable experience. Susan Lindee’s friendship and scholarly dedication continue to inspire me. As all who have written, and rewritten, and rewritten a book will confess, there comes a time when you can no longer bear to look at your own prose. Words can hardly express my gratitude to those who took the time to read and comment on this work; it is an immeasurably better product for their attentions. My thanks to Sharon Groves, Alex Carter, Hannah Joyner, Betsy Hanson, Jennifer Gunn, Elizabeth Toon, Erin Cross, Bruce Lenthall, Sally G. Kohlstedt, Kathy Brown, Kathy Peiss, Janet Tighe, Carrie Askin, and Tanya Falon, who all read chapters of this book. Rick Spevik was kind enough to provide me with access to some excellent illustrations, and Andrea Bretting, thankfully, took charge of the scanning. Ann Steinecke helped with the index. I was also very fortunate in having a great place to write. Erin Cross, Ninah Harris, and Bob Schoenberg may have jokingly referred to me as their scholar-in-residence, but they, and the rest of Penn’s LGBT Center staff, provided me with an office when I desperately needed one. It has been a pleasure to work with Rutgers University Press. I could not have asked for a better editor than Kendra Boileau. Series editor Myra Bluebond-Langner’s warmth and generosity made final revisions more bearable, while Romaine Perin’s excellent copyediting made those revisions readable. Kelly Schrum kindly agreed to be an outside reader on rather short notice, and Miriam Foreman-Brunell, who read this entire manuscript several times, exerted considerable influence on its final form. I am deeply indebted to Janet Golden, who not only found this book a home at Rutgers but also read and commented on the whole shebang with her typical good cheer and good sense. In a very important sense, however, the true editor of this book is Brook Chidester. Over talks at the kitchen table and on walks in the Wissahickon, Brook listened carefully and cheered wildly as the words took shape. She has breathed life into this project, again and again. Last, of course, there is my family. My big brothers, Edward and Kenneth, have been my proud supporters for as long as I can remember. My parents, Pat and Ed Miller, are simply the best. They taught me to love books (though never so much that you bring them back late to the library), and I can only hope that they enjoy this one. Then there is Andrea Bretting. She has lived with me and this project for a decade. And while I hope she is willing to put up with me for a bit longer, I know she is thrilled to see this book on its way out the door. It would not have been possible without her.

Growing Girls

Introduction

What Is the Matter with Jane?




W

hy, asked the New York Times in November 1920, was the Girl Scout movement growing so rapidly that it was forced to turn away four thousand potential members each month because of shortages of staff and resources? The “reason for this is that the scout corps answers a question which is asked in every family where there is a growing girl: ‘What is the matter with Jane?’”1 As “childhood merges into young womanhood new ideas and new longings come, which are the most potent of all for good or evil,” the Times noted. Yet at this critical juncture in her development, when a girl most needed the camaraderie and council of loyal allies, she found herself alone, unable to depend on friends and family. Just as “she has abandoned her dolls Jane finds herself abandoned by her little-boy playfellows, who have attained the age of the loftiest scorn of the ever-feminine—the only true cave-man age of school and college sports and of the gang spirit.” Owing to the small size of the “modern family” and parents’ preoccupation with their own affairs, Jane became further isolated, “a child hermit of the spirit” left to her own devices. The matter with Jane was that she was adrift in a rapidly changing modern world, bereft of the guidance she needed to understand both it and the changes taking place in her adolescent body and soul. The girl faced a daunting array of challenges, some presented by her family, others, sadly, of her own making. “Solitary Jane takes to the romantic novel, to the theatre, to the movies. Her social presence and her clothes become matters of agonizing importance. Jane’s sensible mother finds she is lamentably self-conscious and vain; her even more sensible father that she spends too much time at the movies. And so Jane, who least of all knows what is the matter with her, gets her first feminine skill in concealment and evasion,” the Times warned. If parents were part of the problem, and the girl only made things worse for herself, then who was going to help her? 1

2

Growing Girls

Luckily for Jane there were adults who understood that modern girlhood was in a state of crisis, and who had the time and inclination to intervene on her behalf. “The only real trouble with Jane is that she had been turned away from the Girl Scouts!” the Times exclaimed. “There her idleness would be filled, her solitude banished. Instead of the trumped-up adventure on the screen, witnessed in a stuffy theatre, Jane would herself go on hikes, learn camping, swimming, woodcraft. She learns that her young body is to be used instead of decorated.” Girl Scouting would act as Jane’s guide through the turbulence of adolescence—especially, one must conclude from the Times’ perspective, that portion of the Scouting program focused on camping and woodcraft. The problems Jane faced in the modern world would, oddly enough, be solved in the outdoors via a constellation of “natural” activities offered by girls’ organizations. It was time, the Times proclaimed, for Jane to go camping. This is a book about Jane and her peers, the adolescent girls who grew up in the first decades of the twentieth century and who constituted what anxious adults referred to as “the girl problem.” It is also about the organizations—Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, Girl Pioneers, and Girl Reserves, to name only the largest groups—that were founded to solve this problem. The book’s setting, summer camp, may seem a peculiar place to look for a solution to the girl problem, but as the New York Times had correctly observed, girls’ organizations were convinced that hiking, camping, and woodcraft could offer a potent cure for whatever it was that ailed Jane. At the end of the nineteenth century, sweeping changes in the social lives of middle-class Americans allowed their daughters to develop a new cultural identity—young Victorian ladies were becoming modern girls.2 Girls had not been girls for very long, however, before adults began to worry that there was something wrong with them. As the Times indicated, many fears were predicated on girls’ interaction with popular culture. On the surface, parents and teachers worried that girls were spending their time reading romance novels and going to the theater rather than doing homework and chores. But at a more profound level, adults started to wonder if these new pastimes might contribute to the creation of a new girl—a self-aware individual who was more conscious of her own personal preferences and less willing to subjugate them to adult demands. American girls had been creating their own culture in high schools and on city streets for several decades before their actions caught the attention of scholars who claimed to be experts on childhood development. In 1904, Granville Stanley Hall, psychologist, educator, and president of Clark

What Is the Matter with Jane?

3

University, released a massive two-volume study, Adolescence, announcing his discovery of this new life stage. Hall worried that young people were adrift in a culture that had barely acknowledged their presence. To Hall, adolescents were neither oversized children nor immature adults, but rather developmentally distinct creatures whose special needs were being alternately ignored and repressed by American society. Moreover, he believed that these young people were fundamentally “natural” entities, possessed by drives both biological and evolutionary in origin. Adolescents, Hall wrote, were being done a grievous harm by the relentless forces of modernity that attempted to “civilize” them in ways antithetical to their distinctive needs. It is disingenuous, however, to suggest that Hall worried about all adolescents; he did not. He cared about boys. The essentialist energy that animated Hall’s young people was male; the problem youth faced was a crisis of masculinity; and consequently, Hall’s solution applied only to them.3 Hall, like many of his contemporaries, was deeply troubled by a perceived decline in the virility of late-Victorian manhood, and he attempted to remedy this dire situation with his theory of recapitulation.4 Even a limited experience in a tamed wilderness, he argued, would allow adolescent boys a chance to recall the primitive traits of their prehistoric ancestors and thus restore to an overcivilized and effete society the manly prowess it needed to survive. Hall’s theories were both informed by, and in turn influenced, many popular manifestations of these ideals—Muscular Christianity, collegiate sports, Teddy Roosevelt’s exhortations to the “strenuous life,” and the Boy Scout movement all promoted a robust masculinity associated with the vigorous pursuit of an “outdoor life.”5 But what about girls; did they face an analogous crisis? Was it possible for an allegedly feminine culture to threaten the very people who supposedly perpetuated it? What if the problem wasn’t the culture’s purported gender, but some other trait that did actually have a deleterious effect on girls? Should they then be sent away to the woods like their brothers? No one, presumably, wanted to encourage the resurgence of a primitive masculinity in girls, so what theory could justify girls’ presence out in nature, and what exactly would they do there? Girls’ organizations did not have to come up with an answer to these questions all on their own. Americans had long had an understanding of the natural landscape around them that belied Hall’s confidence in it as an utterly masculine proving ground. From the time of the early republic, many Americans preferred to see the landscape as a middle ground characterized by a harmonious balance. National parks, even college campuses and zoos,

4

Growing Girls

were designed to evoke a synthesis of a host of putative opposites—nature and culture, progressive and primitive, town and country.6 Leaders hoped their summer camps could do the same. Nostalgic for the lost frontier and America’s pioneer past, but uneasy about abandoning the comforting, albeit confining, norms of Victorian society, leaders turned to a landscape that could retain the laudable elements of civilized society, while being infused with the restorative powers of nature. This middle ground would be a perfect ground for their girls, themselves caught in between childhood and adulthood, an invigorating future and a comfortable past. Organized camping for girls had begun on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee near Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, when Laura Mattoon opened Camp Kehonka in 1902.7 Within two decades, a plethora of private camps, located primarily in New England, and serving mostly upper-middle-class girls, shared the American landscape with hundreds of camps sponsored by ethnic societies, political clubs, and religious groups. The Mormons, through their Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association, established camps for their Bee Hive Girls, and the YWHA and several Zionist groups founded camps for Jewish girls, while virtually every Protestant denomination and Catholic social society organized camps for girls of their faiths. The Young Communist League and the Pioneer Youth of America founded camps for girls from families with communist or socialist sympathies. “We may naturally raise the question as to why the summer camp movement has become so extensive,” noted the camp advisory staff of the Girl Scouts in 1935. “Some have asked if America is not becoming camp crazy.”8 In reality, by the time the advisory staff made this observation it was commenting on a well-established phenomenon. When the Porter Sargent Company, which had established its reputation as a reviewer of private high schools, published its first guide to summer camps in 1924, it noted with surprise how fast the movement had grown in recent years. By the time its 1926 edition was released, there were more than a thousand camps for boys and girls, with a quarter of a million children in attendance each season.9 Yet prevalence is no guarantor of significance. If parents were merely sending their offspring away for the summer so they could enjoy a childless vacation for a few weeks or months, the camping movement might well deserve the lack of historical attention it has received. While it is nearly impossible to divine parents’ true intent, it is possible to capture the intent of the people who operated children’s camps, and therein lies a story that deserves to be told. “A camping experience should be the privilege of every girl, for an outing camp is a place where adolescence has a chance for natural, simple

What Is the Matter with Jane?

5

unforced development, and such is the great need of girls who are living in a time when the majority of them are pushed rapidly on into a whirl of experiences and activities,” proclaimed the leadership of the YWCA’s Girl Reserves.10 Obviously, removing girls from the deleterious effects of modern culture was important, but camp was much more than a place where girls could escape their hectic daily routines. Leaders believed that camp could actually improve many facets of girls’ lives—from their personal relationships with family and friends, to their public commitment to the state, to the more private matters of self-respect and self-sufficiency. In reconnecting girls to nature, directors believed that they could facilitate the “simple unforced development” of the most promising aspects of girls’ character. Thus girls’ organizations, the bulk of whose interactions with youngsters happened in school auditoriums, church basements, and neighborhood recreation centers, developed a “mystique of wilderness” that placed camping at the rhetorical core of a program designed to influence the development of female adolescence.11 Although most leaders would have agreed with the Y’s assertion that “there is something universal in the nature of girls,” each organization had its own particular reason for using nature to influence girls’ universal nature. Camp Fire, the oldest and, until 1930, largest organization for girls, tried to encourage “an appreciation of a life close to the heart of nature, whose wayward children we still are, despite our carapace of over-civilization.”12 For founders Luther and Charlotte Gulick, the carapace of modern culture, rather than protecting girls, had inadvertently shielded them from a healthy unfolding of their domestic nature. Camp Fire would solve this problem with the revival of a profound respect for the campfire itself, symbol of a more primitive time when fire’s power had been domesticated in the service of the home.13 “Just as our progressive schools are going back to the home training of the past so the camp brings girls of today back to the primitive conditions of our forebears on the farm and frontier,” concluded the Gulick’s son, Halsey.14 The Gulicks, in other words, accepted a modified version of Hall’s recapitulation theory. They would lead girls, dressed in Camp Fire’s trademark “Indian costume,” back into nature because there they could reclaim a part of girls’ nature that had been lost. Out in the woods, Camp Fire Girls would recapture their primitive femininity much in the same way Hall’s boys found their masculine selves. Camp Fire leadership was convinced that what troubled girls was dissociation from their domestic role; the organization was equally convinced that none of its rivals understood this truth.

6

Growing Girls

“The suggestion of the Girl Scouts did not meet the need,” wrote Charlotte Gulick, because it “did not sufficiently recognize that first grand division of labor which arose when man went forth while women guarded the fire of the household.”15 Charlotte Gulick was absolutely correct. Girl Scout leadership did not focus on the reclamation of domesticity, because it perceived other, more pressing needs that girls could fulfill in the nature of camp. “A Girl Scout Camp is the living of Girl Scouting. Its atmosphere must express courtesy, gentleness, self-discipline, sharing, dependability, independence, and happiness,” gushed camp committee secretary Louise Price.16 Nature, in other words, was the place where girls would learn everything that many adults feared the larger culture was no longer teaching them. But why could these values best be communicated at camp? Why insist that “camp is the best place to study the Girl Scout movement, for here its ideals find most complete expression,” when most camping trips lasted only two weeks?17 For most girls’ organizations, the most powerful promise the American landscape offered girls was a reconnection not to a domestic past, but to a proudly patriotic one. “Of course we put a great deal of emphasis on our camps. Americans love camping out. It is our national heritage from the pioneer days so recently behind us,” proclaimed Girl Scout commissioner Jane Deeter Rippin.18 Girls were taught that their camping experiences would allow them to channel the can-do spirit of early settlers, as if the pioneers had left behind their resourcefulness and valor along with crumbling stone walls and rusty plowshares. “Long ago—yet not so very long ago—there were girl pioneers living where you live right now,” wrote Lina and Adelia Beard, founders of the Girl Pioneers of America. Like Scout leaders, the Beards believed that girls willing to venture into the American landscape could tap into hidden reservoirs of self-reliance and fortitude that had been bequeathed to ensuing generations. “As has been justly said: while historical societies, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Colonial Dames and like organizations seek to preserve the historical records and objects connected with the early life of our country, the Girl Pioneers, working in harmony with them, revive and perpetuate the spirit that dominated the invincible men and women who made our great nation possible,” the Beards proclaimed. Uncomfortable with the forces of immigration and urbanization that were shaping their protean nation, native white Americans loved to recall a mythic national heritage symbolized by Jeffersonian yeoman farmers and resourceful pioneers. (This tendency did not bode well for Camp Fire leaders,

What Is the Matter with Jane?

7

who essentially chose the enemy as their icon for recalling girls to wilderness.) This was the spirit they identified with the American character, and which many believed somehow lived on, embedded in the American landscape itself. While nativists lamented the decline of such stalwart figures, and the closing of the frontier that had brought out the best in them, youth organizations heartily embraced a mission to resurrect this “pioneer heritage” through their camping programs. The reclamation of pioneer heritage worked on several levels. It not only conferred upon girls the self-reliance and courage they were lacking, it removed many of the modern conveniences that had harmed girls in the first place. “Scouting takes girls out into the open, ‘hikes’ with them, teaches them every sort of woodcraft, camping, and swimming . . . that the elevators and gas ranges and electric lights of civilization are causing to be lost out of the race . . . of our pioneer mothers—and the Girl Scouts are putting them back,” proclaimed Scout commissioner Josephine Daskam Bacon.19 Camping took the place of pioneering—“pioneer girls did not ride in trolley cars or automobiles . . . but walked through the often trackless forests and paddled up or down the streams or rivers in birch bark or dug out canoes,” the Beards explained—and through camping, girls gained both the physical prowess and character traits that had characterized their mythic foremothers. “The pioneer women were strong. You can be strong. The pioneer women were upright. You can be upright. The pioneer women were unselfish and self-sacrificing. You can be unselfish too.”20 The Beard sisters surely hoped that all Girl Pioneers aspired to such self-improvements, and yet their language might have struck some girls as too much of a good thing. Boys, after all, went to the woods to have fun acting out their primitive impulses; girls, it seemed, had to be unselfish even in the wilderness. Of all girls’ organizations, it was the Scouts who sensed that girls might like to have an experience that matched a bit more closely what their brothers received. “All that they had read in their story books, all that they had dreamed in their dreams, was happening before them; their own brothers were turning into frontiersmen, explorers, Scouts,” explained a Scout publication, and girls, too, wanted to have a part in those stories.21 Once again, pioneering heritage was called into service, because out on the frontier, girls were told, no one stopped to ask if a chore was men’s or women’s work, they simply did what was necessary. “In an emergency, Scouts were nurses and doctors combined,” claimed Scouting for Girls, the Girl Scout handbook, invoking a well-understood example of sexual stereotyping to prove that true Scouts would rise above such petty distinctions.22 The

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Growing Girls

American frontier was not a place that upheld the divergence of sexual roles that some viewed as a benchmark of civilization’s progress; it was populated by self-reliant and competent people who could act out both parts. Camp as a stand-in for the frontier had a lot to offer girls: patriotism, valor, strength, and an opportunity to perform real physical labor regardless of gender roles. But leaders acknowledged that girls also wanted to have fun. Girls “crave romance and adventure and they will get them in one way or another . . . try to captivate them with the joys and adventures of life in the open before they have learned to satisfy these cravings in artificial and second-hand ways.” Camp, by reconnecting girls to their pioneer heritage, would help with this too. Girls who went to camp could understand “the joys and adventure of life in the open” that had been such a part of the American past. When a girl went to camp she turned “to the simple outof-door life that her pioneer ancestors knew, seeking the straight forward courageous grasp of essentials that can make her life useful and rich, and, on the whole, happy.”23

Chapter Structure These were heady promises indeed for the benefits of bringing girls and nature together. But at its inception, no girls’ organization could honestly say that such rhetoric described more than hopeful dreams for an imagined future. In Chapter 1, I describe how the founders of girls’ organizations spent their time establishing distinct identities, creating programs, and lining up supporters. Camp Fire leadership argued that its more traditional vision of girlhood made it an appropriate analogue to the Boy Scout movement. Boy Scout leadership, who could be counted on to staunchly defend boys’ unique right to Scouting, repeatedly accused the Girl Scouts of “aping” their program.24 Girl Scout founder Juliette Low spent her time cultivating the support of her friend Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the British Boy Scouts, while trying not to provoke the enmity of American Boy Scout leaders. When not accusing each other of misconstruing the real needs of girls, Camp Fire and the Girl Scouts were busy recruiting members. The girls who joined seemed to be having a good time, but local troops were loosely organized and often thrived or folded according to the energy of volunteers. Membership growth was not stagnant, but neither did it seem that the girls of America had been impatiently awaiting the opportunity to join up. The Great War changed all that. In Chapter 2, I turn to America’s mobilization for war and the effect it had on the growth of girls’ organizations.

What Is the Matter with Jane?

9

From their founding, girls’ organizations had insisted that one of their chief goals was the promotion of citizenship. Yet early publications reveal a problem: a bewildering range of activities, from mending tea towels to trapping rodents, was defined as civic duty. During mobilization for the Great War, however, girls’ organizations were not alone in ascribing civic value to previously mundane chores. Eating cornbread and riding bicycles became government-sanctioned acts of civic responsibility, and, as Scout and Camp Fire leaders were quick to point out, these patriotic duties could be discharged just as easily by twelve-year-old girls as by grown men. But could adolescent girls really be mobilized for war? Could girls be viewed not merely as future citizens, but as responsible, even heroic, members of the current body politic? What should the limits of girls’ mobilization efforts be and who was best qualified to set those limits—the government or the organizations that claimed prior experience in delineating girls’ civic duties? This chapter answers these questions by tracing girls’ involvement in mobilization—from Food Administration conservation campaigns to Liberty Loan drives to work in the “moral zones” surrounding army cantonments. Predictably, leaders incurred official reprobation as they moved girls from kitchen to community to the sexually charged space around army camps. However, when officials made it clear that girls’ efforts were no longer required, emboldened leaders did not retreat to the home. Instead, they designed their own camps, where fledgling girl citizens could continue their patriotic training. Yet the hopeful promise of war camps was fleeting. Soon after the home front was demobilized, the patriotic discipline that leaders had hoped to encourage at camp was redefined as rigid militarism. Leaders were faced with the challenge of reconfiguring the camps that had become a central part of their organizations. In Chapter 3, I describe how leaders worked from the ground up to build the new “natural” camps that would act as living stages for the creation of a new model for female adolescence. A confluence of historic trends in the postwar era conspired to reconfigure both the landscape and programs of girls’ summer camps. Economic prosperity fueled the popularity of auto trips to newly created national parks, while “Hometown Weeks” encouraged urban dwellers, now a majority of Americans, to visit increasingly depopulated small towns. These trips were, however, more than recreational vacations; travelers were encouraged to view the landscape as the ancestral homeland of wilderness-taming pioneers and as a repository of old-stock American values. Directors seized on this nationalist reconfiguration of their camps’ landscape while also paying

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Growing Girls

careful attention to the waves of regional pride that were sweeping the nation during the Great Depression. A powerful sense of regionalism, which directors referred to as the “indigenous,” infused the landscape of their new natural camps. An indigenous landscape was animated not only with an American spirit, but also with feelings and preferences that were reflective of its particular region. All it needed in order to express these inherent qualities were inhabitants receptive to its lessons. Accordingly, directors filled camp programs with activities and pageants designed to transmit this natural, indigenous knowledge to their charges. Adolescent girls, who purportedly were endowed with vivid and empathetic imaginations, were seen as perfect conduits for the indigenous lessons residing in the landscape. Having convinced hundreds of thousands of girls that camping was central to their Scout or Camp Fire experience, leaders whisked these youngsters away to the woods. Once ensconced on what camp directors referred to as a “natural stage,” girls were led through a script of activities designed to rekindled their pioneer spirit and reward them for allowing this spirit to flourish. The final chapters in this book, Chapters 4–6, derive their titles— “Naturecraft,” “Homecraft,” and “Healthcraft”—from the most popular categories of honors and awards that girls could win at camp. Through these programs, leaders placed their imprimatur on a new vision of female adolescence that redefined girls’ relationships to the natural world, their families, and even their own bodies. Do not, however, expect to find a coherent philosophy underlying these varied ambitions. How are we to make sense of sense of directors’ sweeping, indeed almost fanciful, claims that camp could connect a girl to her “American pioneer ancestry,” while helping her to appreciate the fact that “dish-washing is a glorified art”? Bound by their own rhetorical flourishes that extolled the importance of the natural world, girls’ organizations proclaimed naturecraft the core of their camping program. Directors wanted to present campers with a vision of the natural world that mirrored what they believed to be the true nature lying dormant inside the adolescent girl. Naturecraft was meant to create girls who could boast of a warm relationship with the natural world while acting as heirs to the pioneer great-grandmothers who had subdued the wilderness through their competence and self-reliance. In Chapter 4, I examine the various components of the naturecraft program. Nature study lessons stressed a balance between sentiment and scientific inquiry that would lead girls to develop an objective, yet still empathetic, relationship to the natural world. The nature study portion of the program

What Is the Matter with Jane?

11

promoted lessons that stressed a balance between sentiment and scientific inquiry that would lead girls to develop an objective, yet still empathetic, relationship to the natural world. Yet individual leaders often created a program rife with the same contradictions that characterized school-based nature study curricula. Leaders may have prided themselves on rejecting the sentimental stories of the so-called nature fakers, but they still taught girls that the “redeeming virtues” of “bright and cheerful coloration” made venomous snakes less dangerous. What did it mean to claim that “the first law of the scientist was the same as the first law of the Girl Scout” when those same girls had little chance of growing up to be scientists? Woodcraft, the second major part of the naturecraft program, depended on girls’ identification with her pioneer grandmothers. These hardy woman wielded brooms as handily as they did rifles, and did both, girls were assured, out of devotion to the home. But still, when directors claimed that campers should be proficient with axes and knives—tools not generally associated with twelve-year-old girls, to say the very least—they ran up against the limits of transferring pioneer heritage to girls. Could the pioneer woman, who worked alongside men to subdue the wilderness and create an attractive home, really serve as a valuable role model for modern girls who looked forward to combining their domestic responsibilities with professional careers? Or would girls have to be content with learning only the domestic side of pioneering, a set of skills that many adults believed girls willfully shunned? In Chapter 5, I explore this “domestic pioneering” program—a series of activities girls’ organizations referred to as homecraft. Cultural observers all agreed that the meaning of housework was undergoing a profound transformation in early twentieth-century America—from menial labor to an emotional commitment to the well-being of the family. Yet adolescent girls did not seem to be catching on to these new expectations. Parents, camp directors argued, were part of the problem and thus girls had to be removed from their homes to be taught proper homecraft lessons. In asserting their superiority, camp leaders joined a host of professionals who claimed expertise backed by formal degrees and modern methods. Ironically, camp leaders used this quintessentially modern argument to promote some very antimodern ideas. At camp, the spirit of nature as embodied in the campfire, the nightly focal point of the camping experience, acted as an agent of transformation. The campfire did not represent the wild and uncontrollable aspects of fire, but rather recalled the time when fire’s power was domesticated. Primitive man had tamed both fire and nature; now

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fire and nature would return the favor by helping “primitive maidens” remember their responsibilities to home and hearth. Tiresome chores became fun in the woods, badges were awarded for outdoor housekeeping, and girls who prepared the best camp meals were heroes. At the end of their camping experience, girls could return home with new skills and a suitable reverence for their domestic role. In the final chapter I explore the changing nature of healthcraft programs for girls. When girls’ organizations were started, camp, with its fresh air and wholesome food, seemed a “natural” place for girls to pursue health honors. By the 1930s, reports began to suggest that children now got sicker the longer they stayed at camp. Moreover, the very notion of what constituted girls’ good health had radically changed. Health Winners used to hike every day and sleep with the windows open to win their merit badges; now they clipped photographs from fashion magazines and studied models’ postures for helpful tips. If health was a commodity girls sought—and found—in the marketplace, where did that leave summer camps? And if summer camps could no longer be relied upon to provide a healthy, let alone transcendent, experience, where did that leave the organizations that had staked so much of their reputations on their ability to transform the nature of girls?

Chapter 1

Fashioning Girls’ Identities


I

t is my place to sketch the conditions which have created a new relation of women to the world; to show why a nation-wide organization of girls and women is inevitable,” proclaimed Luther Gulick, founder of the Camp Fire Girls, in a 1912 pamphlet.1 According to Girl Scout history, just a few months later Juliette Low phoned a friend to announce her own intention to start a new organization. “I have something for the girls of America,” Low proclaimed.2 At the time they made their announcements, however, neither Gulick nor Low had anything tangible: no uniforms or handbooks, no emblems, badges, or honors. Nor did they have any girls. What each future leader did have was a vision—at times inchoate and often not internally consistent, but a vision nonetheless—of what kind of people girls were and who they wanted them to become. Over the ensuing years, as Scout troops and Camp Fires formed, local leaders and, of course, the girls themselves influenced programmatic direction by pursuing certain prescribed activities and ignoring others; but at the beginning, Low and Gulick, along with their closest allies, were the dominant forces that shaped girls’ organizations. These leaders believed that they had arrived at a critical juncture in the ongoing debate about the nature of American girlhood, and in an important sense they were correct. The adolescent girls who had been developing their own cultures in the nation’s high schools since the late nineteenth century had, along with their brothers, been formally introduced to the larger society through G. Stanley Hall’s 1904 monograph, Adolescence. New professionals in educational psychology and social work had begun to study them, and these theoretical ideas were making their way into practice in the form of agencies and programs that served America’s youth. But thus far, those programs had been directed at children in general or boys in particular; none had targeted girls as girls. 13

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Gulick and Low resolved to change that. But creating a recreational program for girls in an era of almost obsessive attention to the theoretical underpinnings of even the most mundane work meant that they would have to engage serious questions about girls’ nature. How different were boys and girls, and therefore how far did proposed girls’ organizations need to diverge from the existing models created for boys? Would girls’ programs have to be fundamentally different from boys,’ or merely tweaked here and there to accommodate special feminine needs? If so, what exactly were those needs? Most could agree that girls’ recreational activities should seek to build character, but what type of character would they build and what specific programs could help accomplish that goal? These were all serious questions that required answers from anyone who wished to garner support from the general public, parents, and the foundations that supplied start-up funding for children’s work. But given the voluntary nature of girls’ organizations, the answer to these questions had to be embedded in a program that would be attractive to the girls themselves. As the new leaders of girls’ groups applied themselves to the creation of the bylaws and charters that would legitimate their work with adult supporters, they also wrangled over the badges and ranks, activities and watchwords that they hoped would catch the eye of adolescent girls. And if Camp Fire and Girl Scout leaders came to very different conclusions about the form their programs should take, they did agree on one fundamental issue—that uniforms would be the most important signifier of all. Relying on a shared assumption that an innate feminine interest in dress might just convince wavering youngsters to join their organizations, leaders invested a great deal of meaning in the costumes they offered to girls. Fabric and designs were fashioned with scrupulous attention to displaying beliefs about what girls’ nature truly was, and what girls might reasonably strive to become.

Camp Fire Girls: A New Relation of Women to the World In March 1911, Luther Gulick convened a meeting of educators, social reformers, and recreation specialists at the Horace Mann School, an experimental school operated by Columbia University’s Teacher’s College. Gulick, who worked at the Russell Sage Foundation, a fund established by the Rockefeller Foundation, believed it was time to launch a recreational program for girls analogous to the young, thriving Boy Scout movement. A medical doctor by training, Gulick had worked in the recreation field for decades, beginning at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts. He had organized a new program

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in physical education for the New York City public schools and headed the Playground Association of America before joining the Russell Sage Foundation in 1907. Up to this point, however, and despite the four daughters he had at home, Gulick’s professional life had been focused primarily on boys.3 But, as the quotation at the beginning of this chapter shows, he now believed the time was ripe to turn his attention to girls. Camp Fire’s inaugural meeting brought together some fairly well known women such as Lina Beard, author of the popular American Girls’ Handy Book, and Dr. Anna Brown of the YWCA with even more prominent men, including best-selling author and Boy Scout cofounder Ernest Thompson Seton and Boy Scout chief executive James E. West. These figures from the girl and boy movements were joined by Gulick’s relatives, friends, and co-workers. His wife, Charlotte Vetter Gulick; his sister-in-law Charlotte Farnsworth, director of a girls’ camp in Vermont; his friend and a famous pageant master, William Chauncey Langdon; Lee Hanmer of the Russell Sage Foundation; and Howard Braucher of the Playground Association rounded out the group. A few weeks after the first meeting, West issued a press release announcing the group’s intention to found the Camp Fire Girls of America.4 If readers believed that its headline, “National Society for Girls Like the Boy Scouts,” implied a commonality between the groups, West quickly disabused them of the notion. “The aim of the Camp Fire Girls of America is to develop womanly qualities in the girls,” he declared, and therefore the organization’s activities would be “of an entirely different character from those arranged for boys.” There was no trouble explaining away portions of the Camp Fire program that happened to look strikingly similar to Boy Scout activities. The tenets of educational psychology (to which many Camp Fire leaders were enthusiastic adherents) held that the motivation with which a task was approached possessed the key to its ultimate meaning. Thus even if boys and girls did the exact same thing, say, cooked their dinner over a campfire, the fundamentally different natures they brought to that task would alter its meaning. For boys, it was a sign of innate self-sufficiency; for girls, it was an acknowledgment of their natural domesticity. All, in other words, devolved back to nature, and boys’ and girls’ natures were as immutable as they were diametrically opposed. Boys, West explained, were driven primarily by an instinct for hero worship, specifically a desire to emulate the “pioneer heroes” they read about in their “favorite story books.” The Boy Scout movement was successful, West claimed, because it provided youngsters with a program through which they could imitate the “healthful out-of-door life led by pioneer heroes.” Once boys were brought into nature, they would find themselves “physically

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and mentally under the supervision of a trained scoutmaster” and “influenced to be more courteous and taught to understand the value of service and the true things of life.” West may have viewed this as a straightforward appeal to boys’ true nature, but it is just as easy to read his description of the Boy Scouts’ highly touted character-building program as an elaborate bait and switch. Boys’ intrinsic love of nature and adventure was used as a ploy to teach them the less innate, and, one must assume, less desirable, lessons of civility. Moreover, boys who had been enticed into nature did not wind up emulating the pioneer heroes who had excited their tendency to hero worship in the first place; instead they came under the control of scoutmasters, earnest purveyors of good manners and moral certitude. Since no one believed that girls were driven by the same basic instincts as boys, no one believed they had to be subjected to the same benign subterfuge. According to Camp Fire leadership, the creation of a successful girls’ organization would prove easier, since girls’ true nature was more consistent and straightforward than boys.’ Unlike their brothers, who had to be duped into accepting character-building lessons, girls actually did want the training they would receive in the Camp Fire program. “Activities to arouse what is most womanly in the girl are to center around the Camp Fire and the hearth fire and appeal to the girl’s instinct to please.” Camp Fire activities would therefore stress the outdoors while still recognizing that “special attention must be paid to the home” (a slightly quixotic ambition whose ramifications will be explored in later chapters). To West, girls’ individual instincts—a desire to please that would naturally express itself “through the personal appearance, through making beautiful objects, and by doing kindly deeds”—dovetailed perfectly with larger, timeless truths. Camp Fire programs would be based on the “fundamental fact that through all the ages woman is the conservator of the home,” and use this common past as a guide to mold girls’ futures. If West’s press release left little doubt about Camp Fire’s underlying philosophies, it left a great many practical questions unanswered. The article made no mention of handbooks or uniform design; it did not describe ranks to be obtained or honors to be achieved. (Although if any person was inspired enough to wish to form a local group, she or he could contact committee secretary Charlotte Farnsworth for more information.) West’s statement described none of these things because none of them existed at the time. What West did allude to, albeit obliquely, was one of the reasons why it would take another six months for any of these specifics to be worked out. Wo-He-Lo, the official history of the Camp Fire movement, ascribes this period of inactivity in the spring and summer of 1911 to Luther Gulick’s

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absence—severe migraines forced him to take a six-month leave from all work—but it was the presence of conflict, both external and internal, more than Gulick’s absence that cast the fledging organization into temporary disarray.5 The external threat to Camp Fire’s claim that it was the “counterpart” of the Boy Scout organization came in the form of two small, but nonetheless significant, competitors. In the Times article, West acknowledged the existence of Girl Guides in England, Canada, and New Zealand, though he implied there was no American branch of the Guide organization. This was a half-truth. Clara Lisetor-Lane, a Des Moines–based journalist, had organized a group of Girl Scouts in Iowa, while in Spokane, Washington, the Reverend David Ferry, a Boy Scout leader, had created a troop of Girl Guides. Neither leader had fully affiliated with the larger Girl Guide network, or shown much initiative in moving beyond the local area. Camp Fire leadership, however, was concerned enough to invite both Lisetor-Lane and Ferry to a June meeting in New York, where they could discuss the possibility of combining their groups. Talks went well enough, and a decision was reached to merge all three organizations under the name Girl Pioneers of America, with Charlotte Gulick serving as president, Lina Beard as chief Pioneer, and Ferry and Lisetor-Lane as heads of the western and midwestern branches, respectively. This easy assimilation of potential competitors, however, belied more divisive ideological differences that were beginning to appear within Camp Fire’s own ranks, and when a subcommittee charged with creating the first handbook began committing specifics to paper, the board’s genial unanimity fractured. The first major debate was as predictable as it was volatile. Under the direction of Grace Gallatin Seton, a freethinking suffragist married to Ernest Thompson Seton, the committee drafted a handbook that was “slavish” in following established boys’ programs.6 West, particularly, was annoyed that Seton had ignored the board’s directive to create a program specifically suited to girls’ needs. When it became clear to her that her work would be summarily rejected, Seton resigned. Her clash with West and his allies was, however, neither strictly personal nor exclusively philosophical; it was a harbinger of the management conflicts that would afflict Camp Fire leadership for decades. Many women who found themselves in disagreement with the reigning men on the committee quit, causing the board’s balance to shift from a female to a male majority. With Grace Seton off the handbook project, work stalled, until it was jump-started by a confrontation that would cost Camp Fire yet another highprofile female leader. In September, a few weeks before leadership was

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scheduled to reconvene, Chief Pioneer Lina Beard received a letter from the Henry Holt Publishing Company informing her that Lord Baden-Powell had recently approved an American edition of the Girl Guide manual. They wanted to know if she was interested in the job.7 It is not clear from the extant record whether the Holt Company knew Beard was involved with an organization that fancied itself a competitor of the Girl Guides; what they did know was that she was a successful author. Beard’s book, How to Amuse Yourself and Others: The American Girl’s Handy Book, first published by Scribner’s in 1887 and in its sixth edition by 1912, was a compendium of practical projects, crafts, and games for girls who enjoyed wholesome fun in the outdoors. It is no surprise that Holt tapped Beard for the Girl Guide project—the interesting question is why Camp Fire had not asked her to write its own handbook. The answer lies not in the board’s fear that Beard, like Seton, would have followed the existing boys’ program too closely—Beard never wavered in her conviction that there should be no difficulty combining domesticity and femininity with outdoor fun. The problem for Camp Fire’s board was the vehicle through which Beard chose to convey these lessons to adolescent girls. Like her brother, Daniel Carter Beard, founder of the Sons of Daniel Boone and the Boy Pioneers, she believed that pioneer settlers, not Gulick’s “primitive” peoples, were the heroes of the American frontier. No one on the Camp Fire board could have doubted that Beard would create a manual favoring pioneers, just as no one who knew the Gulicks could doubt they would rely on their own version of Native American imagery. In addition to their differing opinions about iconography, there was also a question about basic style. Lina Beard stressed straightforward, practical instruction and sometimes grew impatient with the Gulicks’ penchant for symbolism and poetry—a position that put her at such odds with Camp Fire leadership that she, like Grace Seton before her, resigned from the board. By September, only six months after its public unveiling, Camp Fire had lost both its high-profile women to disputes that had important implications for the organization’s future. The board had reaffirmed its commitment to a distinctive program for girls, grounded in an understanding of girls’ nature as fundamentally and irrevocably different from boys.’ Moreover, Camp Fire leaders had opted to express this conviction about girls’ nature in an iconography that they believed embodied timeless truths about girls’ “racial heritage.” Camp Fire’s Indian symbolism would ignite in girls an atavistic longing for the simple, primitive domesticity they had lost; enacting Camp Fire rituals would help them repair the damage done by modern

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Figure 1. This Camp Fire Girl dressed in her ceremonial gown is demonstrating the group’s hand signal, meant to represent the rising flame of the campfire. Courtesy of Camp Fire USA.

culture. And given girls’ natural predilections for beauty and adornment, no part of the Camp Fire program would be a better vehicle to convey these lessons than the ceremonial gown. The Camp Fire ceremonial gown was made of brown serge with leather fringe trim and was cut to a simple pattern allegedly reminiscent of Native American design. When an initiate became a Wood Gatherer, the first Camp Fire rank (the others were Fire Maker and Torch Bearer), her unadorned gown was meant to be an important symbol of her solidarity with the group and an acknowledgment that she had willingly forsworn superficial forms of personal expression. Girls were assured that their plain ceremonial dress fostered a “democracy of spirit, artistic unity, and beauty of form,” traits which were “desirable in the activities of the Camp Fire Girl.” The democratic power of ceremonial gowns allowed “girls from every station of life” to come “together all clad alike,” wiping out the long-standing association of fashion and social class and permitting a more meaningful and shared

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essential femininity to come to the fore. (In case they still had misgivings, girls were assured that the ceremonial gown was “just as becoming to the poor girl as to the rich girl.”) Clad in ceremonial gowns, Camp Fire Girls became united in a “great sisterhood” that respected and emphasized their unique sensibilities as girls, irrespective of superficial distinctions.8 Once a girl had accepted her place in the universal sisterhood, she was free to express her individuality in a more meaningful way than that offered by the ephemeral appeal of fashion. “The importance of the ceremonial gown has grown during the two years since the Camp Fire Girls was started,” her handbook explained. “At first the girls put on decoration simply to make it look pretty, but now no decoration has a place that has not a meaning,” the handbook proudly declared.9 Girls decorated their gowns with the brightly colored honor beads they earned by completing various tasks—proving that a girl’s inborn attraction to beauty and personal appearance need not lead to mere vanity, but could be channeled in a positive direction. Unlike a Girl Scout, who was awarded each merit badge only once, a Camp Fire Girl could earn a flame-colored homecraft honor bead each time she washed and ironed her shirtwaist and skirt, or a green nature lore honor for every new plant she added to her collection, making her gown a visible record of her many accomplishments.10 Although Camp Fire published booklets filled with ideas for how to arrange the beads—including The Shulu-tam-na of the Camp Fire Girls, whose title was purportedly a translation of “in full dress with all beads on” in an unspecified Native American language—girls were encouraged to create their own designs and use their beads to create pictographs of their symbolic “Indian” names or scenes depicting their favorite Camp Fire activities. Sometimes, however, Camp Fire’s Indian dress, and especially its many accessories, appealed too strongly to the girls and they had to be reminded to pay attention not to the gown’s superficial charms but to its power to “bring [them] back to the primitive idea.”11 “Have you ever stopped to consider whether or not there is any distinction between the Indian man and the Indian women in the wearing of feathers?” girls were reproached after some had submitted snapshots of themselves in full headdress to a Camp Fire photography contest. “A feather to the Indian means the same as a medal or college letter awarded to a paleface for athletic merit. But under no circumstances does an Indian woman ever adorn herself with feathers,” they were admonished.12 This did not mean that girls shouldn’t be publicly acknowledged for their achievements, just that both task and reward had to conform to women’s prescribed sphere. “Boys receive honors and medals

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for doing manly things. We must give our girls honors and medals for doing womanly things,” Luther Gulick proclaimed.13 Perhaps repenting of the brusque warnings about feathers that had appeared in the February 1914 issue of Wo-He-Lo, Camp Fire’s monthly magazine, leadership soon tried a more lighthearted tack. Three months later, WoHe-Lo featured an Any Girl drama in which girls were given a different way to interpret their ceremonial dress and were shown a more positive way to think about the honors that were available to them. Any Girl, the eponymous hero of the magazine’s serialized dramas, was always stumbling across “real, true Camp Fire Girls” in her travels. As an interested, but uninitiated, girl, she served as a foil who could start conversations about Camp Fire’s purpose and elicit long stories from members about how much they enjoyed their organization. In this particular drama, Any Girl learned that Camp Fire’s emphasis on domestic chores, rather than limiting girls’ horizons, in fact gave them proper credit for all the work they already did. “Do you mean that you can get beads for making bread and canning fruit just as much as by doing all those other lovely things?” she asked. “Yes,” the proud Camp Fire Girls answered her, “anything you do at home will count toward getting honors.” And credit for work well done would be made manifest in the girls’ official Camp Fire attire. “You’ve no idea what fun it is to cook and sew, especially when it means more beads for your ceremonial gown,” they told her.14 Indeed, girls were encouraged to view their ceremonial gowns proudly as a reckoning of their life’s work. “It will become a beautiful symbolic record of what is most precious in the life of the girl, and may be passed on as a priceless inheritance to her children,” the Camp Fire manual predicted.15 As if they were poring over faded snapshots, aging Camp Fire Girls could show off all the beads that had given true meaning to their old gowns. “Maybe she will show them to her children and her children’s children, explaining how she won each bead and telling the story that belongs to it,” Charlotte Gulick suggested.16 Yet in keeping with Camp Fire’s emphasis on a strictly home-based domesticity, girls were taught that their gowns were an essentially private celebration of their feminine nature. “I have always thought of a Camp Fire ceremonial gown as a diary of the things that we do. We wear them only at ceremonial meetings and each honor and emblem reminds us of the good times we have had together and the worthwhile things we have accomplished,” a guardian observed.17 Girls, even those whose accomplishments were legion, were not meant to brag about their successes or turn them into feats worthy of public accolades. Instead, Camp Fire Girls were supposed to

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be content with the honor conferred by their gowns, those visible diaries that could be publicly interpreted only by the author and her closest confidants. “Care should be taken that the ceremonial gown should not grow common and of little significance by being worn on the street, in parades,” advised the Camp Fire Girl handbook. Ceremonial gowns—and perhaps Camp Fire Girls themselves—could be diminished, even tarnished, by unwarranted public exposure. Public exposure, however, was precisely what an organization with aspirations to serve the girls of an entire nation desperately needed. Camp Fire leadership was beset by a dilemma that had long plagued conservative women: promoting a doctrine of separate spheres and trumpeting the benefits of domesticity often requires neglect of the home and substantial engagement in the public sphere. Furthermore, even if Camp Fire’s female leadership managed to avoid accusations of hypocrisy for publicly promoting the joys of private life, the organization still had to convince supporters that their message would be well received by a rising generation of young women. “Whether the spirit of the organization can be so applied as to lead the girls—especially the girls who need it—to carry the elements of romance and adventure into the pursuit of health and the discharge of the prosaic duties of life, and particularly into the idealization of the latter, is a question which can be determined only by trying it out,” concluded a report from the Rockefeller Foundation.18 Although in basic agreement with Camp Fire’s goals, supporters worried that the symbolic trappings, rather than facilitating girls’ transformation, actually hindered the organization’s chances for success, and they felt that the group had little to boast about in terms of “actual accomplishments.”19 Some faulted Gulick himself—they saw him as a “poet” or “promoter” whose bursts of unsustainable enthusiasm did not auger well for “level stretches of every day work”—but most doubted the appeal of the ritual that Gulick placed at the heart of the Camp Fire program. “Its distinctive emblems, watchwords, costumes and some secret society elements are not likely to be of permanent value,” opined one Rockefeller program evaluator.20 Still, they kept an open mind, stating that the “real value of the work and its lasting qualities are yet hard to determine. I hear commendation from women for the most part, but of course there are some who consider the organization a mere fad.”21 Unfortunately for the Gulicks, those inclined both to sympathize with the general goals of girls’ work and to view Camp Fire as a fad were soon presented with an alternative. It was an organization whose leaders shared the Gulicks’ commitment to adolescent girls, but

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eschewed their ritualistic methods of evoking a mythic past, while encouraging girls to “be prepared” for whatever the future might hold.

Girl Scouts: “Something for the Girls of America” When Juliette Gordon Low met Lord Robert Baden-Powell at a London dinner party in the spring of 1911, she was a wealthy fifty-year-old widow who had been shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic since her husband’s death in 1905.22 Her childless marriage to the drunken and flagrantly adulterous Englishman William Mackay Low had not been at all what she, daughter of one of Savannah’s finest families, had been raised to expect. Willie’s premature death, which Low experienced with a sense of guilty release, left her wealthy and independent but without the social anchor even her unconventional marriage had formerly provided. And so, according to her biographers, Juliette Low became an impulsive, aimless woman constantly traveling between England, the Continent, and America, dabbling in a wide range of activities, focusing on none of them. Speculations about her psychological state notwithstanding, it is indisputable that Low was captivated both by BadenPowell and the girls’ organization he had recently created.23 The popular history of Baden-Powell’s Girl Guides traces the group’s origin to a 1909 Boy Scout rally at London’s Crystal Palace, where a group of uninvited girls demanded they be included in the day’s Scouting activities.24 Evidence suggests, however, that female Boy Scouts predated the rally; they were organized in loose, unofficial bands that nonetheless received tacit approval from the chief Scout. The girls had been studying scoutcraft; practicing drills; and, using their brothers’ garments as patterns, sewing their own uniforms. Therefore, when they appeared at the Crystal Palace in proper Scout attire of khaki and “wide-awake hats,” they had every reason to believe they belonged there. They were greeted, however, with substantially less enthusiasm than they brought with them. The press covering the rally called the aspiring Scouts “young amazons” and hinted at the impropriety of coeducational scouting.25 Baden-Powell’s private support for the girls turned into public discomfort (some historians suggest that his mother’s strenuous disapproval of these masculine-looking Scouts was as much to blame as the negative press), and a few months later he announced that he and his sister Agnes would work out a new, distinctively feminine scheme to better serve British children of both sexes. It became increasingly important to Baden-Powell that every aspect of the girls’ program reflect their particular needs. He had chosen the name

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Scouts for his boys in order to remind them of the rugged British army scouts who had honorably served king and country in the otherwise disastrous Boer War (as the “Hero of Mafeking,” Baden-Powell proudly counted himself among their number). Boys were adventuresome and bold, both needing and desiring opportunities to venture into potentially dangerous terrain in order to test their mettle. Girls, however, were not meant to face such challenges, but rather help prepare boys to do so. Accordingly, Baden-Powell gave them the name Guides to emphasize girls’ important, albeit behind-the-scenes, role of helping boys to develop their potential. The Girl Guide handbook, How Girls Can Help the Empire, was no longer an adaptation of Scouting for Boys, but was crafted for girls who embraced their own supportive role in Britain’s future. Baden-Powell was also adamant about changing the uniform of Girl Guides. The Boy Scout’s khaki uniform had been patterned after British army attire to encourage boys’ martial aspirations. Baden-Powell wanted Boy Scouts to imagine themselves as future military men; he did not want girls to see themselves as soldiers. Changing social conventions were on the verge of turning such fantasies into realities, and Baden-Powell did not want the Guides to encourage girls down this path. A letter from “one of the leading ladies in the land” that appeared in the Girl Guide Gazette with BadenPowell’s editorial blessing echoed his own position on girls in uniform. “I have a very strong feeling about [girls wearing uniforms],” the unnamed lady wrote, “and fear it may lead to a spread of such horrors as women pretending to be soldiers, and going about as recruiting ‘officers’ dressed up in uniforms and calling themselves ‘sergeants’ and ‘corporals.’”26 Instead of khaki, the Girl Guides received a blue serge blouse and skirt that BadenPowell believed was “attractive yet serviceable and without frills!”27 The Girl Guides was not meant to prepare girls for a life of martial discipline, but to encourage in them a vision of femininity that rewarded service, humility, and attractiveness, but not undue vanity. Given the changes he made in uniforms, name, and program, BadenPowell appeared to have taken a firm stand in favor of distinctly tailored, sex-segregated organizations that closely conformed to traditional gender roles. Yet his personality complicated this decision. Baden-Powell possessed an irrepressible, childlike enthusiasm for the activities, games, and adventures that formed the Scouting program, and at some level it was hard for him to believe that girls, too, wouldn’t want a chance to join in the fun.28 He was also a man well known to be infatuated with his own ideas; he rarely, for example, missed an opportunity to remind the world that the Boy

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Image not available.

Figure 2. Juliette Gordon Low with Lord Robert Baden-Powell during the chief Scout’s 1921 visit to New York. By permission of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” was derived from his own initials. However, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, life peer and scion of a proud English family, was certainly no iconoclast and evinced little desire to disrupt the status quo, especially as applied to gender roles. Thus, while he fully supported the domestication of British Guiding, when his friend Juliette Low imported Guiding to the United States in 1912—only to quickly reveal a penchant for controversial changes—Baden-Powell stood by her. Juliette Low returned to the United States in March, fresh from her experience organizing British troops and eager to begin an American version of the Guides. She arrived in Savannah with Baden-Powell’s program and his blessing, but also with the legacy of his ambivalence. This eventually allowed Low to transform the Guides into an organization more suited to her own vision of American girlhood—and change the Guides back into Scouts—but first she simply needed some willing girls. Low organized the

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first Girl Guide troops at Savannah’s prestigious Pape School, taking advantage of her familial connection to its headmistress, Nina Anderson Pape. It was to Pape that Low allegedly made her apocryphal phone call announcing that she had something for the girls of America, and she soon began her mission with a group of Pape sixth and seventh graders, who became the White Rose and Carnation Girl Guide Troops.29 The creation of Low’s Guides in the same month that Camp Fire filed its official incorporation papers did not, however, start a public debate about the nature of American girls and how best to serve them. In fact, in Guiding’s early days, Low and her compatriots concerned themselves primarily with the practicalities of signing up girls and leaders, raising money, and publicizing their efforts. Unlike the Gulicks, Low did not issue sweeping philosophical statements about girls’ nature or their place in a new world order—it was not that she was completely uninterested in such questions, but she neither shared Gulick’s academic and professional background nor had the task before her of creating an organizational mission from scratch. The fact that she possessed Baden-Powell’s ready-made program, as well as his friendship, provided her with the freedom to get on with the business at hand. Yet her intimacy with Baden-Powell was not without complications. In the eyes of wary Camp Fire and Boy Scout leaders, Baden-Powell’s support elevated Low’s position from probable dilettante to potential competitor. Early correspondence between Low and Camp Fire leadership was predicated on a polite, but frankly disingenuous, assumption that everyone involved wanted to merge the two organizations. Low even traveled to New York City to discuss a possible Girl Guide–Camp Fire “amalgamation,” but her visit bore no fruit. It did, however, precipitate an exchange of correspondence that was vintage Juliette Low. Rightly famous for hearing what she wanted to hear, as opposed to what was actually said, Low wrote Gulick to thank him for his willingness to merge their groups. Gulick, of course, had no such intentions, especially on the terms Low laid out. In a masterful display of selective evasion, Low praised the Camp Fire handbooks for their “beauty, poetry and imagination,” after which, without missing a beat, she casually suggested that Camp Fire merge its handbook with the Girl Guides’. She also insisted that Camp Fire “adopt the Ten Guide Laws, as they stand, and make them the principles of character building.”30 Only a true Girl Guide partisan could interpret such uncompromising conditions, however lightly offered, as a balanced merger of equal organizations.

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The irony in Low’s offer, which she must have realized would render the existing Camp Fire program unrecognizable, was that she had no organization to merge. In the summer of 1912 there were a dozen or so American Girl Guides who had met for several months at school and had gone for a few nature hikes during their vacation. Low was shrewd enough to realize, however, that if she did not have actual girls to offer in trade, she could deliver something Camp Fire wanted even more—an uncontested field for carrying out girls’ work in the United States. What Low was really offering in exchange for Camp Fire’s acceptance of the Guide’s laws, program, and uniform was her own abdication of leadership in the new organization. If the merger took place, she wrote to Gulick, “I will efface myself and have the management in your hands.”31 What was so deft about her offer was what it left unsaid. Low’s gracious withdrawal carried with it an implicit promise of Lord Baden-Powell’s blessing of, or at the very least, his noninterference in, Camp Fire’s future development. Gulick responded to Low’s studied nonchalance in kind. He politely thanked Low for her letter, as if it had been concerned with inconsequential pleasantries, and promised to bring up the merger issue at the next board meeting. Six months later Luther Gulick reaped the rewards of his noncommittal response. In the winter of 1912, Baden-Powell entered the fray on Low’s behalf, if not at her behest. He wrote to Gulick, opening his letter on a conciliatory note by referring obliquely to the “difficulties which have occurred in Savannah” and demurring that “it would no doubt be wiser if the Girl Guides could amalgamate with the Camp Fire Movement.”32 But if Baden-Powell appeared willing to compromise his allegiance to Guiding, he made it clear that his support of Low herself was unshakable. He represented Low’s overtures to Camp Fire as a guileless, indeed selfless, effort to help the girls of America. Low’s proposal to “retain the laws and the name in order to remain part of the ‘universal sisterhood’ of Guides” was reflective not of her desire for control, Baden-Powell insisted, but rather her wish to have American girls be part of a worldwide organization that was “established in every British Possession, as well as in most countries on the continent.” In essence, Lord Baden-Powell defended Juliette Low as a perfect lady, in fact, as a perfect Guide, a woman who acted not on her own behalf but in deference to the needs of others, in this case, the needs of American girlhood itself. Having upheld Low’s honor, Baden-Powell was now free to retract his initial conciliatory position and suggest, a bit more forcefully, that Camp Fire “would do well to see if [the guidelaw] could not be adopted into their Movement thus bringing them into the same sisterhood, even though locally

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they retain their title.” Luther Gulick had no intention of turning his organization into a franchise of the Girl Guides, which would forfeit its name, handbook, and laws in return for admittance into a universal sisterhood. Nor was Gulick deceived about what such a merger would mean for Camp Fire’s unique program. In a note he scrawled in the margin of Baden-Powell’s letter, he asked, apparently incredulously given the punctuation, “[A]nd the Camp Fire would abide by the ‘Law of the Guides’?!” With it being clear that Low had staunch support from the chief Scout of Britain, Gulick turned to his own ally in American Boy Scouting, Executive Secretary James West. In a series of letters written over the winter of 1913, Gulick and West debated how to handle Low and the threat she posed. West seemed to understand that the three men were locked in a gentlemanly struggle ignited by Baden-Powell’s chivalrous defense of Juliette Low. He was concerned that Gulick had been too personal in his criticism of Low, thus running the risk of offending her champion. After West had “repeatedly” told Baden-Powell “that it would be unfortunate if Mrs. Low was encouraged in organizing the Girl Guides” and received no positive response, he felt there was little else he could do and encouraged Gulick to follow his lead.33 Accepting West’s correction, Gulick tried a different tactic the next time he wrote to Baden-Powell. Instead of criticizing Low, he lavished praise on his own program. “Mothers are as enthusiastic as are the girls over the renewed devotion and enthusiasm that the girls have in their domestic duties and their home opportunities,” he bragged to Baden-Powell.34 Without exactly saying so, Gulick hinted that if left to her own devices, Low, a childless widow, might create an organization that would not engender such domestic devotion. But in offering to “efface” herself vis-à-vis Gulick, and in having Baden-Powell defend her womanly credentials, Low had effectively immunized herself against such innuendo.

L

ow was abroad off and on for much of 1913, leaving the day-today administration of the Girl Guides in the hands of Edith Johnston, the organization’s only staff member, who was simultaneously thrilled and horrified to find that “the whole movement is sweeping the country.”35 All spring Johnston’s anxiety mounted. She received an ever-increasing number of inquiries from girls who wanted to start troops, but she had no handbooks or program standards to send, and no leaders who could help organize the girls. She had to redirect the bill for merit badges to Colonel Gordon, Low’s father, as there was less than four dollars in the treasury, and she herself had not been paid for months. By early summer, Johnston was in a panic.

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Clara Lisetor-Lane had been sending her vaguely threatening letters that she didn’t know how to answer, and requests for help from prospective Guides intensified now that school was out and the camping season had begun. Johnston, too, was ready to decamp to her family’s country home in order to escape Savannah’s summer heat but, as she complained to Low, she had no stationery, business cards, or office equipment to take with her. Juliette Low’s inattention to the prosaic demands of starting up an organization was clearly vexing to Edith Johnston, but Johnston’s implicit accusation that Low did not care about the Guides’ success was unfounded. Nothing, in fact, could have been further from the truth; it was just that Low was attending to a different type of Guiding business. While Johnston concerned herself with badges and budgets, Low had arrived at several important decisions that had lasting effects on the complexion of girls’ organizations in America. By February 1913, she had changed her Girl Guides into Girl Scouts and reclaimed the khaki uniforms that Baden-Powell had taken away from his British Girl Guides. Despite these changes, she had secured Baden-Powell’s continued patronage—he agreed that the American edition of the handbook could either list him as a coauthor or simply bear his endorsement, whichever Low preferred. “I hope you will make a great success with it,” Baden-Powell wrote her in a letter he also forwarded directly to Camp Fire headquarters.36 No one, least of all her new Camp Fire rivals, could have any lingering doubts that Juliette Low intended to run her organization exactly as she wished. Having made it clear that she was willing to challenge Camp Fire’s position as sole representative of girls’ needs, Low moved to consolidate support for her organization from the Boy Scouts. In a polite but firm letter to Ernest Thompson Seton, Low suggested that the Boy and Girl Scouts shared not merely a common name but also a common destiny—one that was at odds with defining principles of the Camp Fire movement.37 Luther Gulick, Low implied, was an obstructionist who resisted a merger between girls’ groups because he clung tenaciously to his idiosyncratic philosophies. Gulick, she reminded Seton, often talked about Camp Fire as an “army not a hospital,” by which he meant that his organization was for girls who were “able to give service, not for ones who needed service.” This, Low pointed out, was clearly at odds with the Scout goal of serving “girls of all grades of life.” Furthermore, Gulick’s unwavering commitment to Native American iconography meant that Camp Fire would never have appeal beyond the United States. “There is very little ground to claim that Camp Fire would work internationally,” Low opined. When Juliette Low suggested that

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cross-class appeal and internationalism were important goals of her fledging Girl Scout movement, she knew perfectly well that she was affirming established Boy Scout principles. Standing on the common ground she had carefully constructed, Low was now ready to take on the issue that was the real point of her letter. “We are the same movement for girls that scouts are for boys,” she forthrightly stated. And not only did the organizations share the hallowed Scout/Guide Laws that Gulick found anathema, they should, Low suggested, also share programming and activities. Accordingly, she requested Seton’s permission to use select badges—“will you allow me to use those already in use by the Girl Guides in England such as bicycle pioneer, signaller, seamanship, etc.?” This was an audacious way for Low to frame her request. She was well aware that Boy Scout leaders believed that their badge work was inextricably tied to their vision of hardy masculinity, and here Low was reminding them that in fact their boys pursued the same honors as those won by English girls.38 Moreover, by referring to the English Guides, Low reminded Seton (who himself had had several tense encounters with Baden-Powell over copyrights) that absolute precedent for Scout/Guide programming rested not with the Americans, but with Baden-Powell. Low may have asked Seton’s permission to use the badges, but she implied that she did not need it; and in truth, she did not wait for him to grant it. By the time Low had written to Ernest Thompson Seton, American Girl Scouting was already under way. Financial troubles notwithstanding, handbooks, uniform accessories, and badges were on order. Headquarters were about to be moved from their provincial home in Savannah to the more cosmopolitan environs of Washington, DC. Barely a year later, Girl Scouting took up residence in New York, a city, not coincidently, that was home to the Camp Fire and Boy Scout national offices. Although a clear token of Low’s intent to be a player on the national scene, the geographic proximity might not have provoked much anger had it not been for other more disconcerting encroachments. As the two women who constituted the national staff—Cora Neal had recently joined Edith Johnston—began to put out pamphlets and press releases advertising their organization, they were in a state of near-constant anxiety. Their fears were not entirely unfounded. Many of the earliest Girl Scout publications borrowed heavily from Boy Scout materials, and Neal, especially, worried that they were dangerously close to provoking a copyright lawsuit. Indeed the organization seemed beset from all sides. Opposition from the Boy Scouts was unrelenting—sometimes emanating from national levels,

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at other times from the rank and file. “I don’t mind how many attacks we have just so long they don’t come from the leaders,” Johnston wrote to Low, “Let a few commissioners and Scout Masters resign if they want to.”39 When not running the Boy Scout gauntlet, the staff did battle with Camp Fire supporters. “I have visited a number of schools and I do not find them at all friendly to the Girl Scouts,” Neal complained to Low, “as they think Camp Fire should have the exclusive right.”40 While the staff did its best to promote Girl Scouting without unduly provoking its adversaries, an event that would seem to have no bearing at all on the fortunes of American girls’ organizations began to assert its considerable influence. Barely had the Washington office been set up when the Great War began in Europe. Just a few months later, Cora Neal made an acute observation. The war had brought the Boy Scouts unprecedented publicity; they were “always in the news,” Neal wrote to Low. And more important, “Camp Fire Girls never were.” Although Neal did not attempt to explain why this should be so, she clearly saw the disparate coverage as a boon to the Girl Scout’s future prospects. The media, she told Low, did not perceive Camp Fire and Boy Scouts as the analogous organizations their leaders promoted them as being. She was not the only one who noticed the disparity: “Many people do not know that the Camp Fire Girls exist, while everybody knows the Boy Scouts,” lamented Luther Gulick, proving that Neal’s perceptions were not simply the wishful thinking of a partisan observer.41 And what, according to Gulick, accounted for the Boy Scouts’ widespread public appeal, while his Camp Fire Girls languished in near anonymity? “Boy Scouts have a striking, serviceable uniform, which they commonly wear,” he observed.

Uniform Identities It is not at all surprising that Luther Gulick would attribute so much influence to the popular appeal of the right clothing. He had grown up in an era in which dress reform—often associated with campaigns against corsets and in favor of new attire such as Amelia Bloomer’s costume—had become a cause célèbre among many Americans. Although there were conservative physicians who lent their support to the reform movement, arguing that the tight binding of corsets and fashionable dresses impaired women’s reproductive capacities, most Americans understood, even if they did not support, the implicit message of freedom found in less restrictive clothing. Women began to design, and girls to wear, outfits for hiking, horseback riding, and bicycling, activities that allowed them to move more boldly and

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more quickly through an enlarged public sphere. Thus, in creating Camp Fire’s ceremonial gown with its emphasis on private domesticity, Gulick was advocating a counterweight to the revolution in feminine dress that had launched respectable girls into the public domain. If women and girls had been granted physical freedom thanks to the clothing they wore, they also gained free time thanks to the fact that they no longer had to make clothing. By the second decade of the century, commercially produced clothing promulgated by mail-order catalogs and newly opened department stores filled middle-class wardrobes, including those in children’s bedrooms. Children’s introduction into what sociologist Daniel Thomas Cook terms “consumer citizenship” was greeted with profound ambivalence by many adults.42 Witness the pages of Wo-He-Lo: patterns a girl could use to make her own ceremonial gown frequently shared the page with advertisements for the myriad Camp Fire products she could buy to accessorize that homemade gown. It is too simple to read this juxtaposition as a crass moneymaking scheme by Camp Fire leadership. Rather, it is a graphic depiction of an honest dilemma adults faced. A girl’s new role as consumer forced the adults who cared about her, be they parents or leaders of her chosen organization, to grant her at least limited status as an independent actor with her own needs and preferences. Leaders of girls’ organizations often seemed as proud of offering their girls choices as they were bemused by what she might actually choose, hedging their bets on whether to grant girls full citizenship in the consumer culture. The problem Luther Gulick faced was that unlike his Girl Scout rivals, he had chosen to make his organization’s “uniform” symbolic of his fears about launching girls into the wider world, not representative of his faith that they could manage their new independence. His Camp Fire Girls did not have a “serviceable uniform” that they could show off in the public domain, but Girl Scouts did. The Matter of Khaki “Of all the aspects of the early Girl Guide/Girl Scout movement, uniforms had the greatest appeal for the girls,” wrote Katherine Wright in her 1937 history of Girl Scouting.43 Given her description of the uniforms, however, one is hard-pressed to understand why. When Guides became Scouts, they traded in dark blue bloomers, white middy blouses, and light blue sateen ties for matching ankle-length skirts and blouses—this last complete with “wide white collars and cuffs”—made of what would come to be called “Girl Scout khaki.” All girls were free to choose the color of their

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neckerchiefs; the most accomplished Scouts adorned their sleeves with any of the twenty-two proficiency badges, “large as a silver dollars,” that they were able to earn. Leaders’ uniforms were made of the same khaki fabric but included “kick pleats” in the skirts and an “uncompromising shirt-waist with a torturing collar” and were topped by an “enormous stiff brown hat.” So why did girls like them? “Back in 1912, when she had been pulling hard for pioneering, camping, trying to get away from the possibility of being a doll,” Wright wrote about a typical member of the earliest Scouts, “khaki was what she wanted, khaki as much like the boys’ uniform as possible.” She went on to note, with admiration, that the plucky girl who did not wish to be “a doll” gamely gave up some traditional feminine pleasures when she donned khaki. “She achieved what from the vantage point of today seems rather a clumsy dress. Maybe it was not becoming to blue eyes—but it did not show dust, and proudly she marched in it.” The girls were proud, Wright argued, because they had fought hard to prove themselves capable of “camping and pioneering.” Girls had demonstrated that their skills, like their uniforms, were equal to the boys’. These important battles, Wright pointedly informed her readers, “were won in khaki.” Despite such vigorous pronouncements about the symbolic value of khaki, Wright, like many of her contemporaries in Scouting leadership, was not willing to issue an unequivocal challenge to men’s presumptive claims on this most martial of fabrics. After recounting girls’ pitched battles over the right to wear khaki, Wright softly backpedaled and suggested another reason why girls preferred the controversial material. “The clay soil of our Georgia state had proved quite devastating . . . to the blue duck,” she explained, “so khaki had been selected as more practical for our hikes, or picnicking, and our camping.”44 Wright was willing to create such dissonance in her own text—assuming a studied nonchalance that promoted the sheer practicality of khaki in one paragraph, before moving quickly on to promote the material as a potent symbol of female equality in the next—because such ambivalence well reflected the position of Scouting’s leadership. In public presentations, Girl Scout leaders spent as much energy advocating for new opportunities as they did claiming to conserve the best of the old ways, consistently seeking a benign middle ground that they believed to be the strongest foundation for their organization. The most notable exception to this unofficial, but carefully adhered to, policy was the organization’s staunch—and after reading the historical documents one almost has to add gleeful—opposition to the complaints

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of the Boy Scouts. Since 1913, and the change from Guides to Scouts and blue duck to khaki, Boy Scout leadership had grown increasingly uneasy as it became obvious that the Girl Scouts would continue to “ape” the boys’ program with unrepentant impunity. American Boy Scout officers, following the lead of Baden-Powell, had chosen a uniform that was “patterned closely upon the attire of the United States Army private” and designed “to advise the public that here was a young man ready to render many kinds of service.”45 Boy Scout leadership was adamant that their cause would be severely damaged if girls could be looked to for the same services that boys performed. Girl Scout leadership responded by largely ignoring their male counterparts’ grievances and reasserting their right to khaki. Katherine Wright summed up the outcome of the dispute succinctly, and proudly, in her jubilee history: “Girls stuck to their khaki, and the boys got used to it!”46 Although Wright refrained from gloating over the victory in retrospect, some contemporary leaders were less able to control themselves while in the midst of the fray. In a playful, but still potentially incendiary, slap at the Boy Scouts, the editors of the Rally published a story submitted by a Girl Scout troop from Auburn, Pennsylvania. The girls had been on a long ramble through the countryside and were just passing by a small town on their way home when they saw a group of boys in the distance. The boys were confused at first, uncertain of exactly who these strangers in uniform were. Finally, recognition dawned on them and a boy happily shouted out, “Here come some girls with Boy Scout suits, only they wear skirts!”47 Boy Scout suits with skirts! This was precisely the public reaction that confirmed Boy Scout executives’ worst fears. When the gang of young boys saw girls gamely hiking through a local meadow they did not see Girl Scouts, but rather Boy Scouts who happened to be girls. This little story illuminates the crux of the dispute over uniforms: both sides were essentially correct. Girls in uniform did gain a measure of recognition and respect, while boys became far too closely associated with the very girls who were crashing their all-male party. The Boy Scouts had, after all, adopted khaki because it was a recognizable symbol of hardy masculine character traits. A young lad clad in khaki was striving to be a little soldier—physically robust, civic minded, and “ready to render many kinds of service.” Girl Scout leadership understood that by the first decades of the twentieth century the general public had largely been persuaded that these were desirable traits for girls as well as boys. Boy Scout leadership in turn understood that despite public support for girls’ accomplishments, most

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boys felt that the luster of their success was somehow tarnished when girls, too, proved capable of achieving the same goals. A 1939 study, “Scouting in Less-Chance Areas,” showed just how far the situation deteriorated in the ensuing years, and how uniforms remained central to the public’s perception of Scouting.48 “Many a jest has been directed toward the over-zealous boy in scouting attire, and he is the subject of countless whimsical cartoons,” reported the study’s author upon reviewing the contents of select newspaper stories. Unfortunately, attitudes on the streets were even worse than those promulgated by the news media. When Boy Scout leadership tried to reach out to youngsters in what they defined as “less-chance” areas, predominately enclaves of the urban poor, they were categorically rebuffed. Current members “did not like to wear the suit” and were “not interested in many of the activities,” while potential recruits were deterred by “the fact that boys in these areas call scouts ‘sissies.’” In a single generation the Boy Scout’s program of activities, which had been designed to promote manliness, and its uniform, which had been deliberately chosen to convey a martial attitude, had been rendered effeminate. To discuss the plight of “sissy” Scouts on the eve of World War II, however, is to get far ahead of my story. Juliette Low may have authorized the change to khaki in 1913 because the fabric conferred upon her girls an aura of competence and dependability (although her personal preference for military attire might have played some role in her decision), but after April 1917, khaki assumed an even greater symbolic power on the American home front.49 Girl Scout preparedness, conveyed to the public by the proficiency badges, epaulettes, and shiny whistles that adorned uniforms, was easily translated into a broader home front preparedness that brought the Girl Scouts accolades for their patriotism and devotion to civic service. Khaki became firmly established as the color of Girl Scouting and carried a symbolic value that Juliette Low refused to relinquish during her lifetime. Despite the strong appeal of khaki’s military origins, Scout leadership was careful to counter charges that their girls’ uniforms were too martial. With twenty-five years of hindsight Katherine Wright may have found the early uniforms “clumsy” and “uncompromising,” but during the war, leaders did not see any reason why khaki couldn’t be both attractive and emblematic of a girl’s civic responsibility. Indeed, they understood that there were times when being attractive was actually part of a girl’s civic duty. The Rally, for example, reported on a dance for servicemen hosted by Scout Troop 10 of Savannah, Georgia. “Uniforms of soldiers, sailors and marines made a most attractive scene mingled as they were with the khaki uniform of Scouts,”

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the article proclaimed.50 It is important to note that it was not the girls’ uniforms by themselves that were labeled “attractive,” it was the intermingling of men’s uniforms and Girl Scout khaki that struck the observer as such a pleasant sight. Obviously this “attractive scene” represented a highly desirable social setting for girls and a place to display their feminine skills in dancing and hostessing; it was still an occasion where the best-dressed girls, and the bravest men, wore khaki. The cover of the January 1918 edition of the Rally provides a wonderful graphic depiction of this view of khaki. The full-page illustration depicts a parade of American soldiers proudly marching down a city street. The men are the very picture of heroic, manly warriors—straight backed and square jawed, with rifles held stiffly over their shoulders. But at the head of the soldierly procession are Girl Scouts. The girls, attired in full uniform, appear larger than life as they crowd the foreground of the drawing. They are stereotypically feminine, with long curling hair and angelic smiles, and they are throwing flowers at the soldiers’ feet, but they too are clad as soldiers. This cover drawing, taken from a French illustrated weekly, was titled “As France Sees the Girl Scouts.” It is more reasonable to assume, however, that this is how Scout leaders themselves perceived their girls—and how they hoped other Americans would too. While Scout leadership was keen to show that khaki could be attractive and feminine, they did not lose sight of the fabric’s power. When leaders were challenged about their appropriation of khaki, they responded with a vigor that showed how much they felt was at stake in retaining their chosen uniforms. In November 1917, the Rally issued a statement, apparently in response to some complaint, that girls were told to quote if they encountered any public objection to their uniforms. “Here is a fact which every Girl Scout should know and publish, in order that no one may think that we are infringing upon the rights of those to whom khaki belongs first—our brave soldiers: The khaki used by the Girl Scout organization is neither the color nor the weight of that used by the US army, therefore our use of it does not in any way affect the supply needed for soldiers.”51 The information that girls were given to pass on is quite telling. They were to acknowledge the preemptive claim of soldiers, but they were in no way to disavow their own claim to khaki. The issue of khaki’s appropriateness for girls was transformed from one of unacceptable transgression into a simple matter of the fabric’s availability. Soldiers had their style of khaki; the Girl Scouts had theirs. Leadership explicitly confirmed that both groups were entitled to wear the material; they tacitly suggested that both groups

Image not available.

Figure 3. Girl Scout leaders were fond of showing off their members’ khaki uniforms. They claimed this martial fabric as a symbol of girls’ patriotic service, while stressing its feminine charms. Courtesy of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

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also had their separate duties to perform. Scout leadership acknowledged that girls and soldiers wore different uniforms and shouldered different burdens; they did not say whether the weight of the soldier’s duty, like the weight of his uniform, was any heavier. The Red, White, and Blue of the Minute Girls On April 18, 1917, less than a week after the United States’ declaration of war on Germany, Luther Gulick wrote an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson offering to put the services of 94,458 Camp Fire Girls at the commander-in-chief’s disposal. Gulick believed that his rapidly mobilized patriotic force recalled a heroic chapter in American history and should therefore be known as the “Minute Girls.” He noted, however, that even with the best of intentions a “citizen army cannot spring to arms” without “definite aims and organization.” Therefore, Gulick outlined his proposed program for the Minute Girls and asked President Wilson for his blessing. “Do you approve?” Gulick inquired at the end of his letter. “We await your instructions.”52 Gulick did not simply mark time while waiting for Wilson’s response. By the time he received official word that the government was indeed interested in accepting Camp Fire’s offer, he had already begun to assemble his “splendid army of women,” as he came to refer to the Minute Girls and their leaders. Gulick’s recruitment drive for the Minute Girl program escalated with the publication of the 1917 edition of the Book of the Camp Fire Girls, renamed War Call to the Girls of America for that year. This handbook, which had existed in much the same form since it was first published in 1912, was now prefaced with eighteen pages that described the goals of the “war program” and showed pictures of appropriate Minute Girl activities, such as outdoor canning and farmwork. “We are a nation at war,” he reminded potential recruits, and thus any girl who decided to enlist in the Minute Girls was “putting [herself] directly into national service.”53 Minute Girls sewed Red Cross bandages for injured soldiers and knitted leg warmers for healthy ones; they planted war gardens and canned the bounty. They observed all food conservation programs, denied themselves sweets, and learned to prepare wheatless and meatless meals. Less directly applicable to war work, a Minute Girl was to keep herself physically fit by hiking one hundred miles a month. Gulick also required Minute Girls to pray daily, presumably for a successful conclusion to the conflict, although the handbook did not specify particular prayers. Despite all her obligations—civic, physical, and religious—a Minute Girl had

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one duty that trumped all others, a program requirement that Gulick referred to as the “single greatest thing” she could do to help win the war. A Minute Girl had to wear her uniform proudly. “There is no army in the world but what has its uniform,” Gulick observed in introducing the “red tie, white blouse, blue skirt, and white navy cap” of the Minute Girls. Uniforms conferred a sense of camaraderie and commanded public recognition, advantages that Gulick believed women often lacked, and which he deeply desired for the Minute Girls. Yet a uniform performed another important function, one that was “needed just as much by the women as it is by the soldiers,” and this, Gulick believed, was a historic event. “This is the first time in the world’s history that women are needed in war as much as men are needed,” he explained, and this new measure of devotion required of women could best be made manifest by a uniform. “In this epoch-making time in the world’s history, it is exactly this consecration and devotion that the women need to symbolize,” he concluded.54 Gulick referred to the symbolic power of uniforms to educate girls on what they would have to sacrifice if they chose to become Minute Girls. “When a man puts on the soldier’s uniform,” Gulick wrote, he shows “that he has laid aside his civilian clothes and with them his civilian responsibilities and relationships.” The man ceased being a father, husband, and son, and instead became a soldier. It was imperative not only for the man to recognize his personal transformation, but for his family and friends to acknowledge it also. “The community recognizes [that] a man in uniform is free from various social obligations and from all sorts of ties,” Gulick wrote. Luther Gulick, father of five and a man given to romanticizing the pleasures of family life, did not take paternal responsibility lightly. Nor did he view the temporary dissolution of a soldier’s relational ties as an abrogation of familial duty; rather, it was a sign of the soldier’s laudable devotion to “ideals of democracy.” However, as Gulick elaborated on the soldier’s patriotic devotion, he revealed some less sanguine opinions of the quotidian demands of family life. The soldier’s “devotion to the one thing has freed him . . . from the multitude of entanglements which fritter away our daily lives,” Gulick wrote, perhaps a bit wistfully. True, a soldier’s devotion required the sacrifice of social ties, but these were ties that had the potential to confine even as they secured a man to his civilian life. What ties, by contrast, were girls meant to sever? Which obligations did they leave behind, and what sacrifices were exacted from them when they adopted the uniform of the Minute Girls? Gulick hinted at the answers to these questions in a speech he delivered at the Girls’ Latin School of

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Boston in the spring of 1917. A soldier’s devotion “freed” him from certain social ties and temporarily unfettered him from responsibilities that impinged on his personal autonomy. Uniformed girls, however, were required to give up parts of themselves that had previously helped to define their individuality. Yet according to Gulick this was a positive step that would help girls devote themselves to their civic duty. Simply put, uniforms freed men from their families, while they freed girls from unhealthy aspects of their own character. The Minute Girl uniform took girls outside themselves, reminding them of their patriotic duty and freeing them from a pernicious obsession with their own appearance. “It is the dress of women that fills our eyes,” Gulick observed. This was true not simply because men were inclined to notice such things, but because women, to the detriment of more important issues, paid too much attention to their appearance. It has been “one of woman’s primary needs to decorate herself, to make herself appear to be different from other women, to emphasize her own personality and charm.”55 A girl who adopted the Minute Girl uniform, however, proved that she had overcome the need to distinguish herself individually and showed that she was willing to deemphasize her own personality. The uniform also helped shore up a girl’s will to sublimate other selfish desires. “When you are invited to eat candy between meals, to waste food or money or do anything else against your pledge of devotion, smile and point to your uniform,” Gulick advised. A soldier’s uniform helped him to preserve the freedom of his daily life; a Minute Girl’s uniform reminded her of the necessity of policing hers. In addition to obviating the need for personal individuation, uniforms helped girls to downplay what Gulick considered superficial and distracting differences that arose from their various class and educational backgrounds. “If women were dressed alike so as to obliterate the wealth distinctions, obliterate the social distinctions for the period of the war, we should have the most marvelous new sense of devotion,” he informed his listeners. It is hard to imagine what the audience at Girls’ Latin, a school established by concerned parents who wanted to give their daughters equal access to a college-preparatory curriculum, must have thought was so marvelous about Gulick’s plan to obliterate such distinctions. Even after these paeans to social homogeneity, Gulick was not finished promoting the power of Minute Girl red, white, and blue. He proceeded to build an argument for the uniform’s adoption that was perhaps even more ill advised given his particular audience. Although some of the most ebullient expectations for single-sex education had faded since the first generation

Figure 4. In May 1918, the Camp Fire Girls’ monthly magazine, WoHeLo, featured this Minute Girl knitting for the war effort. Courtesy of Camp Fire USA.

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of students had graduated from the Seven Sisters, many women remained tenaciously loyal to their academic institutions. When Gulick addressed Girls’ Latin students in 1917, women’s colleges and seminaries could still inspire a deep, indeed lifelong, devotion on the part of their faculty and alumnae.56 Yet Gulick rather nonchalantly advised girls and women to give up their alma mater’s colors. “The patriotic uniform might well be used at commencements of all schools for girls and women. It would unite all these institutions in a common thought and a common purpose. . . . All over America the girls will be graduating from school and college in the colors—red, white and blue. This means devotion and inspiration.”57 It did not seem to occur to Luther Gulick, a man who feared that women knew little about group loyalty, that the Minute Girl uniform could displace an important symbol of devotion to an institution from which so many women drew a great deal of inspiration. For all his volunteering of Minute Girls regiments, Luther Gulick had in actuality commandeered only a temporary reserve force—fully committed to the struggle and just as intent on demobilizing as soon as hostilities ceased. Minute Girls’ Red Cross bandages joined revolutionary-era tea boycotts and Civil War homespun in a lineage of American women’s war work. None of it was insignificant, but none of it mounted a challenge to women’s domestic role or men’s presumptive claim to be the true defenders of the state. A Minute Girl’s snappy red, white, and blue uniform—patriotic rather than martial—perfectly conveyed this supportive, status quo role. Indeed, many published images of Minute Girls resemble nothing so much as the famous World War I poster of an impishly pretty young woman dressed in an oversized sailor suit. The poster was so acceptable because its caption, “I wish I were a man so I could join up,” was so unbelievable. Americans “knew” that such a classically attractive woman did not really want to be a man, any more than she truly wanted to fight or die in a war. This poster, which belied the reality of the American women who remained women as they joined ambulance corps and nursing units in France, in fact captured the spirit of Gulick’s forces. Minute Girl uniforms were not hallmarks of a profound transformation; they were temporary, albeit sincere, symbols of girls’ willingness to serve their country. Minute Girls would willingly abandon this publicly displayed patriotic mantle in favor of their private ceremonial gowns just as soon as the war was over. Girl Scout khaki, however, conveyed a rather different message. Resplendent in their beloved fabric, girls claimed a more equal part with soldiering men. Regardless of the war work Scouts actually performed—many,

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like their Minute Girl counterparts, spent the war sewing bandages—the Rally was awash in stories trumpeting girls’ heroism. In tales both fictional and depicted as absolute truth, girls displayed courage and selfless sacrifice, sometimes at great personal risk.58 In short, they acted like soldiers. Leaders may have got away with dressing their girls like soldiers, and implying that they behaved like them, because everyone knew soldering was not really part of a girl’s future. In contrast, for every boy who sneered at the Boy Scout suit as being “sissy,” there was a parent who worried it was too militaristic, a disconcerting reminder of what their son might actually be wearing just a few years hence. The fact that this transformation from Scout to soldier would never happen to a girl did not stop Girl Scout leaders from suggesting that girls, like men, fought and won battles in their khaki uniforms.

Home Front Battles of Their Own Did I hear Sir Robert refer to Girl Scouts? Pray, what sort of creatures must they be? —attributed to Teddy Roosevelt

American entry into the Great War marked the end of girls’ organizations’ beginnings. By 1917, both Camp Fire and the Girl Scouts had established national and regional governance structures, launched monthly magazines, and secured contracts with commercial suppliers who churned out an ever-expanding array of officially sanctioned uniforms and accessories. Camp Fire claimed more members, but the Scouts had clearly established themselves as a strong rival with a distinct identity. Merger talks still occasionally came up, but they were typically initiated either by national foundations or local charities worried about the efficacy of offering financial support to competing organizations. Given his elevated vantage point, John D. Rockefeller Jr. can perhaps be forgiven for believing that the two groups worked along “similar lines . . . towards practically the same end,” but those who came into contact with the recipients of Rockefeller’s largesse knew better.59 In a memo to Rockefeller, advisee W. S. Richardson acknowledged that “there is undoubtedly a place for the home development emphasis and the more individualistic ideas and ideals of the Camp Fire,” but he doubted Camp Fire’s ongoing appeal in a nation where ideas about girls’ roles were in a state of flux. “Personally, I am of the opinion that the Girl Scout movement, in principle and method, is going to be more useful in America than the Camp Fire Girls. Its aim at service and

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citizenship rather than any personal development is significant in these days and is likely to be more and more powerful in the next generation.”60 Apparently, for all the Gulicks’ rhetoric about Camp Fire’s preeminent role in fostering a new generation of girls, it was the Girl Scouts who had won the fight for the future. Scout leaders stepped up their claims that they were the ones who had correctly anticipated the changing nature of American girlhood. “Personally I outgrew my interest in Camp Fire when the Girl Scouts came along because the latter are so much less sentimental and so much more practical and more related to the development of growing girls into womanhood,” chided Girl Scout commissioner Anne Hyde Choate. “In the few places that I have watched a group of Camp Fire Girls, they have just naturally turned into scouts!”61 Many Americans were gradually coming to believe what Choate proclaimed so emphatically—that given the proper guidance, schoolgirl culture could evolve into a more mature, responsible, and civic-minded girlhood. But if this evolutionary change served to distinguish Girl Scouts from their allegedly impractical and sentimental rivals, it only strengthened their identification with those other Scouts who emphatically resisted such comparisons. Girl Scouting’s ascendancy was accompanied by the now-familiar drumbeat of Boy Scout protestations. National Boy Scout headquarters constantly issued warnings about the dangers of “following the boys’ program too closely,” which they paired with paeans to the benefits of focusing on the “fundamental needs of girls.”62 It was hard, in a time of war, for Boy Scout leaders to oppose a girls’ organization devoted to “character building and citizen training,” but they tried their best. Feelings ran so high that in 1918 the Girl Scouts were asked to submit to a Board of Arbitration in order to resolve ongoing tensions over the groups’ shared name, a request that drew an indignant response from Girl Scout leader, Mrs. Emily Hammond. Boy Scout leadership would have been better off had they read Hammond’s letter more closely, rather then responding to her mistaken claim that American girls had been Scouts since their organization’s inception in 1912. For Hammond made a slip in her letter that went straight to heart of the issue. “Besides meeting their duties in the home, which will almost be foremost with them,” she wrote, “We wish to prepare the girls of this country for such new responsibilities as the results of the war may put upon them” [emphasis mine].63 Surely she had meant to write that girls’ home duties would always be foremost with them, but her inadvertent verification of the Boy Scout’s chief complaint against their female

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counterparts would have given them powerful ammunition in their ongoing public relations struggle. As much as most Americans supported character building for children of both sexes, they still believed that girls and women bore exclusive responsibility for the upkeep of the home. Moreover, there was a broad consensus that girls were increasingly both unwilling and unable to properly discharge these domestic responsibilities. But Boy Scout leadership proved itself tone-deaf to these public debates about girls’ proper role. Instead of arguing that girls’ citizenship training must be considered secondary to home training, or combined more closely with it—arguments that most likely would have carried the day—Boy Scout leaders insisted on an absolute divergence of training for boys and girls. In their eyes, there was no place for any convergence of program, even concerning civic duty, even during a time of war. This position however, was an anachronism, as ever-growing numbers of Americans were themselves products of just such comparable training, courtesy of compulsory—and coeducational—public schooling. Of all the people who could have pointed this truth out to Boy Scout leadership, it had to have been their ally-cum-adversary, Lord Baden-Powell. “I cannot tell you how glad I was to realize that you and the heads of the Movement have seen your way to coming into line with the Girl Scouts,” he wrote to an undoubtedly astonished James West after a visit to the United States in 1919. Baden-Powell proceeded to explain that while he had initially been against girls taking up Scouting, he now felt that their presence “will probably be a help rather than a hindrance to the Boy Scouts” since the public clearly viewed Scouting as a form of educational training that was “equally applicable to boys and girls.” Although he could not have been more wrong about Boy Scout attitudes, Baden-Powell correctly pointed to the cultural development that undergirded his claim. “You Americans have gone so far ahead of us here in the matter of co-education so that Boy and Girl Scouts is less incongruous in the States.”64 It is a vast understatement to suggest that Boy Scout leaders and their allies were not as sanguine as Baden-Powell about the effects of coeducation; indeed, their fears often approached the hysterical. G. Stanley Hall actually argued that girls should be sent away to the countryside during their middle-school years in order to protect fragile male egos that suffered from girls’ mental and physical superiority.65 The position taken by many Scout leaders was similarly alarmist. Citing no less an authority than former president Teddy Roosevelt, the executive board of a Boy Scout roundup held in Berkeley, California, in 1918 declared: “[T]he fact that girls liked to do

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Image not available.

Figure 5. Despite his sometimes dire pronouncements about the appropriateness of scouting for girls, Teddy Roosevelt did lend his support to both Camp Fire and the Girl Scouts. He is shown here with Girl Scouts who were collecting silver for a precious-metals drive during the war. By permission of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

certain things was the best reason why he, as a boy, would not like to do them.”66 They then passed a motion affirming that “young Roosevelt had epitomized and characterized the unanimous point of view of our Executive Board in about as clear a manner as we could hope to do.” Not all present were content with merely passing resolutions. A Scout leader from Butte, Montana, wanted to “suppress and restrain the activities of the Girl Scouts” if they would not agree to change their program. “I want to say that immediately when you allow the Girl Scouts to organize you might as well say good-bye to Boy Scouts, because of all things that boys cherish is the fact that they are boys and in the near future will be men, and the most diabolical accusation you can make against a boy is to call him a sissy.” Boys could not enjoy the same activities as girls because if they did, they would turn into something other than boys. This was not simply a matter of acknowledging shared talents, or even a fear of being beaten, it was abject terror at losing one’s identity. Apparently, the real

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problem with Girl Scouting was not what girls could do; it was a question of what boys would, or would not, become. “No boy cares to be the same thing that girls are,” wrote one Boy Scout leader.67 According to these men, the girl problem actually struck at the heart of manliness, and this was a problem that would only be exacerbated by a war that was meant to be a display of valorous masculinity but instead turned out to offer girls a starring role.

Chapter 2

“A Splendid Army of Women” Mobilizing Girl Soldiers


Everyone of you has shown by joining the Girl Scouts, that you are ready and eager to be as near the home firing line as possible in this world-wide war. —Rally, January 1918 Women and girls who devote their thought and their energy to the Minute Girls will be serving the country and conducting the fight for peace and freedom just as truly and just as effectively as the men on the battlefield or in the trenches. —Luther Gulick, War Call to the Girls of America/Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 1917

W

hy were Scout and Camp Fire leaders so insistent that thirteen-year-old schoolgirls could be effectively mobilized for a war being fought thousands of miles from their homes? And given the absurdity of their claims—Girl Scouts on the home firing line! Minute Girls on battlefields and in trenches!—why did the general public take their proclamations so seriously? The Great War had such a galvanizing effect on the development of girls’ organizations because it occurred at precisely the right historical moment. From their inception just a few years before, girls’ groups—especially the Scouts, whose handbook was titled How Girls Can Help Their Country—had placed citizenship training at the core of their character-building program. Before the war, girls took pledges to serve their country, but once the United States was mobilized, even adolescent girls gained access to a home front battlefield, in which they could enact their pledges. If girls’ organizations seemed to perceive civic duty everywhere they looked before the war—mending tea towels, fixing gas lamps, and trapping rodents all counted—during mobilization they became positively obsessed. 48

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This obsession, however, was now no longer quaintly idiosyncratic; it placed them within the mainstream of American culture and earned them the praise of government officials. Leaders argued that adolescent girls should be part of a civic community that shouldered the duties of citizenship and shared in the rights that were earned from the discharge of those duties. But how far, literally and metaphorically, would girls be able to go in pursuit of citizenship? The English poet Nina Macdonald observed that the Great War had changed a great many things: “Girls are doing things / They’ve never done before. . . . All the world is topsy-turvy / Since the War began.”1 But could leaders of girls’ organizations, caught up as they were in a patriotic fervor, really equate their girls’ wartime service with the sacrifice of soldiers? During mobilization, the wholehearted support that Scout and Camp Fire Girls initially enjoyed gradually began to fade as their leaders moved them further and further into the public sphere. As food conservation drives turned into Liberty Loan sales, and finally into work near the army’s cantonments, official approval for girls’ war service waned. An interesting thing happened, however, when leaders ran up against the apparent limits of their efforts to expand the definition of girls’ civic duties. Instead of pulling back to the acceptable confines of home-based chores, leaders leapt over the barriers placed in their path and into a newly created space where they themselves made the rules. When their “splendid army of women” faced demobilization, the leaders of girls’ organizations retreated to their summer camps, built in a landscape that they believed encouraged democratic feeling and where their girls could exercise their “fervent ambition for military training” while still enjoying the “delights of outdoor life.”2

The Food Administration: Keeping the “Home” in Home Front Mobilization Herbert Hoover assumed command of the Food Administration in May 1917, a month after the United States’ entry into war and shortly after he returned home from a fourteen-year sojourn in Europe. Hoover quickly realized that the methods he had employed in organizing European relief efforts—namely, a heavy-handed control of agrarian production—were not going to work in America. Midwestern farmers were reeling from several years of bad harvests, and the anticipation of yet another poor crop had them hoarding wheat in an effort to drive up prices on Chicago’s grain futures market. Farmers were not about to go along willingly with government price controls or production quotas. Their recalcitrance, buoyed by a surge of

Figure 6. The Rally alone could not satisfy girls’ desires to celebrate their wartime accomplishments, prompting local councils to publish their own magazines. This cover of the Philadelphia council’s Messenger shows a proud Scout standing tall with America just one month after the Armstice. Courtesy of the Girl Scouts of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

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support from Woodrow Wilson’s political adversaries, made the president reluctant to give Hoover a free hand in controlling the production side of the food-supply problem. Hoover, therefore, had to concentrate on regulating consumption and, at least for the time being, cede the battle over production to the farmers.3 Meddling with consumption, however, meant the Food Administration had to turn its attention from farm and factory to the women and girls who purchased and prepared foodstuffs in the home. Wary even in this arena of forcing coercive measures upon an unwilling populace, Hoover attempted to recruit the voluntary effort of the people instead of adopting mandatory European-style rationing policies. But as Hoover well knew, a successful voluntary effort would require near-universal support to “reach into every kitchen in America.”4 That kind of support could only be mustered by launching a relentless propaganda campaign that struck just the right rhetorical note with American women. Hoover and other Food Administration officials created a rationing campaign whose central message appealed to women’s emotional commitment to their homes and families. The authors of Food Administration posters, pamphlets, and public addresses constantly invoked “the spirit of selfsacrifice” as they pleaded with the nation’s households willingly to suffer “wheatless” and “meatless” days. Taking his cue from President Wilson, who trumpeted the benefits of a volunteer army over the political dangers of introducing conscription, Hoover wrote paeans to the “voluntary action” that would be a catalyst “to [organizing] the service and self-denial of the American people.” Although the sacrifice requested by Hoover had to do with forgoing pot roast and bread pudding, not imperiling life or limb, his rhetorical flourishes often rivaled those of his commander-in-chief. “We propose to mobilize the spirit of self-denial and self-sacrifice in this entire country,” Hoover concluded of his administration’s efforts to enlist the voluntary cooperation of all Americans.5 And he did mean all Americans. In January 1918, Hoover addressed the Girls Scouts of America in the pages of their monthly magazine, the Rally. “The Food Administration appreciates the response that you have given to their suggestions for helping to win the war,” he told the Scouts, but now nine months into the campaign he asked girls to redouble their efforts. The Allies are “fighting our war and must have our food,” Hoover explained, but because American surpluses had been diminished or exhausted it was more important than ever for girls to “save.” “So we beg of you—help by doing without candy and observe meatless and wheatless meals as often as you can” and in “your social affairs

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try to have simple conservation refreshments—if any,” he pleaded.6 Herbert Hoover—husband of Lou Henry Hoover, a devoted Girl Scout supporter who would go on to become their national secretary—was rightly confident that girls who had read the Rally would be familiar with his calls for selfsacrifice and self-denial. Then the president revealed that he had not completely understood the message that Scouts were being taught about their wartime service. After inviting Scouts to serve as ambassadors of Food Administration programs, he stooped to a bit of condescension that must have sounded incongruous to girls who were told by their leaders they were serving on the “firing line” of a “world-wide war.” You “must keep yourself well and cheery, and that will help everybody,” he glibly concluded in his address to the Scouts. Hoover may have correctly assumed that Girl Scouts were well versed in the language of self-denial, but he seemed to view their training as a quaint, indeed juvenile, responsibility that girls owed their families. Leaders of girls’ organizations, however, had been busy redefining self-denial as an unequivocal call to public service. Prior to the war, girls’ organizations had employed the rhetoric of self-denial in reference to personal hygiene or familial cooperation; during the war it became freighted with patriotic duty and responsibility to the state. Before the war, for example, a Girl Scout who refrained from “sweets, candy, or cake” between meals did so in pursuit of her Personal Health merit badge.7 During the war, the Girl Scouts of Poppy Troop 1 in Altoona, Pennsylvania, participated in their town’s mobilization campaign by “denying themselves sweets in order to send chocolate to our soldiers in France.”8 Acts that once informed the behavior of a healthy adolescent girl had been transformed into the duties of a responsibly mobilized citizen. When the Food Administration transformed the choice to prepare cornbread instead of wheat bread from an individual culinary decision into an expression of self-denial and an act of civic duty, women and girls responded, but they also claimed credit for doing so. A half million volunteers secured conservation pledges from three times that number of households. The pages of the Rally and Wo-He-Lo brimmed with reports of Scouts and Camp Fire Girls who had proudly taken the pledge. Although responding to rhetoric intended to resonate with traditional notions of female domesticity, women and girls answered with a patriotic vigor that surprised even the government officials who solicited their assistance. Conservation was not the only home front campaign the Food Administration brought into American kitchens. Hoover wanted families to rely

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more on food they had produced and preserved themselves, allowing manufactured foodstuffs to flow freely to European markets instead of stocking local larders. To accomplish this, it was necessary to throw state approval behind the revival of a domestic chore that had practically been banished from the urban kitchens where the majority of Americans now ate their meals. Home canning, wistfully referred to as “the art of fixing the seasons” by aficionados, was in fact, heavy, hot labor that had been gratefully abandoned by housewives in favor of the convenience of manufactured canned goods.9 By the first decades of the twentieth century, women’s magazines regularly included recipes calling for canned fruit and vegetables, thus securing a place for store-bought foods within “homemade” meals. At the same time as manufacturers sought to define their products as sufficiently homey, they popularized recent findings about calories and vitamins to stake scientific claims about the health benefits of canned goods. And so when the Food Administration encouraged American housewives to preserve the bounty of their “Victory Gardens” and free up canned goods for export to Europe, they were forced to counteract a marketing campaign that had successfully redefined canning as an old-fashioned and burdensome chore that modern women were better off without. Just as Food Administration officials redefined canning as valuable war work, Scout and Camp Fire leaders attempted to redefine the girls who performed this work. In The War Call to the Girls of America, Luther Gulick dismissed those who found fault with girls for their alleged lack of interest in domestic skills. Girls were neither selfish nor unskilled, as their critics charged; rather, they had never been encouraged to view chores in the proper light. “Women do not naturally feel the esprit de corps,” he wrote, and therefore, instilling in girls a sense of cooperation was “more difficult to do than raise an army”—but no less important to America’s chances for victory. If girls could be taught to view both war-related and more mundane domestic chores as a group effort, they would be more inclined to complete these tasks cheerfully and efficiently. Gulick recommended that all chores, including canning, be performed with the spirit of comrades called to arms. If girls who wished to do some war-related canning found “no berries or apples to pick near home,” Gulick advised them to “go off together and camp for a week or two where you know people who have such crops.” By working together girls would “arouse a powerful patriotic sentiment” within themselves and come to realize the true value of their combined service.10 “Each one must feel that she belongs to the army . . . and [feel] that she is in line touching elbows

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with others who are also serving.” The fact that girls were “in line touching elbows” over the kitchen stove while they preserved fruit was irrelevant to Gulick; canning had become war work, and the girls who did it had joined the “splendid army of women” he boasted of to President Wilson. It was not only girls’ organizations that participated in turning canning into invaluable war work. The back cover of the September 1918 issue of Scouting Magazine, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America, offered a wonderful example of how canning became the province of boys as well as girls. A full-page drawing depicted an “Americanning Party,” in which three brawny U.S. servicemen vigorously stuff German military leaders, including Kaiser Wilhelm himself, into trash cans under the watchful eye of Uncle Sam.11 While the grown men are busy with their “canning” duties, in the background a Boy Scout performs his own version of patriotic canning. He spoons beans into cans, happily doing his part to produce that iconic staple food of fighting men. All the “Americaner” males—old and young, soldier and Scout—have rolled up their sleeves and got down to the business of “pitching in.” Their actions elicit an avuncular burst of pride from Uncle Sam: “Atta Boy!” he beams. Ironically, the Boy Scouts, who jealously guarded their program and resented any perceived encroachment by girls’ organizations, had unwittingly aided the girls’ cause by picking up their own spoons. While claiming a place for their boys alongside fighting men, they helped to transform a chore universally perceived as women’s work—old-fashioned women’s work at that—into admirable patriotic service. Scout leadership suggested that their boys’ canning efforts were worthy of Uncle Sam’s praise, but in doing so they established canning as a quasi-military duty that a boy could be proud to perform. And if boys could be proud to can, then how much better for girls, who could rightly claim this work as an integral part of their feminine, and civic, duties. Canning, of course, was only the last step in food production, and leaders of girls’ organizations were unflagging in their efforts to encourage their members’ participation in all facets of the process. The Rally encouraged Girl Scouts to become “Soldiers of the Soil,” and it prominently featured the results of war garden competitions won by local troops.12 “By this time every Girl Scout knows that she can help her country by raising vegetables,” intoned the editorial staff.13 A Scout who toiled in her Victory Garden was not merely a good citizen, she was a gardener-soldier—a role that leaders were quick to promote and, given the abundance of press coverage, girls were happy to adopt.

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As much as the endless Rally and Wo-He-Lo stories inspired Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, leaders were also eager to get word of their girls’ accomplishments out to the general public. Members of a Scout troop from Mount Kisco, New York, who camped at Juliette Low’s nearby summer house were turned into stars when their exploits were captured on celluloid and “shown in theaters as evidence of the patriotic spirit of the Girl Scouts.” The girls built a fire and cooked chops on a stick before revealing how their expertise in the outdoors could be used to patriotic ends. After lunch, the troop made its way to Low’s vegetable garden, where the girls picked baskets of fresh produce to hand over to four Scouts dressed in “Food Administration costume.” These girls proceeded to “give a lively demonstration of the latest methods of canning.”14 A morning of amusing Scout activities had segued seamlessly into an afternoon of serious mobilization work. Cinematic pageantry in Juliette Low’s vegetable garden aside, the Girl Scouts did not rely solely on costumes and playacting to cement their association with the Food Administration. The national Scouting office also established formal ties with the Agricultural Department’s Canning Clubs, and the clubs responded by creating proficiency tests that the Girl Scout education committee used as the basis of its badge work. In another example of their close cooperation, Scouts gave official demonstrations of approved Canning Club techniques, while Canning Club offices in Washington, DC, kept Girl Scout literature on display. At a national meeting of Canning Club demonstrators, a state agent from Mississippi expressed her positive opinion of this mutual support: “Since hearing [about the Scouts’ participation in Canning Clubs] my whole attitude has changed. When I see Girl Scouts now my impulse will be for co-operation, and not, as hitherto, for approbation [sic].”15 Given the context, the agent surely meant to say opprobrium rather than approbation, but the Rally gave no indication of why she had been ill disposed toward Girl Scouts. It did make clear, however, that her change of heart was directly related to girls’ active participation in mobilization efforts. Yet for all the talk of generating esprit de corps and soldiering in the soil, girls who answered the Food Administration’s call to service still did so largely within the confines of their own homes and gardens. The patriotic fervor whipped up by the Food Administration may have permitted the leaders of girls’ organizations to equate participation in conservation efforts with membership in an army, but this was an army that marched off to orchards and berry patches and returned home to put up preserves. Rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding, girls’ participation in Food Administration activities was easily contained within prescribed, indeed very traditional,

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definitions of women’s duties. In stark contrast, when girls ventured farther afield to participate in another home front mobilization campaign, the Liberty Loan drives, problems followed. Liberty Loan campaigns, which brought girls out of their homes and into the streets to solicit funds from the general public, tested the limits of what was acceptable for a girl to do in the service of her country.

Liberty Loans: The “Dangers and Disadvantages” of Selling in Public When Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo launched the first Liberty Loan drive, the keystone of his complex plan to finance a rather unpopular war without instituting what was bound to be an even more unpopular tax hike, he received a lukewarm response from the American people. Similar to Hoover’s food conservation drives, the Liberty Loan campaigns were meant to serve as testimonials of support for both the war and the Wilson administration. McAdoo’s goal was to reach millions of small first-time investors, regular folk who were supposed to “do their bit” by purchasing the low-denomination bonds, and consequently he unleashed a tremendous effort to entrench the loan campaigns in popular culture. Just as the Food Administration had insinuated itself into every kitchen in America, the Treasury Department and its myriad state and local committees worked to bring Liberty Loan drives into the professional lives and leisure-time activities of all Americans. There were loan drives held at workplaces, colleges, and even elementary schools. “Four Minute Men” from the Committee on Public Information, the government’s wartime propaganda machine, gave rousing speeches at sporting events and theaters. Hollywood stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks went on a barnstorming tour to promote the loans. There was a nationwide moment of silence to mark the commencement of the fourth Liberty Loan drive in September 1918. These efforts were often accompanied by a not-so-veiled threat that noncompliance was tantamount to treason, but still they failed to move the American public. All five campaigns, from the first Liberty Loan drive, launched within two weeks of the U.S. entry into war, to the Victory Loan drive conducted after the Armistice was signed, failed to reach targeted participation rates.16 Somehow, the general public’s widespread and long-lived reluctance to buy bonds did not seem to dampen the enthusiasm of those who were determined to sell them. Scores of religious and fraternal organizations, women’s

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clubs, and civic societies overwhelmed local bond committees with their efforts. The national Girl Scout and Camp Fire organizations followed suit, as their members responded with a zeal that at first delighted, and later unsettled, government officials. Bond committees responded not so much to the sheer number of youngsters as to what the children intended to do as part of their wartime service. It was one thing to solicit girls’ help, as the Food Administration had, within the confines of their own homes; it was another thing altogether to send girls out on the streets to solicit others’ participation. City streets were complicated places for children in the first decades of the twentieth century. On the one hand, America’s cities and children appeared to share an extraordinary growth spurt, maturing at a pace that simultaneously thrilled and worried many adult observers. Urban areas were bursting with energy, and as the title of Jane Addams’s 1909 book, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, indicates, their dynamism seemed inextricably tied to the rising generation. But there was another side to the allure of city streets. Hundreds of children were injured, even killed, by the traffic that clogged urban avenues; more died from the typhus and dysentery outbreaks that were endemic to poor neighborhoods. To earnest reformers, however, almost as worrying as these physical dangers was the potential for moral contamination that hung like a miasma over city streets. Some of their fears were inchoate—many middle-class reformers were motivated by a vague belief in urban degeneracy or ominous, albeit unreliable, stories of children abducted for the “white slave trade.” Many more were focused on children’s apparent fascination with the burgeoning consumer culture that turned the streets into a rollicking marketplace where commercial entertainments threatened to seduce youngsters who participated in the urban economy. Most reformers were not particularly surprised when working girls and boys acquired their money in unsavory ways or chose to squander it on frivolous entertainment, but increasingly it was respectable youngsters who attracted reformers’ attention and piqued their anxiety. Decent lads who earned a few coins selling newspapers or delivering messages might evoke admiration for their entrepreneurial initiative, but they were expected to exercise self-control in their consumer decisions. Respectable girls enjoyed no such freedom. Like boys, they heard frequent criticisms of how they chose to spend their money—sweets and sodas, movie tickets, and trashy novels tended to top the list of proscribed purchases. But for girls the very act of selling anything in order to earn a bit of pocket money bespoke a lack of decorum. In the decades after the war, girls’ organizations would legitimize

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their members’ participation in public commerce, most famously via the Girl Scout cookie drives that began in 1922, but during the war years the sight of girls engaging in public sales made Americans uneasy. Despite these tensions, loan campaign officials were initially shameless in their efforts to exploit children as entering wedges into otherwise recalcitrant families. In specially targeted areas of the country where participation was lagging, government-sponsored “Flying Squads” distributed purchase blanks in schools—elementary as well as secondary—that children took home to their parents.17 The government also turned to youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Camp Fire Girls to recruit children, since leaders of these organizations, unlike reluctant public school teachers, were often vociferous about their desire to participate. In response to the Boy Scouts’ offer of assistance, for example, President Wilson replied that “every Scout has a wonderful opportunity to do his share for his country under the slogan ‘Every Scout To Save a Soldier.’”18 The Scouts took up the president’s challenge with a vengeance. “Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls stopped people on the streets and tried to sell them bonds,” reported one small-town Missouri newspaper.19 The Boy Scouts’ participation in loan drives became so zealous that in addition to simply selling loans, they became involved in more coercive measures instituted by local committees. Scout executive H. M. Craig wrote to his colleague James West to voice his support for Scouts’ participation in an action designed to rid towns of “slackers,” people who had continually refused to purchase bonds.20 There was to be a “clean up campaign in which the Boy Scouts have been asked to participate,” Craig wrote. Scouts would assist in this endeavor “by making house to house solicitations and digging out those people who have not subscribed, in securing their subscriptions if possible, and if not, turning them over to a strong armed committee of men.” Scout officials appeared not to be troubled by the fact that in the process of “saving soldiers” their boys might become vigilante-like enforcers of public behavior. Although they eschewed boys’ more forceful techniques, girls responded to their government’s bond-selling exhortations with similar vigor. Reports of girls’ prowess flooded into the pages of Wo-He-Lo and the Rally, as Camp Fires and Scout troops across the country engaged in an informal competition for the highest sales. Considering the fact that the average Scout or Camp Fire Girl was a thirteen-year-old grammar school student, sales figures were quite impressive. Girl Scout Troop 3 from Huntington, New York, sold $10,200 in bonds; the girls of Sunflower Troop 1

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in Scranton, Pennsylvania, sold an extraordinary $363,000 worth of bonds during the second Liberty Loan campaign.21 Scout leadership, while proud of its girls’ efforts, took pains to ensure the true meaning of loans did not get lost in a selling frenzy. In Savannah, Georgia, home of Juliette Low and birthplace of Girl Scouting, leaders attended a course titled “How to Interest Young Girls in War Economics.” Leaders encouraged girls to view the sale of bonds not as an end in itself, but as the means by which their government could win the “war for worldwide democracy.” At a more personal level, girls were taught to view Liberty Bonds as both an economic tool and as an emblem of citizenship. Thanks to lessons in war economics, girls learned to call Liberty Loans “certificates of citizenship” and to interpret their own role not so much as successful sellers but as responsible citizens.22 As opposed to their brothers, whose role as seller sometimes devolved into enforcer, girls were encouraged to find common ground with the people to whom they sold loans. Girls’ academic understanding of war economics and their devotion to acts of citizenship did not prevent local Liberty Loan officials from becoming annoyed by overzealous sellers. Despite—or perhaps because of—girls’ enthusiasm, the Girl Scout National Office was forced to limit their participation and ensure that it was properly channeled. During the third Liberty Loan drive in April 1918, National Headquarters issued a statement forbidding troops to undertake work on the War Service Award, which included bond selling as a requirement, without first consulting local committees. “One unfailing rule Girl Scouts must make for themselves is that they must not bother the local committee members,” headquarters warned. Although Scouts were still encouraged to “Speak Up for the Liberty Loan,” they were cautioned to “not be discouraged if your services seem to fail of a welcome.” As girls worked to discharge their civic duty in the Liberty Loan drives, they found their efforts undermined not only by annoyed loan committee members, but also by their own leadership. Unlike Boy Scouts, who could at least count on support from their own organization in the face of government hostility, Girl Scouts faced restrictive rules put in place by Scout officials themselves. “National Headquarters is strongly opposed to Girl Scouts, unaccompanied by adults, doing any house to house canvassing for Liberty Loan subscriptions,” reported the Rally in April 1918, only six months after prominently featuring stories of girls’ achievements.23 The record does not reveal whether this directive was internally motivated or whether headquarters was responding to external pressures, but clearly Scout leadership

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Image not available.

Figure 7. Girls Scouts selling Liberty Loans in New York City during the third Liberty Loan drive. By permission of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

felt uneasy at the thought of girls alone on the streets, carrying money and knocking on strangers’ doors to solicit contributions. Despite restrictions that circumscribed their efforts, girls still sold loans with gusto. The members of Cincinnati Troop 13, confined by the local council to a ten-block radius from their meeting place, raised $44,400. The Girl Scout Council of Manhattan, forbidden from door-to-door canvasing and forced into a booth at Plaza Circle, nonetheless managed to sell just under a half million dollars in loans. (The girls, restricted in their own mobility, used Scouting skills to bring the public to them. The Rally reported that “many a bond was sold through the persuasive appeal of wigwag,” a system of semaphore flag signals that was a specialty of many Scouts.) Top honors, however, went to the greater Philadelphia area, where girls sold an impressive $1,352,400 worth of bonds. The girls’ effort was “so significant” that they were invited to be “the only women’s organization asked to take part” in the City of Brotherly Love’s war parade.24 Clearly, Girl Scout leadership was concerned about girls’ unfettered access to the public, but they remained proud of their girls’ ability to sell loans so successfully.

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Girls who read the March 1919 issue of the Rally must, therefore, have been rather surprised to learn of the National Board’s decision to terminate Scout participation in the final Liberty Loan campaign. The motivation behind this decision, reached after “considering the Treasury officials’ attitude in this matter,” was that the “dangers and disadvantages of employing Girl Scouts as Bond sellers is greater than the money they raised.”25 But what specific danger or disadvantage was bad enough to offset the millions of dollars that girls had raised? Perhaps a youngster was assaulted or robbed while out selling bonds. Perhaps officials felt an irrepressible fear that such an incident might occur. Maybe the public was simply fed up with unwanted loan solicitations and found it more judicious to complain about the exuberance of thirteen-year-old Girl Scouts than about the persistence of men from the local Chamber of Commerce. Whatever the reason, when girls left their kitchens and gardens to sell loans on the streets of their communities, they obviously overstepped a boundary. Girls peddling self-denial to others, even in the guise of civic duty, was clearly less acceptable than their practicing self-denial in the confines of their own homes. Still, it had taken until the end of the war and the last of five Liberty Loan drives for the government to shut down girls’ participation. Scout and Camp Fire leaders had every reason to be hopeful that girls’ patriotic war work could indeed extend beyond the confines of the home—provided it occurred in the proper context. It is therefore nothing short of astonishing that girls’ organizations attempted to carry out their war work within a social space that everyone agreed was fraught with dangers—the sexually charged public space surrounding the army’s training camp facilities. The fact that leaders of girls’ groups believed they could successfully organize their membership within these military zones is clear evidence of how badly they wanted their girls to fully participate in mobilization efforts. It is also symbolic of how sure leaders were that they could influence, if not control, the debate about girls’ relationship to this most fundamental civic duty of all Americans.

Military Training Camps: The Causes and Cures of “Khaki Fever” The construction of training camps and cantonments for National Army and National Guard divisions who were awaiting deployment to Europe began in May 1917, just a month after Congress had declared war, and soon encompassed thirty-two camps, with an average capacity of 44,000 men.26 National Guard cantonments predominated in the South, from Camp

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Greene in the North Carolina piedmont to Camp Mac Arthur outside Dallas, Texas. Although National Army camps were spread out, to accommodate recruits from across the nation, they were heavily concentrated in the eastern port cites, gathering points from which hastily trained men could be shipped to the European trenches. As soon as the camps were constructed, and well before the first man left for France, serious concerns about the camps’ “social conditions” began to surface. Reformers from the American Social Hygiene Association, an organization concerned with sexual health and purity, convinced the War Department to investigate the situation. Government officials responded by creating the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), directed by Raymond D. Fosdick and placed under the aegis of the Council of National Defense. The CTCA’s mission was to safeguard the physical and moral health of America’s fighting men, which largely meant keeping them free from venereal disease. The CTCA produced scores of heavy-handed, moralistic pamphlets and posters—as well as a full-length film titled Fit to Fight—in an effort to dissuade recruits from frequenting the saloons and brothels that ringed most training facilities. The CTCA was, however, quick to point out that the vast majority of soldiers were essentially upright young men who were guilty of no more than temporary lapses in judgment caused by exposure to an unhealthy and unnatural social environment. Accordingly, the CTCA complemented its negative prevention campaign with positive efforts to encourage wholesome activities for the men. The committee organized athletic teams, set up libraries, and built Liberty Theaters that screened a select repertoire of preapproved films.27 War Camp Community Service officials worked in concert with a variety of organizations such as the YWCA and the Jewish Welfare Board to sponsor social events that brought soldiers together with respectable young women. The CTCA promoted coed dances and dinners not only to give soldiers an enjoyable evening, but also because its officials believed in the power of women’s moral suasion over men. The Health and Recreation Department of the Women’s Committee, originally named the Department for Safeguarding Moral and Spiritual Forces, expressed its mission as being “to provide wholesome recreation in camps and camp activities, and [to take] steps to prevent a lowering of moral standards as a result of the war.”28 Officials’ faith in women’s innate moral superiority, a belief that was on the wane in mainstream American culture, received a test when they realized that an evening of chaperoned dancing could quickly go awry as amorous couples with other things on their minds slipped out of the gymnasium unnoticed.

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Young women’s tendency to decide for themselves how they wanted to conduct their dates with soldiers precipitated a social condition that reformers dubbed the “girl problem.” It was a problem that proved as recalcitrant, though far less clear cut, as the “scourge of prostitution” infecting the camps. In September 1917, just three months into his tenure, Fosdick had been persuaded to address the girl problem by creating the Committee on Protective Work for Girls (CPWG). Some concerned individuals, including Maude E. Miner, the first chairwoman of the CPWG, believed that local girls who lived near training camps needed the services of a protective program. They were inclined to believe that soldiers, not the girls themselves, were the cause of the girl problem. Others, however, were not so sure who needed protection from whom. Much to the discomfort of CPWG officials, they began to hear complaints about girls’—not soldiers’—behavior, a clear indication that the line between wholesome coed entertainment and immodest, if not immoral, activity had become quite blurred.29 Even CTCA and CPWG officials who viewed army camps as hopeless dens of depravity could not hold them exclusively responsible for creating the slippery slope of morality many young people seemed quite content to navigate. The years before the war had witnessed a sexual awakening on the part of the entire youth culture. Charity girls, young working-class women who were willing to barter sexual favors for an enjoyable night out on the town, made the line between prostitution and dating increasingly difficult to discern.30 The girls themselves weren’t especially confused about how to define their behavior, but their language had little in common with the lexicon of the middle-class reformers who tried to control them. More troubling was the fear that these attitudes about sexuality were in the process of creeping up to middle-class girls, who were increasingly open about their own desires and increasingly willing to act on them.31 This, of course, was an uncomfortable realization for erstwhile reformers, who quickly concluded that if the girl problem could infect respectable youngsters, its origins must lie not in a girl’s nature but in some dangerous and unhealthy aspect of her environment.32 Fortunately for Americans, the cause of—and a potential cure for—the girl problem had already been discovered by their British allies. Virtually from the war’s beginning, the British press had warned its public about “khaki fever,” an unwholesome tendency on the part of young girls to throw themselves wantonly into the path of soldiering men.33 Wherever there were men in uniform, there were girls infected with khaki fever. Lord Robert Baden-Powell diagnosed khaki fever in a group of giggling

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girls dressed like “flappers” hanging around the streets of London. “Is it for this sort of thing that [our soldiers] are fighting?” Baden-Powell asked himself. Even contemplating the answer caused him to be “seared with shame.”34 But flappers with their predilection for smoking, drinking, and dancing caused Baden-Powell shame whether they suffered from khaki fever or not. In his worldview, the soldier’s fight to defend king and empire was entwined with the preservation of a very particular version of British womanhood—one that flappers had resolutely rejected. In Baden-Powell’s England, courageous, self-disciplined men had to be able to fight for the honor of women who were worthy of their sacrifice. The problem in England—as would be true later in the United States—was that an epidemic of khaki fever not only had swept the unsavory streets of London’s East End, but also had infected previously wholesome country towns and previously wholesome English girls.35 According to Baden-Powell, good girls became afflicted with khaki fever because they misunderstood the nature of their attraction to men in uniform. Girls were supposed to admire fighting men; indeed, they owed soldiers their unwavering loyalty. To the detriment of all, however, khaki fever perverted this natural and admirable impulse. Although a young man might be flattered by a girl’s attentions and in a moment’s indiscretion take advantage of her affections, he did not really benefit from such an encounter. A quick kiss—or more—snatched on the way to war was not at all worth fighting for, while the ability to return home to a wholesome girl was. An effective antidote to khaki fever would have to teach girls “self-control and self-policing,” while encouraging them to show proper respect for a soldier’s duty and his potential sacrifice. The Girl Guides, Baden-Powell claimed, could accomplish all this. The Guides cured khaki fever by keeping girls busy with a variety of wholesome, war-related chores—from sewing Red Cross bandages to tending Victory Gardens. By doing such work, girls could rightfully claim their place as “guides,” those women whose supportive work made the martial duties of men that much more bearable. However, the Guides did not remedy khaki fever simply by making the soldier’s task less onerous; the supportive labors of Guides would, Baden-Powell believed, give girls a greater respect for men as soldiers, not simply as dashing males in attractive uniforms. The self-control and self-policing that the Guides taught contained girls’ natural predilections for men in uniform, while war-related labors gave girls a greater appreciation for the sacrifices soldiers willingly endured. Girls honored a soldier’s work, since they learned how to directly support it; they also

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understood that a soldier’s sacrifice was supreme and given at least partly for the maintenance of their own honor. Like British home front reformers before them, American officials concluded that the chief reason previously respectable middle-class girls were willing to throw away their virtue was the overpowering influence of khaki fever. A CTCA pamphlet warned reformers who worked with girls that “the ‘lure of the uniform’ is more than a phrase; it is an actuality. Girls often lose their heads in a whirl of emotions brought about by these unusual conditions.”36 Lecturers from the CPWG echoed this message and cautioned a group of mothers that girls “cannot . . . withstand the natural attractions which the glamour of war lends to the soldier’s uniform.”37 Although this etiology of khaki fever faulted a tainted environment created by “unusual” social conditions, it did not entirely absolve the patient for coming down with the disease. Girls might be exposed to khaki fever via their environment, but they fell ill because they lacked the self-discipline to stay well. Such a diagnosis of the girl problem was bound to have detractors among those committed to girls’ work, and among those who believed in the essentially upright nature of girls’ character. Consider, for example, a postwar study, titled The Unadjusted Girl, that analyzed psychological data collected by the Girls’ Protective Bureau of the United States Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board.38 In the book’s foreword, Ethel S. Dummer described khaki fever not as an environmental problem or as an affliction of weak-willed girls, but as a disease of men’s character. “The devotion of the young girl to the cadet who enslaves her reveals the same instinct which holds a wife faithful through difficulties and degradation—the instinct from which have developed the virtues of loyalty, endurance and self-sacrifice,” she wrote.39 Dummer’s female subjects were paragons of natural morality; they possessed powerful instincts for both goodness and strength. Their downfall was caused not by flaws in their selfcontrol but because they were forced against their will, even “enslaved,” by men who clearly did not share their natural advantages. Although Dummer’s assessment of khaki fever’s causes might seem more appealing to girls’ organizations, the truth was that exculpating girls meant blaming soldiers, and neither Scout nor Camp Fire leadership was prepared to do that. “Guardians will readily understand the grave danger to which the training camp situation has given rise,” a Wo-He-Lo article ominously intoned. The problem, the article was quick to point out, resulted “not because the great mass of our soldiers, nor of our girls, are not rightminded,” but rather because of the “severance of usual social ties.” Areas in

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the vicinity of training camps had to be turned into “moral zones” because they were artificial spaces where “usual social ties” had been torn asunder, allowing soldiers, and girls, to operate free of customary constraints. “It is very difficult to keep the ordinary fascination most young girls feel for soldiers within the limits of right conduct,” the article concluded.40 Although Camp Fire leaders were disinclined to fault either soldiers or girls, they still acknowledged that their girls sometimes caught khaki fever. Girl Scout leadership, however, not only implied that their girls were immune to the disease, they also suggested that their organization could help cure the ills of soldiers who were stationed at training facilities. Putting theory into practice, Girl Scout leaders convened a meeting with army officials to discuss their concerns about Camp Upton, which housed the Seventy-seventh Division of the National Army. A dozen women from the greater New York area met in the Upper West Side drawing room of Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer. “The object of the meeting was to discuss the mobilization into Girl Scout troops of Long Island girls living in the vicinity of the army training camps,” reported the Rally. The purpose of these troops was not to safeguard local girls, but to mobilize Girl Scouts so they could serve the soldiers camped in their community. The army officer who joined the women was not at all convinced that this was a good idea. He supported the establishment of Scout troops, even agreed to let them serve his men, but urged “the absolute necessity of having the Scouts work for the soldiers in the girls’ own homes and communities, and under no circumstances whatsoever to let this work take the girls into the camps.”41 Presumably, Scout leadership deferred to his command, but the fact that they supported girls’ work within the camps in the first place suggests they had a quite different vision of girls’ nature than either BadenPowell or their Camp Fire colleagues. By rejecting an explanation of khaki fever that focused on individual failings, either on the part of soldiers or girls, Girl Scout leaders emphasized the communal nature of the disease. And a communal etiology suggested a communal solution. Scout leaders wanted their organizations to be involved in the “moral zones” surrounding war camps not because they believed that their girls had a natural penchant for moral uplift, but because they were convinced that their girls could help restore the civic bonds inevitably torn asunder by these camps. Young men had been damaged by the severance of ties that had bound them to female school chums and kid sisters, who were an integral part of the American social fabric.42 Girl Scouts, therefore, could help soldiers by re-creating the hometown camaraderie that camps lacked.

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Scouts were encouraged to repair the compromised environment of army camps by either keeping in touch with their own hometown boys, or by “adopting” new ones. A troop from Middletown, Ohio, raised money from hometown subscribers so they could send “boxes of comfort” to Middletown soldiers stationed at camps across the country. Girls from the big city who did not have the benefit of strong community ties at home made do as best they could. A troop from Washington, DC, for example, “adopted” an army unit drawn from a different neighborhood and forwarded them subscriptions to local papers. The Rally encouraged all Scout troops to create scrapbooks full of clippings from local newspapers to send to hometown boys “over there.”43 Scouts who happened to live in the vicinity of army cantonments had a dual responsibility; they kept in touch with their own boys at the same time as they fashioned a new hometown for men stationed nearby. Scouts in Savannah, Georgia, “adopted” the men of the Twenty-eighth National Guard from Pennsylvania, who had been assigned to Camp Hancock. In their visits and mailings, girls were encouraged to report on those smalltown America doings—Fourth of July parades, school plays, and football games—that would make soldiers remember why they were fighting. Leaders believed that through Girl Scout work in the camps, young men would realize that although their lives had been disrupted, the good life at home continued undisturbed. Moreover, soldiers might come to understand that these devoted girls in their khaki uniforms were emblematic of all the good news that they passed along.44 Yet this interpretation of girls’ wartime work casts khaki fever, and its alleged cure, in a slightly different light. Baden-Powell believed that the Girl Guides acted as an antidote because its activities instilled in girls a respect for men’s sacrifice. But some historians have turned this assumption on its head: “Khaki fever lost its potency in part because women were assuming more of the patriotic involvement and warrior garb which had created the attraction in the first place,” argues Angela Woollacott.45 In other words, girls’ organizations could cure khaki fever, but only because they encouraged the usurpation of the symbolic power of khaki itself. Soldiers lost some of their mystique when girls went about dressed like them, performing war-related chores that garnered respect from the public and appreciation from the government. If Scout and Camp Fire leaders believed even half of what they said in the quotations that opened this chapter, then their girls had indeed been cured. Girls’ organizations expanded the limits of girls’ civic responsibility by redefining their members as important and valuable citizens of their nation

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and community. Leaders argued that adolescent girls now had a right, indeed a duty, to perform civic and patriotic service. And so when leaders ran up against the limits of their ability to mobilize girls for wartime service, they did not disband their “splendid army of women”; they simply moved them to a place where they themselves could set the limits. Enthusiastic girls, who had been told that for all intents and purposes they were on the firing line and in the trenches, found their tour of duty extended as they reported to their own proving grounds.

Encampments for Girls In November 1920, Senator William Clark of Montana delivered the dedication address at Camp Andree Clark, the Girl Scouts’ new national training camp, located on the Hudson River near Briarcliff, New York. Clark and his wife donated the hundred-acre tract to the Girl Scouts in memory of their fourteen-year-old daughter who had died the year before. While reading their daughter’s diary, the Clarks had discovered “how much Scouting meant to her,” and they decided to provide the land that became the first national Girl Scout campground. In his dedication address, Senator Clark invoked the legacy of the Great War to explain why Scouting in general, and camping in particular, had become so popular with girls such as his daughter. “The military spirit engendered by the recent war, doubtless gave [Girl Scouting] a great impetus and inspired in the minds and hearts of American women and girls a fervent ambition for military training that would qualify them for a fuller discharge of the duties of citizenship, and at the same time enable them to enjoy the advantages and delights of outdoor life.”46 Senator Clark was right when he suggested that women had understood, and exploited, the links between Girl Scouting, military training, and the duties of citizenship. He might have noticed, however, that many women had forged yet another link in this chain. The military training that qualified women for a fuller discharge of their civic duties also gave them, after those duties were successfully completed, the grounds by which they could claim a panoply of rights associated with citizenship.47 Military training became such an important part of the Scouting program because it functioned as the starting point of a syllogism that equated martial skills with civic duty, and civic duty with civic rights. But now that the war was over and even citizensoldiers on the home front had been demobilized, where could girls satisfy this fervent ambition for military training?

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The answer to this question—at least according to girls’ organizations—can be found at the end of Senator Clark’s speech, although it is not clear whether he himself completely understood this. Far from being a pleasant afterthought, the “advantages and delights of outdoor life” made manifest in camps such as Andree Clark were becoming the vehicles through which girls acquired the training that would qualify them for “a fuller discharge of the duties of citizenship.” As the Girl Scout camping committee asserted almost sixteen years to the day after the Armistice was signed, “The war had a greater influence on camping than on any other part of our program.”48 This was true because leaders of girls’ organizations did not view camping as the incidental, albeit enjoyable, diversion that Senator Clark thought it was. They believed that camp—from its physical arrangement and program of activities to the very landscape on which it was built—conferred lessons that were essential to an appreciation of democracy and an understanding of civic duty. Given the fact that girls’ organizations came of age during America’s first total war, it is hardly surprising that leaders often equated democracy and civic responsibility with martial training. From early-morning tent inspection to the campfire songs that signaled the end of the day, girls were told that their military training was of vital importance, allowing them, if necessary, “to take the place of [their] brothers” at the front. Furthermore, the military training girls received from their leaders was complemented by lessons in citizenship and democracy available directly from the landscape itself. Democracy, conveyed through lessons of self-reliance and teamwork, was inherent to the “wilderness” in which camps were situated.49 At camp, a girl could prove that once she had been properly trained, and tempered by “nature,” it was well within her own nature to become if not a soldier, then at least a citizen. “The Democracy of the Wilderness” When Luther Gulick had issued his “war call” to the girls of America demanding they become “hard as soldiers,” he made it clear that an established camp, located in the “wilderness,” was the ideal site at which this transformation could take place. Gulick conceded that some families might not have the financial means to send girls away for a two-week stay—let alone an entire summer season—at a distant camp, and so he offered alternatives closer to home. Minute Girls who could not afford to attend an established camp “will go camping for not less than a week, and will endure some real hardships,” he commanded.50 The fact that the camping experience

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would be much briefer than Gulick preferred was not to lessen its impact, nor could girls allow a makeshift camp located nearby to “make them soft.” “Face the hardships!” the War Call exclaimed, “even if you encounter them by camping in your own back yard.” Gulick knew that camping close to home tempted girls to avoid hardships rather than face them. He did his best to disabuse Minute Girls of the notion that the goal of camping was to minimize discomforts while maximizing the pleasures of living outdoors. “Don’t try to make camping too easy,” he directed. “Don’t go in the house if it rains. . . . [F]ight it out with big fires, blankets, shelters, also with singing and joyous mastery.” Why were Minute Girls to face hardships that could be so easily avoided? Because the hardships they faced, and consequently overcame, would teach them valuable lessons. “Sleep on the ground. You will lie awake learning. Learning is what life is for,” Gulick concluded. And learning was, in Luther Gulick’s mind, most assuredly what camp was for. Minute Girls who were privileged enough to be able to attend a real camp found even more lessons available in the wilderness setting. In May 1917, Gulick had received a letter from a Camp Fire guardian asking his advice about a serious sacrifice she and her girls were considering: should the group give up their week at camp and instead donate the camp fees to the Red Cross? Judging from the rhetoric that filled the pages of the War Call and Wo-He-Lo, Gulick should have been pleased, for here was a group of girls ready to make the sacrifices and show the patriotic commitment required of Minute Girls. Yet Gulick rejected their proposal. He did not disapprove of Red Cross work or the spirit in which the girls crafted their plan, but rather he believed that there was an important lesson all girls had to learn in order to truly understand the wartime work in which they were engaged. “I have been thinking over earnestly your letter,” Gulick wrote back to the guardian in an open response published in Wo-He-Lo. “All human beings need to take a time, apart by themselves . . . in contact with nature and their own ideals,” because such time, he explained, was essential to the development of a strong moral character.51 Gulick believed that this private time was so crucial that in a flight of rhetorical fancy, excessive even for him, he equated it with “what Christ was doing when He went into the wilderness by Himself to commune with His Father.” Why did Luther Gulick, devout Christian and son of missionaries, suggest to every Camp Fire Girl in America that spending a week in summer camp was comparable to Christ’s years of wandering in the wilderness?

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The answer can be found, more than a year later, in a June 1918 WoHe-Lo editorial titled “The Value of Summer Camps for Girls.” Gulick began his message by referencing the guardian’s original letter and explaining that a year’s reflection had left him even more certain of the wisdom of his initial response.52 Although Gulick hoped he would never “rob anyone of the holy joy of sacrifice,” he cautioned Camp Fire Girls to think carefully about their motivation in offering up such a sacrifice. “We must not let sacrifice and sacrificing mature into sentimentality,” he warned. For Gulick, sacrifice was rendered holy when it was freely given and fully understood. The guardian who had written to Gulick a year earlier thought she was merely sacrificing a week of fun for the war effort; in fact, Gulick implied, by abandoning camp she was abandoning the opportunity to teach her girls what sacrifice and civic duty really meant. Camp disentangled girls from sentimental attachments they had heretofore mistaken for true devotion. “When girls go out into the woods, the first thing they do is take off their skirts and hang them up on a hook together with all the traditions which through the ages have made girls stiff. They put on bloomers, then they stretch their muscles.”53 Girls who could be persuaded to “throw aside their petticoats” were free to grow into a “sturdier, less hysterical, and more dependable womanhood.” Yet it was not only a sense of physical freedom that girls could acquire when they left behind convention and gave themselves over to the camp experience. “When girls lay aside the clothing which they wear in everyday life and put on their camp uniform, they by that very act are dramatizing the fact that they are standing on their own feet. We have always demanded that women shall emphasize their individual selves,” but, Gulick suggested, it had been the wrong self that society asked girls to emphasize.54 If girls could be persuaded to endure the hardships that would give them an unvarnished look at themselves, they could develop into true unsentimental patriots and citizens. “When girls are away from places where money can buy ease and are in places where family prestige means nothing if it does not help them to swim, to endure on a hike, to cook a good meal and to make a neat pack, they stand on their own merits and they unconsciously learn to judge other girls by what the girls can do and by what they themselves are.” This clear-eyed self-sufficiency would help girls to appreciate the lessons of democracy all citizens had to learn. “I have never seen anything which tended to bring out the personal character, develop independence, grit, courage, self-reliance and democracy, as much as camping.” Properly run, a camp could encourage the creation of democratic girls in a

Image not available.

Figure 8. By the mid-1920s both the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls had extensive catalogs of official camp clothing and accessories. This advertisement for bloomers and middie blouses was featured on the back cover of the American Girl in May 1924. By permission of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

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democratic environment. “The democracy of the wilderness is the greatest democracy the world knows,” concluded Luther Gulick. Daily Life at Camp: “Making Girls Hard as Soldiers” Every girl should be as ‘hard as nails’ if she is really going to amount to much. —Luther Gulick, War Call to the Girls of America/ Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 1917

Photographs from the early years of girls’ camps show just what this “democracy of the wilderness” looked like. Dozens of snapshots of Camp Odakota, located in the Philadelphia suburbs, for example, depict perfectly aligned rows of uniformed girls standing at attention in front of perfectly aligned rows of identical canvas tents. At Odakota, rows of tents raised on low wooden platforms faced one another across a central walkway decorated by a lone flagpole. The area in front of the tents, like the walkways dividing the rows, was packed dirt with no trace of grass, let alone landscaping.55 The stark atmosphere of many girls’ camps did the real military camps on which they were modeled one better. Many army camps and cantonments included a few homey touches in an effort to improve the morale of displaced soldiers and import at least some domestic culture from home. But directors of girls’ camps did not want to re-create the home; the idea of camp was to leave behind the restrictions that girls had encountered there. The interiors of the girls’ tents were just as austere as the area outside. “The usual tent furniture in a girl’s camp includes two cot beds, an iron washstand, a not very large mirror and two camp stools, sometimes there is a table. Under the bed goes the girl’s steamer trunk and in that she keeps all her wardrobe; not much chance for frills and finery here, nor are they wanted,” wrote Adelia Beard, Lina Beard’s sister and co-founder of the Girl Pioneers of America.56 Camp directors were convinced this type of “army-style camping,” complete with “barrack-like sleeping areas” and totally lacking “frills and finery,” was an asset to their camping program. To camp leaders, most of whom were new to this job of creating an entire camp from the ground up, the military aura they built into girls’ camps conferred a sense of authenticity. Leaders also relied on the military trappings of their camps to convey a sense of discipline and dependability, important features for leaders who had to convince parents to send their offspring away from home for two weeks, or even two months.

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Camp Odakota advertised “comfortable army cots” as one of the “dependable things” parents could count on the camp to provide.57 In a letter to the Rally recounting her troop’s camping trip, an Illinois captain boasted that her girls dished up their meals “in army style” and were “truly military in their line-up and service.”58 All this boasting about military style helped camp leaders achieve two goals. First, leaders proved they could be relied upon to properly care for the youngsters in their charge; everybody knew the military did all it could to feed, clothe, and shelter its members. Second, leaders hoped by adopting a martial attitude and leaving behind “frills and finery” they would show that their girls were “tough as nails” and capable of the self-discipline and self-sacrifice required of good citizens. The structure of camp activities was permeated by the same martial influences that dictated the design of the physical plant. Time at camp was as tightly regimented as space, as girls moved through a packed schedule, which in many cases specified the time allotted for particular activities down to five-minute intervals. While it would be foolish to overlook the practical benefits harassed leaders gained by eliminating unstructured, and therefore potentially disruptive, playtime, the tight structure of the camp schedule was also meant to instill in girls a quasi-martial attitude toward their camp experience. For example, a Rally advertisement for the Official Radiolite Girl Scout Watch advised girls at camp to “look sharp.” “Things go snappily at camp, and all on schedule,” the ad proclaimed. A camper in possession of a Radiolite watch was able to navigate her way efficiently through the “work time, play time, rest time, and meal time” that structured her day. Far from exaggerating camp’s temporal demands as a ploy to sell watches, this advertisement actually underestimated the number of times a Scout might have to consult her Radiolite during the typical day. The 1919 brochure for Camp Odakota reveals just how regimented the camp schedule was. The girls’ day began at 6:30 a.m. with the “first call” from the camp bugler, followed by assembly, reveille, calisthenics, and a morning dip—all before the 7:45 “mess call” for breakfast. The remainder of the morning was just as fast paced. Girls were “called” for personal inspection, tent inspection, drill, and assembly before they got to eat lunch at noon. The fiveminute “swimming call” from 10:20 to 10:25 afforded the morning’s only respite. The afternoon and early evening, however, offered greater opportunities for “optional” free time and recreation, punctuated by calls to church, quarters, and “colors.”59 (All this “calling” might have become tedious for the girls, but it was a perfect opportunity for the camp bugler, who had to master the twelve tunes from first call to taps in order to earn her proficiency badge.)60

Figure 9. A suggested daily program for camp from Campward Ho! a Girl Scout publication designed to help directors run their camps more effectively.

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Campers, summoned by their bugler, marched through a regimented program meant to teach them what leaders considered military-style discipline and structure. Leaders also promoted the idea that the very act of moving through the day’s activities en masse would encourage girls to develop a sense of teamwork and esprit de corps—qualities that many in the general public believed girls lacked. Yet leaders did not rely solely on the proper execution of the camp program to teach these valuable skills. Certain activities, largely associated with fighting men, were intended to acquaint girls with the soldierly skills of discipline and unit cohesion. If the degree to which camp directors themselves prepared for a particular activity is any indication of its importance, then there can be no question that the two skills at the heart of girls’ military training were drilling and semaphore signaling. The National Training School for Girl Scout leaders held in Boston during the summer of 1917 featured military drill and signaling at the core of its curriculum.61 The National Service School’s encampment outside Washington, DC, which was open to all interested women but had a strong enough Scout presence to deserve mention in the Rally, was “housed in tents and . . . conducted along military lines.” The fifty-two captains present, who attended courtesy of National Girl Scout Council scholarships, were encouraged to wear their Scout uniforms as they received instruction in drill and semaphore along with “labor replacement” skills such as typewriting and telegraph and telephone operation.62 Leaders schooled in programs blending war work with training in drill and semaphore learned that military skills were part and parcel of their mobilization responsibilities. When they went to camp, they brought with them a conviction that girls, too, should learn these soldierly skills. Semaphore signaling was not new to wartime camps; it had made its American debut in How Girls Can Help Their Country, the first Girl Scout handbook, which had been borrowed wholesale from Baden-Powell’s How Girls Can Help the Empire. The handbook included an overview of signaling in the “Scoutcraft” chapter, a section rounded out with instructions on how to read a compass, tie knots, and recognize hand and whistle signals as well as tips on how to shoot a rifle and aim an arrow.63 The popularity signaling enjoyed during and after the war was also reflected in later editions of the Scout handbook. In Scouting for Girls, the revised 1920 edition of the handbook, signaling instructions filled an expanded eight-page section. There was advice on technique and posture—the signaler “should stand erect, well balanced on the arches of the feet”—in addition to lessons on the rudiments of the alphabet and other signs. Girls could learn either

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the International Morse Code system, popularly known as “wigwag,” where one flag was used to depict dots and dashes, or the semaphore code in which two flags manipulated together were used to spell out words. To be awarded the signaler proficiency badge, girls had to master both codes and be able to send and receive messages within established time limits.64 Girls were cautioned to take their practice very seriously and consult The Cadet Manual of the U.S. Army if they had any questions.65 Girls appear to have taken to signaling instruction with panache. During the war, uniformed Scout troops often gave public demonstrations of Scouting activities, and they almost invariably concluded their performance with a signaling display. At one demonstration given by a Buffalo, New York, troop, the girls put on such an impressive show that a group of Boy Scouts waiting in the wings for their own performance flashed the girls a congratulatory message. The proud Girl Scout captain who reported on the event for the Rally assured readers that the boys’ message was “interpreted with equal accuracy” by her girls. Girls’ signaling skills were presented as proof that they were members of an elite group who had mastered a complex and vitally important form of communication. Soldiers, after all, did not learn semaphore in order to chat; they used it to relay orders and direct military operations. Girls’ mastery of signaling implied not only communication skills, but also a clear, important purpose to that communication. Life’s issue on the Girl Scouts, published in November 1924, lampooned many aspects of the Scouting program, but took special aim at signaling. The center spread showed a two-page drawing titled Wig-Wag, in which three battleships, bristling with gun turrets, steam away in tight formation. Standing on dry land in the drawing’s foreground, a uniformed Girl Scout signals to a sailor who hangs precariously from the uppermost rigging of the largest ship. Although the sailor is signaling back to her, it is the text of the girl’s message that gives the drawing its caption: “Yoo-hoo, Jack—Mama says you forgot your toothbrush.”66 The Life cartoon did not challenge the Scout’s claim of wigwag proficiency; the girl was depicted as perfectly capable of getting her message through to the sailor. Rather, it implied that even those Scouts who had successfully mastered signaling’s complexities had nothing of importance to say. For all its popularity, signaling paled in comparison to another camp activity, military drill. In the open meadows of camp, girls expanded upon the drilling skills they had practiced in weekly meetings back home. Drills executed in the cramped formations dictated by the confines of school auditoriums or church basements were abandoned at camp, where the presence

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of dozens of troops and acres of open space allowed captains to drill girls in larger, more sweeping patterns. It appears that some captains put girls through their paces with a gusto that campers found it hard to forget—even fifty years later. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout archives has several photo albums donated by a woman who attended Camp Hilldale as a young girl. A note attached to the albums recalled how her captain had “snapped out the commands and scared us to death.”67 Captains and camp directors demanded so much of their charges because they had such high opinions of the benefits that military drill could confer upon girls if it was properly executed. Helen Ward Stevens, a Girl Scout commissioner from Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, wrote to the Rally to extol the virtues of military drill.68 Stevens was an avowed enthusiast of all types of physical education for girls, but believed many popular activities contained some inherent flaw. Gymnastics encouraged individual prowess at the expense of team unity, while the most popular team sport, basketball, was played inside and thus did not expose girls to the healthful influences of the outdoors. Moreover, Stevens complained, girls’ squads consistently had to defer to boys’ teams in the battle over gym space and playing time. Outdoor drilling avoided all these pitfalls and offered additional benefits. “Nothing yet has been invented which excels military drill as a training in co-ordination and team work,” Stevens wrote. In this opinion she echoed other leaders of girls’ organizations who felt that drill was the way to teach adolescent girls a sense of solidarity. Accordingly, captains at Girl Scout training camps were schooled both in the practice of drill and its psychological impact. Teenage girls lacked the “gang instinct” natural to boys their age, prospective drill leaders were taught, and therefore girls had to be persuaded to develop group allegiance through camp activities. “[M]arching drill is a good way to get the girls into a feeling of unity,” they were advised. Even Luther Gulick, who roundly, and repeatedly, criticized Scouting as too “martial” for girls, made an exception for military drill. “Women do not naturally feel the esprit de corps and inspiration to be gained from marching together,” he wrote in the War Call. Women’s nature had, Gulick conceded, changed for the better over the past few decades, and he contended that some of these changes were visible in the way women approached marching. “When I came to New York in 1886, it was the exception for women to keep step on Fifth Avenue when walking together. To-day it is the exception when they do not,” Gulick observed in 1917. Gulick agreed with Scouting leadership that this ability to master military drill had far-reaching benefits for girls in that it taught them teamwork and self-control. “It is the

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ability to keep step, not merely in walking, but in community affairs” that allows girls “to discover one’s finest self, and to work for the social whole,” Gulick concluded.69 Once girls acquired these civic skills at camp, leaders were eager to put them on display in the larger community. The December 1917 issue of the Rally describes how a troop of girls, clad in “khaki uniforms and marching with a precision which would have done credit to any military body,” presented a fieldwork demonstration at their local public park. The girls efficiently pitched and broke camp, built a campfire, and performed a signaland-wigwag drill before giving “an exhibition of wall scaling and rescue work which was executed perfectly.” In short, the Girl Scouts played soldier, and they did so with expertise and aplomb. Girls’ display of soldierly skills not only reflected their own ability to act as a unit, it allowed them to bring the unity and esprit de corps they learned to the audience. After a girl played “Colors” on her bugle, the exhibition ended with a “most impressive” flagraising ceremony, for which “the thousands stood as one and uncovered while the anthem was played.”70 This Rally article suggested that girls who possessed martial skills could not only be turned into passable soldiers, they could inspire civilian crowds to a higher degree of patriotism.

Return to Whose Normalcy? This great war, that has swept us all into its terrible whirlpool, has brought out in all of us abilities we never knew we possessed. —“Try Camping This Summer,” Rally, July 1918

Leading up to the first presidential election after the war, Warren G. Harding’s campaign slogan “A Return to Normalcy” appeared to capture the mood of many Americans. Yet a return to normalcy that meant a return to prewar conditions held little appeal for girls’ organizations. The war may have swept Scouts and Camp Fire Girls into its “terrible whirlpool,” but they had come out on the other side—with exponentially larger membership roles and widespread public support. Even government moves to curtail their participation in mobilization efforts were balanced by the dozens of federal, state, and local officials who accepted honorary titles and lent their names to advisory boards. The war may have been over but the fact remained that girls’ organizations had marched into American culture just as the home front mobilized, and that historical coincidence remained fresh in the public’s mind. “Most of us still think of the Girl Scouts in the terms of wartime—as an apprentice to the manifold arts and crafts which, more than

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any other factor, gave women a realization of their position in the State,” wrote a New York Times reporter in November 1920. Obviously, there was no more war work to be done, but if leaders were reluctant to give up the “manifold arts and crafts” that characterized their wartime program, they were loath to relinquish the “position in the State” that those skills had allowed them to realize. As Katherine Wright proclaimed in her jubilee history of Scouting, written in 1937, girls had “won many important battles . . . in khaki.” There was nothing leaders could do about the demobilization of their girl soldiers after the Armistice, but that did not mean that they were content to retreat from their new responsibilities. Girls’ organizations tried to assert their civic identity—in January 1920, for example, the New York Times reported that Girl Scouts were employed “to accompany many of the census takers in Manhattan”— but for the most part the postwar years saw a sharp decline in girls’ service to the state.71 Part of the problem was the widespread acceptance of a regressive vision of female citizens. America’s return to normalcy was accompanied by the rise of what historians call maternalist politics, an ideology that stressed, among other things, maternity as women’s paramount obligation to the state. Some officials even applied these ideas to adolescent girls. When former Treasury secretary McAdoo addressed a Girl Scout fund-raising event barely a year after the war’s end, he assured his audience that what “impressed us most in the war was that American citizenship was up to standard.” McAdoo believed that the Scout’s commitment to citizenship had earned them the public’s support, but now that the war was over he felt the organization should alter its definition of civic duty. “The Girl Scouts need money,” he continued, so that “the work of providing the best training for our future mothers and citizens be pushed forward.”72 McAdoo’s argument was not original; he was reiterating an idea with a well-established pedigree in American history—Republican motherhood, the notion that a woman’s role was to bear and raise good male citizens was as old as the Republic itself. Yet this was a historical precedent that held little appeal for girls’ organizations. They had advocated for girls’ right to serve on the home firing line and to be counted as citizens in the moment, not await some indirect role as future mothers of future soldiers. Besides, there was a more immediate future that appeared troubling for an entirely different reason. Some observers of girls’ organizations in postwar America agreed that girls in uniform still represented a link between military training and

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citizenship, but viewed this as a quaint anachronism. The Girl Scout issue of Life once again provided a telling image of this view of girls’ groups. A cartoon labeled The Deserter depicted a lone Girl Scout slipping away unnoticed from the back of a parade in which she had been marching with her compatriots. The girl was lured away from the parade by a movie house featuring a film called Mad Love. Yet the cartoon was not simply about what tempted the AWOL Scout; it also commented on the event she chose to desert. The Scouts’ parade was greeted by a tearful crowd composed almost entirely of old folks, sniffing into hankies and leaning on their canes. Girl Scouts marching in full uniform, Life suggested, appealed only to the old guard and certainly was not compelling enough to hold the attention of a modern girl seeking modern amusements.73 And so girls’ organizations were caught in a quandary. They did not wish to return to a normalcy that negated the rights they had earned through their war work; however, marching into the future meant marching into a burgeoning consumer culture replete with distractions such as “Mad Love.” Demobilized girl citizens needed a congenial place where they could continue the work they had begun. As Senator Clark suggested, it was the outdoor life that gave girls and their leaders what they needed. At camp, far from judgmental public officials and the allure of popular culture, leaders literally and metaphorically found the space to continue girls’ training. Girls had learned a crucial lesson in the democracy of the wilderness: how to stand on their own two feet and be judged by their own individual merits, while remaining loyal members of the larger group. These skills, taught via military training, gave girls access to the character traits that leaders believed to be the hallmarks of a responsible citizenry. At the end of their busy, regimented days, girls gathered around the campfire to sing popular tunes rewritten to celebrate their newfound skills and responsibilities. In these campfire songs it is possible to find the most complete expression of leaders’ dreams for their girl citizen-soldiers. The very first issue of the Rally contained a new rendering of the popular tune “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” under the heading “Girl Scout Camp Songs.”74 Far from lamenting a son’s departure for war, the Rally’s version joyously looked forward to the day when girls might be called to serve their country.75 “You needn’t think that we’re afraid of danger / We’ll even make fine soldiers if we may / We know there’ll be a day, When mothers will say / ‘I want to raise my girl to be a Girl Scout,’” the song proclaimed. The Camp Song section in the following issue offered an equally inspired tune about Scouts’ eagerness to shoulder their share of martial burdens:

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America, we Scouts are all for you, America, you’ll find us brave and true, Place your burdens on our shoulders, We are ready to do or die; America, we’re not the only ones, We know the rest will try, So, if you want some others, To take the place of our brothers, America, we’re prepared.76

The grown women who put the words of these songs into the mouths of adolescent girls did not, of course, really want their campers shipped off to the front. They did, however, fervently desire that their campers, their girls, would be given the chance to prove their mettle. And the best place to give girls this chance, they agreed, was in the landscape of summer camp.

Chapter 3

The Landscape of Camp


One must begin with landscape if one is to end with soul. When You Hike, 1930

W hen girls’ organizations were first

founded, camp, and indeed nature itself, was a casual affair. A leader who was so inclined took her girls for short hikes and nature walks, or “got up” a weekend excursion to a nearby farm or popular swimming hole. Leaders who lacked an affinity for the out-of-doors did none of these things, and their programs were judged to be none the worse for it. Camp and nature certainly had their places within the fledgling organizations, but the realities of recruiting volunteers, locating members, and raising money occupied the attention of most leaders. Summer camping trips were pleasant diversions, but were diversions nonetheless, an extra bonus for girls and leaders who had made it through a year of the real business of being a Girl Scout, Girl Pioneer, or Camp Fire Girl. As was suggested in the previous chapter, the Great War changed all that. Although seldom occupying more than two weeks of any particular girl’s experience, the camping program moved from the periphery to the rhetorical core of organizations’ self-definition. The popularity of wartime camps boosted membership rolls and brought girls’ organizations to the attention of the American public. The war’s legacy, however, was mixed. It was widely acknowledged that girls learned about pluck and patriotism at camp, but leadership also increasingly believed that the rigidity of their camps’ layout and programming had inadvertently encouraged an aura of militarism and autocracy. Thus, even as it elevated camping to a pivotal position in organizational programming, the war’s influence tainted camps’ natural landscape and subtly threatened the character of the campers themselves. This notion that the American landscape played a powerful role in forming the character of its inhabitants was ubiquitous in the first decades of the twentieth century. Directors of girls’ camps could cite no less a figure than 83

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former president Teddy Roosevelt himself to support their contention that the natural world could, for good or ill, affect the nature of humans. Thus, leaders were obliged to pay careful attention to the contours of their camps’ geography, lest campers be shaped by untoward influences.1 By the early 1920s, directors were convinced that they had to cast off the military trappings that had become emblematic of girls’ camping experience by redefining the physical space in which their camps were located. If they wanted to end with their girls’ souls, they would have to begin by redefining the landscape of camp.

Surveying the Landscape of Early Twentieth-Century America When the leaders of girls’ organizations looked around in the postwar years, they found a wide array of ideas about nature, wilderness, and the American landscape that they could use to craft a new, nonmilitary version of summer camp. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner put Americans on notice that the frontier, whose relentless western migration had become virtually synonymous with the nation’s identity, was now irrevocably closed. In the ensuing decades, Americans questioned what to do with a vast landscape that, if no longer technically a frontier, was still largely underused and uninhabited. The debate typically pitted proponents of conservation, a group that advocated utilitarian stewardship and was closely associated with Teddy Roosevelt, against John Muir, the Sierra Club, and other adherents of preservation. Each side claimed victories—the establishment of the National Forest Service for conservation, and the passage of the 1916 National Park Service Act for preservation. As historians point out, however, the ground-level results of both groups’ efforts, and especially the language with which they talked about the landscape, often looked and sounded remarkably similar.2 At a practical level, preservationists’ efforts—although ostensibly in opposition to the consumer exploitation of the land—often resulted in the solidification of a new “natural” economy grounded in the burgeoning tourist trade. Hundreds of miles of new rail lines and roads were built to accommodate the needs of holidaymakers and auto tourists who flocked to the lodges, camps, and resorts that now dotted the preserved landscape.3 While it is foolish to suggest that such developments had a comparable environmental impact to even the most conservatively managed mining and timber interests, it is true that preservationists, like their opposite numbers in conservation, tended to view the landscape through a highly anthropocentric lens. To many impassioned believers in preservation, their efforts represented nothing less

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than a bulwark against the relentless tide of commercialism and capitalism that profited from the destruction of the American wilderness. Such ideology held a particular appeal for middle-class women (and men inclined to Romantic sensibilities) who incorporated the preservation of nature into their existing mission to defend and preserve the soul of America itself.4 Mrs. Robert Burdette, president of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs, for example, believed that clubwomen were saving nature from “men to whose greedy souls Mount Sinai is only a stone quarry” and from others with “gang-saws for souls” who would willing turn “our world-famous Sequoias into planks and fencing worth so many dollars.”5 This idea, of men whose souls were so poisoned that they would happily reduce living nature to commercialized lifelessness, suggested its own opposite—women pledged to the defense of a landscape that embodied a soul. Yet it would be a mistake to suggest that all women interested in nature were driven by purely disinterested, noble motives. As mountaineers, or just hardy vacationers, women had been exploring the American wilderness for several generations.6 Women, as well as men, took advantage of the new parks, with their improved trail networks and rough shelters. In numbers that by turn delighted, amazed, and eventually troubled organizers, women began to join established hiking societies such as the Sierra Club and Appalachian Mountain Club.7 Women participated with so much enthusiasm that by 1930 several local branches of the Appalachian Mountain Club reported more women than men on their rolls, provoking the almost exclusively male leadership to declare a moratorium on new female members.8 While leaders were reluctant to discourage women’s enthusiasm, they did fear that a preponderance of women would discourage male participation; they also assumed that women joined their clubs primarily as a way to meet men. Women, however, seemed to be genuinely interested in hiking, whether or not men were included in the party. Horace Albright, director of the National Park Service, offered confirmation that women were not simply joining clubs for a social experience. In his 1928 text, Oh, Ranger! which chronicled his experiences in the Park Service, Albright observed that while “[t]ramping over the park trails one is struck by the great number of women making the trail trips alone.” These women were encouraged, Albright believed, by the fact that they were “safe as they would be in their homes” and so flocked to the parks in such volume that they outnumbered the men.9 Although women apparently felt safe while hiking, Albright, it seems, did not feel particularly safe around these women hikers. “It is no longer a rare occurrence for women to steal cars

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from people who have befriended them, and these days we hear of women hikers using guns or knives in taking possession of cars and their contents,” he warned his readers. There is no evidence to support Albright’s contention that gangs of armed female hikers perpetrated a rash of carjackings in Yosemite, so what exactly was he worried about? Albright’s fear of women in the wilderness seemed to grow in direct proportion to the comfort women experienced there. I do not bring up Albright’s text to suggest that camp directors advocated that their girls adopt a life of crime as wilderness carjackers, but rather to show just how comfortable women had become in the wilderness by the time directors were refashioning their camps. Women were comfortable in nature largely because they viewed the landscape as a balanced environment that could both enhance a reverent aesthetic and serve as a test of fortitude. To men such as Albright who saw nature as a proving ground of manliness and mastery, it was a small leap of logic to assume that women who thrived there might emulate masculine behavior, including armed violence. Many women, however, felt that they could incorporate a gentle nature of preservation and soul-inspiring landscapes with a rugged wilderness that they were competent enough to travel in without conquering. In constructing such a balanced perspective, these women were drawing on a time-honored tradition in American cultural history. Most often invoked in the form of the “middle landscape,” the notion of a “middle state between primitive and overly refined civilization,” the American landscape had long called forth an image of idyllic balance.10 Historians have located the middle-landscape ideal in many corners of the world inhabited by early twentieth-century camp directors from college campuses and chautauquas to world’s fairs and zoos, and even the suburbs that they increasingly called home.11 Camp directors found the concept of the middle landscape useful not only for its perfect balance, but also because it was closely associated with the lessons of self-improvement and uplift deemed crucial to children’s development.12 Like Jeffersonian yeoman farmers who embodied the harmonious temperance of the landscape they tilled, youngsters who dwelt in the nature of summer camp imbibed the lessons inherent to landscape. Camp directors drew on yet another tradition of the American landscape, a tradition that had become a much anticipated part of many middleclass people’s lives, the summer vacation. It may seem obvious that directors’ musings about camp would be informed by their experience of summer vacation, but camps were not meant to be mere recreation facilities—they were supposed to be character-building institutions. Camp directors understood, for

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example, that in answering the call to “See America First,” vacationers were not only engaging in a pleasurable commercial outing, but also offering proof of their patriotism.13 “Hometown Weeks,” which encouraged urban New Englanders to spend their holidays pitching in with the milking and other chores at picturesque farms, were an ersatz variant of the Country Life movement that promoted more permanent migration to the increasingly depopulated northeastern countryside. The success of such trips depended as much on their recreational appeal as on the benefits that vacationers were meant to acquire via their participation in the mythic resurrection of colonial New England.14 Recreational trips into a landscape that had the power to confer patriotic credentials and contribute to the restoration of America’s pioneer heritage held broad appeal for directors who wanted their own camps to achieve similar feats. When, in the years following the conclusion of the Great War, camp directors surveyed the American landscape looking for a model from which to mold their camps, they beheld an attractive sight. They saw a landscape whose appreciation and preservation constituted an act of moral fortitude. Yet it was the same landscape where a girl could test her mettle and prove her resourcefulness and grit. At the same time, this aesthetic and soulful, but rugged, landscape was familiar enough to be comfortable and homey. No single definition of the American landscape offered directors all they needed to construct their camps, and so they incorporated varied, and at times mutually exclusive, elements into an eclectic mix of their very own. The fact that directors relied on so many ideas present in the larger culture did not mean that they approached the landscape of camp empty handed. They had, after all, been running camps of various sorts for a decade, and although most war influences had to be abandoned, directors had gained some useful expertise. While they were developing preferences for how the new natural landscape of camp should look, they were also forming opinions about the nature of the campers they had supervised over the years. And so when the Girl Scouts decided it was time to begin a sustained effort to dismantle war camps and create a new camp program, they looked at both the nature of the landscape and the nature of girls themselves.

A

t its May 1923 meeting, the National Camp Committee recommended that its secretary, Louise M. Price, be sent into the field to evaluate the state of Girl Scout camping. The committee charged Price with a mission of reconnaissance and guidance. She was to “find out exactly what was being done” at the local level, assess directors’ needs, and then discuss with them “the aims and policies of the National Camp Committee.” Price began her

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four-month tour at Camp Andree Clark, Scouting’s flagship training center located at Briarcliff Manor, thirty miles up the Hudson River from National Headquarters in New York City. From June 4 to October 6, Price visited two dozen camps in ten states from Connecticut to Colorado before wrapping up her trip at the National Camp Conference held at Camp Andree.15 Although she had recently been appointed secretary of the Camp Department, the twenty-eight-year-old Price had not herself been a director at the time she set out on her official mission to evaluate camps nationwide.16 Despite her relative lack of experience, she did have very particular ideas about how camps should be run—opinions she did not hesitate to share with the directors she met. Her seriousness and “frank criticisms” appear to have stemmed more from naïveté than mean spirits (she occasionally hopped off the train to make unscheduled stops at camps along her route, a habit that most likely did not endear her to directors), but nonetheless she often found herself at odds with the directors she was supposed to be helping. “Undoubtedly I have missed some very good things which the directors themselves might think most important,” Price admitted in retrospect, but these “very good things” were not the ones she herself considered most important. The aspects of Girl Scout camping to which Louise Price gave the most attention can be found in a list of queries she made in order to systematize her task of evaluating camps. Unsurprisingly, one of the questions Price asked was “whether or not we were military or non-military in layout and rigidity and stress of program.” She included a few practical questions about sanitation and safety on her list, but mostly it was filled with questions about the landscape of camp and how directors’ use of the landscape benefited the girls. Specifically, Price asked herself “whether or not our camps are located in beautiful woodsy natural surroundings and whether they make the best possible use of their sites.”17 Camp Fawn Brook in Marlboro, Connecticut, “a very attractive small camp . . . just outside Hartford,” fulfilled her expectations. “It is located on a lovely hillside looking out across a small brook (which winds its way round into a dammed-up swim pool) and looks out toward perfectly gorgeous woods,” she reported admiringly.18 An excellent location was not, Price hastened to explain, simply a matter of aesthetics, but had profound ramifications for the success of the camping program. “Personally, I do not think too much can be said in favor of locating our camps where our girls will be actually filled with wonder at the impressive beauty of nature . . . there is a certain something, a sort of expanse of soul, which comes from such experiences.”19 Small wonder then that Price was disgruntled when she felt that local directors squandered the natural beauty available to them.

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As inspiring as a camp’s landscape could be, it was unfortunately possible for an unwitting director to mar it in a variety of ways. Some directors failed to repent of the “formal layout” that had characterized war camps. Just down the road from the “impressive beauty” of Camp Fawn Brook, the director of Gales Ferry Camp had arranged her tents in “two straight rows facing each other about twenty feet apart” despite having a “large beautiful field with some trees and a lovely sloping hillside.” Price liked the camp’s staff and admired the program’s “high standards,” yet she ultimately judged the camp to be “much handicapped” by its physical arrangement.20 Thus two camps located in virtually the same geographic environment ended up inhabiting vastly different landscapes; one encouraged an expanse of the soul, the other was handicapped. Lingering militarism was not the only untoward influence that had the power to compromise a camp’s natural landscape. “Some of our camps are very beautifully located with trees and natural surroundings an inspiration to the campers,” Price reported. “Others approach too nearly the country boarding house type of camp and are given to ‘front lawns’ instead of woods.”21 Occasionally, directors further spoiled their camps’ already imperfect setting by importing too many conveniences from home. For example, Price was generally pleased with the staff at Camp Proctor, located in California, Ohio, but was “sorry they had put in electric lights because the camp is so civilized anyway.” “It really needs uncivilizing,” she concluded.22 Price conceded that most directors who ran “overly civilized” camps did so because they thought they were being responsive to the needs of their girls. While reviewing an “unrecognized” camp at Manomet, Massachusetts, in the company of Mrs. Storrow, director of the Girl Scout’s National Training Camp at Long Pond, Price confronted just such a situation. The two women could not find the troop itself but saw “the big house [with] a lovely lawn and hammocks swinging in the breeze, where they were staying.” “This is a very nice type of house party outing which many captains throughout the country who do not have any real knowledge or liking for the out of doors mistake for a camping trip,” Price lamented.23 The girls involved in this and similar camps might be having “a good time,” she conceded, but they were not having “particularly a Scouting time.”24 The fact that these two experiences were not synonymous was at the heart of Price’s criticisms of the camps she visited. Directors who insisted on maintaining military influences or flirted with “civilized” practices undermined the benefits of even the most inspiring landscapes, at least according to Louise Price and the National Camp

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Committee, which had authorized her travels. Mrs. Mundy, director of the Patrol Leaders Camp in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, had an incomparably beautiful site for her camp but had compromised it by her attachment to both militarism and civilization. She clashed with Price on the issue of military drill—“Mrs. Mundy feels it is very much worth emphasizing”—an activity that literally trampled down her camp’s natural landscape on a daily basis. Nor was Mrs. Mundy cognizant of her camps’ nocturnal charms. “I personally, would have liked the campfires better out of doors as they have a perfectly beautiful place to see the stars, and I have a feeling that we should do as much as possible out of doors,” Price commented; however, “this camp has developed a tradition about campfire indoors.” When directors foreswore such unfortunate traditions, alternative benefits born of the camp’s landscape were able to assert themselves. At Camp Low in Dunstable, Massachusetts, Price had nothing but praise for both the physical arrangement and program direction of Miss Fernald. “It is as beautiful and non-military a camp as I saw anywhere,” Price raved, occupying a “perfectly charming place” and enhanced by a “delightful arrangement” of the site. Miss Fernald’s respect for the natural beauty of her camp made the lessons inherent to the landscape accessible to the girls. It was at Camp Low that Louise Price witnessed her “first real outdoor game which takes people out over the hills and dales.”25 A carefully preserved natural landscape devoid of militarism and the excesses of civilization could not help but draw girls into it, and once they were there, they could truly learn the lessons that military camps had tried, but failed, to convey. “We are also trying to teach real patriotism which means an understanding of the country itself,” Price wrote. “Our outdoor program takes girls out across the land itself so that they learn to know the rocks and rills and to love the land.” This, Price argued, developed a “real patriotism” in girls that was preferable to the “flag waving one hundred percent” kind.26 A well-arranged landscape, by virtue of the power inherent in the land, could help girls forsake superficial patriotism and replaced it with real devotion. A girl willing to struggle over the “rocks and rills” of her camp’s landscape would come to truly know and love the land and, in the process, imbibe the lessons it contained. The lessons that awaited girls once they ventured into a properly situated landscape were as varied as the geography in which camps were located, because the lessons were intimately tied to the land itself. Girls who attended the training camp on Hungry Jack Lake in northern Minnesota, for example, benefited from excellent forestry instruction and “canoe trips

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that . . . were romantic enough to thrill any red-blooded American.”27 But the true spirit of this camp was not simply contained in the lessons that grew naturally from its “woodsey atmosphere”; it was called forth by an inchoate mixture of the landscape’s history and heritage. The girls at Hungry Jack Lake, Price noted with approval, had an abundance of good humor that helped them “over many a hard road . . . much the same way that Paul Bunyan’s yarns used to take the edge off the loggers’ hard moments.” Thus an ideal camp was capable of conveying general lessons in patriotism as well as more regionally specific lessons that depended on its particular location. Together these lessons constituted the soul of the landscape. At the end of her four-month tour, Louise Price was able to exclaim that she had “spent one of the most delightful and interesting summers of my life!” She had also, in the words of a 1966 retrospective on Girl Scout camping, “developed our first camping standards” for the movement.28 For the most part, local directors had been sympathetic to her critique that war camps had become rigid and overly civilized at the expense of natural beauty, and they worked hard to create camps that would engender the “expanse of the soul” that Price prized so highly.

The Legacy of “Natural” Architecture When directors set about the task of building camps, from clearing fields to constructing cabins to designing programs, they did so against the backdrop of a landscape that was animate in so many ways. It was not only campers who were capable of sensing the harmony and balance emanating from a properly ordered landscape, animals, and even buildings, knew if directors had built their camps in such a way as to respect the innate qualities of a particular landscape. Everything within a camp’s boundaries was part of an organic whole—alive with preferences and possibilities drawn from the essence of the landscape itself. War camps had become lifeless and overly civilized outposts, thoughtlessly plunked down onto a static environment that had been bent to the will of well-meaning, but nonetheless rigid, directors. The new camps were meant be alive, not so much occupying as interacting with a landscape from which clues for its preferred arrangement would “spring naturally.” Girls’ organizations wanted to portray a camp’s environment as natural because it was in this natural landscape, they claimed, that they would be able to discover the uncorrupted nature of girls. National leaders of the camping movement, mindful of the criticism they had received for attempting to

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turn girls into soldiers, now argued that their camps facilitated the growth of girls into what they naturally were. When a director carefully choreographed her camp’s natural environment, she, in effect, assembled a living stage composed of a landscape and buildings upon which girls could act out the programs and pageants that were inherent to the setting. The most perspicacious director was ever alert for the clues about a camp’s natural arrangement, because if she began by fashioning the correct landscape, she was guaranteed to end by influencing girls’ souls. “Our aim is to bring our girls as close to nature and simple living as possible,” proclaimed Louise Price, and the best way to achieve this was for “girls to sleep under the stars.” Directors who were personally responsible for the safety and comfort of campers were, however, less sanguine than Price about the prospect of hundreds of youngsters sleeping outside unprotected from the elements. Practical concerns trumped idealism in this case, causing Price to concede, in the very next sentence, that the “next compromise with civilization is a tent.”29 But even this compromise proved inadequate for directors, especially those who returned to the same grounds each summer and longed for more permanent, albeit more “civilized,” shelters for their campers. Tents may have been “part of the ‘adventure’ for which the girls come to camp,” but directors often viewed them as an unnecessary and undesirable burden.30 Twice a season, every season, a director had to supervise the setup and breakdown of all her camp’s tents. Well in advance of a camp’s opening, the wooden platforms and yards of heavy canvas had to be dragged from winter storage, mended, cleaned, and aired out. Since most organizations recommended a maximum of four girls per tent (although necessity often dictated that camps put their two-person tents to use) even relatively small camps required large numbers of tents. Directors rarely asked their staff to provide this hard physical labor, and that meant the added expense of hiring hands before the season had even begun, only to repeat the process in reverse at the summer’s end. And so despite girls’ sense of adventure and national leaders’ concern about “compromising with civilization,” local directors opted to abandon tents in favor of more “civilized” shelters. “I hope it won’t be too far in the future before all the tents will be replaced by this rustic cabin,” read the caption beneath the drawing of a log cabin in The Fire Fly, a mimeographed publication of the Minneapolis–St. Paul Camp Fire Girls.31 It was not only the labor inherent to tents that convinced local directors to change the way they sheltered girls at camp. As camping grew in popularity and took its place as an established part of the yearly program, directors

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became more interested in securing permanent sites for their camps. Girls and adult staff alike developed strong loyalties to their particular summer camp, and if local councils wanted to ensure that the site would be available in perpetuity, they had to consider purchasing it, instead of relying on the goodwill of a landlord. Once land was purchased, ties of affection and loyalty became entangled with financial responsibilities, compelling even the most sentimental directors to view the landscape of camp from a more pragmatic perspective. The construction of cabins, for example, which Louise Price had labeled a “less desirable development,” became capital improvements in the eyes of local officials eager to enhance the value of their property. They were now the potential landlords, able to generate income by leasing their camps to groups who wished to use them in the off-season. A few “rustic” cabins might make the property more “civilized,” but they also made it more profitable. Similar to tourists and proprietors of tourist destinations, girls’ organizations’ retreat from “civilization” had not severed their ties to a consumer society—it had simply reconfigured them. Acknowledging the financial benefits of land ownership, national boards and camp committees who wanted to encourage local fiscal responsibility quickly relented in the matter of cabin construction. However, in an effort to manage the compromise that national leaders believed to be inherent to the construction of cabins, they attempted to exert influence on the type of architecture that found its way onto the camp landscape. In 1924, just a year after pronouncing cabins “undesirable,” Louise Price sent a letter to local camp directors asking them to submit blueprints of “particularly artistic and attractive rustic or log cabin buildings” for the file she was assembling.32 Over the following decade, the Girl Scouts’ National Camp Committee compiled a collection of articles on camp architecture and blueprints for a variety of camp buildings that local councils were invited to review for two weeks, before returning them to the national office. An analysis of these articles and blueprints reveals how national camp officials believed they could construct an acceptable compromise with civilization in the form of the buildings that would house their girls. From sleeping under the stars, to scattering tents among stands of trees, to the official approval of rustic cabins as camp shelters, national leaders had come a long way in their compromise with civilization and they knew it. The success of directors’ endeavors to bring campers “as close to nature and simple living as possible,” while insisting on comfort, convenience, and cost-effectiveness, hinged on their ability to shape camp architecture to their own design. Directors did not often literally redesign

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buildings, but they did pay careful attention to constructing the meaning of camp architecture. Building materials had to be defined as “natural” and appropriate to their particular camp environment; the harsh “overly-civilized” edges of camp buildings had to be planed smooth so they would blend harmoniously into the contours of the “natural” landscape. Moreover, leaders felt the need to render both the buildings and the landscape itself animate, alive with feelings and preferences that dictated the design of camp architecture. In this way leaders were free to imagine that they were not creating building designs, but rather responding to a set of ideals that were intrinsic to the landscape itself. It was, in short, a lot of work to rhetorically construct the appropriate camp buildings. Fortunately for directors, there existed a century-old tradition in American architecture that provided them with workable blueprints to guide their labors. The progenitor of the architectural style that camp directors found most useful was Andrew Jackson Downing, standard-bearer of nineteenthcentury American architecture and founder of the “natural style.”33 Downing, who had first put forth his ideas about architecture and landscape design in antebellum America, was still widely influential in the early twentieth century, more than six decades after his premature death.34 Camp directors found Downing’s natural style of architecture so attractive because he claimed it to be just that, natural. Downing’s cottages, the architectural design for which he was best known, conformed to what he believed were the dictates of the natural world and thus were able to blend into nature’s beauty. Builders of residential cottages at the Chautauqua Institute, for example, heeded Downing’s admonition to “avoid colors nature avoids” and painted their buildings brown and gray, the better to situate them unobtrusively within the natural environment.35 According to Downing, an architect who observed the rules that originated in nature could create buildings that were in harmony with their natural setting, an idea that held obvious appeal for camp directors. The true promise of Downing’s natural style of architecture, however, was even grander than a guarantee that buildings could be artistically situated within the landscape. After all, a perceived need to blend one object into another presupposes that they did not fit well together in the first place. A country cottage that blended into the landscape by virtue of mirroring nature’s palette was still a cottage that, if scraped free of its paint, might be viewed as an intrusion. Downing termed his architectural style “natural” not because buildings constructed according to its specifications looked natural, but because he believed that they actually were natural at a fundamental

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level. Downing arrived at this conclusion by following a path many Americans had traveled before him, that of defining the natural in opposition to the man-made. In a passage similar to dozens of others in his writings, Downing described a country cottage of his design: “The greatest charm of this residence . . . will be the novelty and contrast experienced in coming directly from the highly artificial and populous city, only a couple of miles distant, to its quiet, secluded shades, full of wildness, only sufficiently subdued by art to heighten its natural beauty.”36 Natural beauty was contrasted with urban noise and crowds, art with the artificial. Downing’s efforts to seamlessly combine a cozy architectural design with the “wildness” of an easily accessible natural surrounding, and to set this pastoral combination in opposition to the artifice of the city, was perfectly suited to directors’ agenda for the landscape of their camps. The natural style of architecture promised that buildings could be completely subsumed into the natural, leaving all traces of the pernicious effects of civilization behind. Downing was not the first American to propose such ideas, and he was not the last, which made it easy for the Girl Scout’s National Camp Committee to top up its collection of articles on camp architecture with the work of their contemporaries. Judging from the enthusiastic marginalia, underlining, and multiple exclamation points penciled into one article, committee members found the work of Philip N. Youtz particularly inspiring. Youtz, director of the Brooklyn Museum and member of the American Institute of Architects, echoed many of Downing’s architectural preoccupations but adapted them to what he considered the pressing issues of his own times. Downing, writing in the 1840s, had worried that the American frontier was disappearing, necessitating the development of cottages that provided an oasis of “wildness” to harried urban dwellers. By the 1930s, there was no denying the demise of the frontier. To men such as Youtz, the fact that the frontier was gone made it all the more important that traditions born in frontier times not be forsaken. To women on the Girl Scout’s National Camp Committee, such a position was ideal because a properly modified version of the pioneer cabin proved to be just the right form of camp architecture. Although Youtz pursued many interests over the course of a long career—his obituary in Architectural Forum referred to him as “architect, inventor and educator”—the article that generated so much interest from the national committee was specifically about “camp buildings and equipment.”37 For Youtz, camp architecture held the greatest promise of restoring valuable lessons of pioneer heritage to modern Americans. “The traditions

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of camp architecture in America begin in remote Indian days [and] develop through nearly three centuries of frontier life” until they arrive at a time when the “last remaining patches of wilderness” has been settled, Youtz wrote. This long tradition conferred on contemporary architects an impressive array of tools with which to shape camp buildings. “[R]esourceful men with keen axes” had “bequeathed to the camp architect a rich store of shrewd handicraft methods,” Youtz proclaimed.38 Yet buildings that displayed these quintessential American techniques were rarely built. The problem was not, the architect warned, one that his profession alone could solve. The reason why the accumulated experience of frontier builders could not “be directly applied to contemporary camps [was] because most campers come, not from rude frontier cabins, but from homes which pamper them with steam heat,” Youtz observed. These campers, he lamented, “must be protected from the rigors of the out-of-doors,” a task certainly not in keeping with the tenets of frontier architecture. Yet if campers could somehow be trained not simply to withstand but to thrive among the “rigors of the outof-doors” then camp buildings would further contribute to their well-being. “Some buildings have a way of coddling us until we can hardly step out on the soft, inviting ground after a rain without catching cold,” but “a good camp building will promote health,” Youtz concluded, voicing one of the many sentiments that provoked vigorous underlining from a committee member. Camp leaders were so enthusiastic about Youtz’s work because it dovetailed so closely with their own. He offered plans for cabins that promised to rekindle the physical prowess associated with the lost frontier; leaders yearned to create campers who could reap the benefits of such buildings. Crucial though it was, good physical health was not the only, or even the most important, benefit that accrued to campers who were tough enough to live in the correct type of camp buildings. Like directors who believed the proper landscape would lead to the development of the soul, Youtz felt that the right buildings would benefit the mind and imagination, as well as the physique. These benefits were, of course, contingent on the observance of certain architectural guidelines. If a camper is “to be on good terms with the folk out-of-doors they must put up buildings made of rough natural materials.”39 Why was this so? Youtz rhetorically quizzed his readers. Because nothing “offends the taste of wild folk such as owls and raccoons and deer as much as new spic and span suburban cottages put up in the middle of the woods,” he answered.40 Lest campers believe that it was only “wild folk” that suffered when the laws of natural architecture were violated, Youtz reminded his readers that once they entered nature, they too were bound by

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the same aesthetic conventions. “Humans as well as wild folk resent being reminded of civilization when they are at camp,” he concluded. For Youtz, and the camp directors who so admired his work, humans resented being reminded of civilization while at camp because they went there to find the natural, and that meant they were seeking a balance. Youtz’s natural camp buildings provided secure shelter but did not overprotect humans from the natural elements. It was imperative, Youtz believed, that campers adopt this attitude. “Camping isn’t an imitation of urban life without its conveniences. Camping isn’t merely roughing it to see how many hardships one can stand. Camping is the art of living well and comfortably in the out-of-doors.”41 Youtz’s architecture removed the roughness from outdoor living without descending to coddling because its compromises mirrored those found in a balanced landscape. Nature was not the opposite of civilization; it was a balance between an uncomfortable and inhospitable wildness and an overly accommodating civilization. Youtz’s camp buildings worked, he claimed, because they led “the imagination back to the forest and ledgestone architecture of nature.”42 Camp leaders admired architects such as Youtz because they found a way to negate the potential threat inherent to civilized camp buildings while still providing designs for shelters that brought girls “close to nature and simple living.”

Creating a Legacy of Their Own: Indigenous Architecture As helpful as the precepts of natural architecture were, camp directors found that they could improve upon them by introducing another concept that became central to their understanding of good camp architecture. Directors, like many of their contemporaries involved in regional planning, landscape design, and commercial tourism, were smitten with a concept they referred to as the “indigenous.” Almost never concisely defined, indigenous described the physical attributes and natural resources native to a particular region. The term’s malleability allowed it to assume a near mythic power as directors employed it to describe a long list of items central to the life of their camps. Cabins, plants, songs, pageants, programs, and even attitudes became linked to indigenous landscapes. Ironically, the more firmly the indigenous was rooted in a sense of place, the more flexible and adaptable it became in relationship to time. The indigenous existed beyond the confines of historical time, allowing campers not only to reap the benefits of the nature beneath their feet, but also to profit from the power of a landscape that, like the legendary Brigadoon, would rise up from the past.

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It was therefore incumbent upon directors to develop both a general feeling for the natural landscape and a more particular sense of the indigenous that could provide them with the finer details and local color that truly brought a landscape to life. As Louise Price had noted at Hungry Jack Lake, a properly constructed landscape would engender the resurgence of traits that had been lost to contemporary inhabitants. At some level, the landscape retained, and was ready to confer upon worthy campers, atavistic powers that had been lying dormant for generations. If a camp’s landscape could be built, with all its natural harmonies and all its indigenous qualities intact, then the girls who dwelt there would surely benefit. The path to indigenous architecture at girls’ camps began by following the principles set forth in natural architecture. Even the lowliest buildings found on a camp’s landscape were deemed more pleasing if they blended into their environment.43 Referring to the new latrines that had been installed that day, a staff member at a suburban Philadelphia Girl Scout camp recorded the following opinion in her diary: “[S]tain looks better in the woods than paint.”44 The YWCA’s Girl Reserve Manual recommended that buildings great and small as well as all camp accessories reflect the “natural” as much as possible.45 Camp bulletin boards, for example, looked better if they were “covered with green burlap and decorated with fresh leaves,” the manual announced.46 Yet to leaders of girls’ camps, blending into nature did not mean blending into just any nature, but rather into the specific indigenous nature that constituted a camp’s surroundings. A story in Sun Up: Maine’s Own Magazine advertising the charms of a Camp Fire Girl camp bragged that each “bungalow has been built to fit its particular surroundings and use, giving a unique and wood-like appearance.”47 Indigenous architecture stipulated that in addition to striking a balance between civilization and nature, buildings had to vary according to their particular geographic locale. “Each area of the country has its own basic type of architecture and the design of Girl Scout buildings should be in harmony not only with the natural landscape but with the general architectural plan of the locality,” advised a Scout manual on camp construction.48 Camp directors achieved this harmony via the two basic tenets of indigenous architecture. First, savvy camp directors had to be mindful of the mundane challenges presented by the local environment. Summer thunderstorms and widely fluctuating daily temperatures, as well as the insects and rodents that inevitably plagued camps, all figured into the calculus of indigenous architecture. In the Southwest and California, open sleeping shelters that allowed for cooling breezes, but were equipped with

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canvas flaps that could be lowered in the event of a sudden storm were recommended. In northern Minnesota lake country, local councils pooled resources to purchase mosquito netting in bulk, and admonished each other about the necessity of steeply pitched roofs that protected buildings from extensive winter snowfall. Directors of camps in Palisades Interstate Park just north of New York City were advised that buildings be reinforced with tin to thwart the raccoons that shared camp facilities. However, not all the specifications designed to adapt buildings to the local environment had their roots in such practical matters. Equally important to many directors was the animate nature of the local environment itself. The indigenous environment invested even inanimate structures such as cabins with a sense of belonging, and if camp architecture did not reflect this vital force, then buildings would neither house the girls properly nor promote harmony. “A Maine Woods log cabin would not feel ‘at home’ in Arizona nor would an adobe building be in harmony with its natural surroundings among the lakes of Minnesota,” warned a Girl Scout publication on camp architecture.49 Directors were therefore urged to consider the “harmony of surroundings” while they managed the more prosaic demands of dependability and balanced budgets. Abbie Graham, author of The Girls’ Camp and prominent YWCA leader, advised camp directors to observe the local community and adopt the styles and decorative themes that best reflected the indigenous environment. While touring camps in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Graham had been impressed by a dining hall decorated with the “peculiarly fascinating” designs and “magic emblems common to the area.”50 Although not all directors could hope to have camps located in regions as richly evocative as “Pennsylvania Dutch country,” she acknowledged, a careful observer could always find something appropriate in the indigenous environment. Thus Graham suggested that camps located in “cow country,” for example, could use “cattle brands” as ornamental motifs on cabins. Important as it was for camp buildings to reflect the indigenous, it was crucial that directors chose the correct form of the indigenous as their guiding principle. “Architecture of buildings should be chosen to conform to the type built by early settlers of the country in which the camp is situated,” proclaimed the National Camp Committee of the Girl Scouts.51 National leaders suggested that local councils conduct a study of older houses in an area, “especially those of the pioneer era” in order to find useful ideas to incorporate into camp architecture. In other words, the proper template for camp buildings was not necessarily the farm on the next property or the type

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of architecture currently prevalent in the township, but rather those buildings that recalled what directors referred to as “the pioneer past.” A series of photographs from a file of architectural plans compiled by the Girl Scout’s National Camp Committee reveal how the ahistorical powers of the indigenous could provide the perfect blueprint for camp buildings.52 The photos, which depict several unacceptable choices before presenting the perfect model for a girl’s cabin, led local camp directors through an architectural variation of Goldilocks’s dilemma. The first cabins pictured included too many of the unwanted trappings of civilization. The photos that followed showed cabins that, while “natural,” were crudely appointed and therefore “unsuitable” for campers. Finally, directors paging through the packet found photos of cabins that were just right. The structures, neither too civilized nor too wild, recalled the pioneer era of the indigenous environment. In the first series of photographs, camp directors were presented with interior and exterior views of sectional “demountable” housing developed by the Architectural Research Division of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Warned that these cabins were “not suitable for camp cabins in their present design,” directors were instead invited to view them as “ideas of how pre-fabricated material can be used in the construction of camp cabins.” Obviously, cabins made of “termite-proof material” complete with insulation and easy-to-clean linoleum floors would be a boon to camp directors. These features, along with the demountable housing’s mobility and economy, were presented as assets a director could safely make use of as long as she did not include the unacceptable parts of the cabin’s design. The unacceptable features of this structure were legion if we recall the criterion established by Philip Youtz, whose article “Camp Buildings and Equipment” was also included in the packet of materials circulated to local camp directors. The boxy and starkly white structure that contrasted sharply with the background foliage certainly did not “belong to its natural surroundings.” One might even conclude that such buildings resembled the “spic and span suburban cottages” that Youtz believed “offend[ed] the taste of the wild folk.” But it was not merely the wild folk that were ill served by such a cabin; girls could not hope to “be on good terms” with the outdoors either, if they dwelt in such a structure. “A building is a specialized tool for performing some particular social function,” wrote Youtz, and the “particular social function” directors hoped to perform at camp was reconnecting girls with their indigenous pioneer heritage—a task that could certainly not be achieved in these prefabricated cabins.

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Figure 10. Figures 10–13 show photographs taken by Dorothy J. MacLean of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, included in a folder the national Girl Scout camp committee had assembled to instruct local councils on the proper construction of camp buildings. This image shows a comfortably modern, but aesthetically unappealing, option.

A photo of the cabin’s interior provides even more information about why such housing was inappropriate for campers. “This interior is included to show the floors, walls and window openings and is not intended to suggest such ‘de luxe’ furnishings for Girl Scout cabins,” directors were cautioned.53 The deluxe furnishings included a full-sized couch, matching cabinets, curtains, potted plants, and a pair of framed prints hanging on the wall. These furnishings certainly were incongruous with the recommended simplicity of girls’ cabins, yet furniture was optional and camp directors could have chosen the floors, walls, and window openings without the additional items. Or could they have? There are several other items in the photograph that cannot be considered “de luxe” but were nonetheless symbolic of what was wrong with the interior of this cabin. A copy of Glamour lay on top of a stack of magazines. In the room there is a portable radio, a device often vilified by leaders of

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Figure 11. The trailer’s interior reveals some untoward modern influences, including ashtrays, a radio, and Glamour magazine.

girls’ organizations for exposing youngsters to jazz. There are matches, cigarettes, and four ashtrays scattered around. Leaders of the camping movement saw the cabin’s deluxe accessories as inextricably bound up with these other less deluxe but more pernicious aspects of the civilization they wished to leave behind. After viewing photos of the unacceptably civilized structures, a director was presented with buildings that had benefited too little from modern improvements. “In sharp contrast to the very modern pre-fabricated buildings” the following pages depicted homes “used by families in the Tennessee mountains,” according to the guide that accompanied the photographs.54 Although these log cabins with wide gaps in the walls and rough wooden shingles were also deemed “not suitable for camp buildings,” they did have something to offer. The buildings, we are told, “illustrate some of the basic features of pioneer cabins of the Mid-South.” These dilapidated cabins served as a model, albeit a flawed one, of indigenous architecture. Some of the “finest and most effective camp buildings are designed to follow the basic architectural pattern of the

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Figure 12. This cabin, though unacceptably rustic, was meant to show off some of the desirable pioneer features popular in the mid-South.

locality, particularly in regard to the pioneer era,” the guide announced. Camp directors were asked to look past the crumbling structure and see the elements of the indigenous that they could use in their own buildings. If directors could not quite figure out for themselves how to combine the benefits of the modern and pioneer eras into an appropriate indigenous

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Figure 13. A cabin showing the perfect compromise of modern convenience and indigenous appeal.

building for their camps, the following set of photos provided examples of hybrid buildings that were just right. The exterior of the structure retained some of the rustic log cabin appearance of the pioneer cabin, including wooden shingles and a stone chimney. However, the cabin was larger and more spacious, with several windows and logs that were cleanly cut and tightly fitted. To the women of the camping committee who put the photo album together, this cabin represented contemporary architectural skill used in the service of the pioneer spirit. The unsuitable civilized model had bequeathed its numerous sun-filled windows, ventilation system, and electric lighting, while the rustic charm of the pioneer cabin remained visible in broad-plank wooden flooring, plain wood walls, and exposed ceiling beams. Gone were the deluxe furnishings of the modern-looking Tennessee Valley Authority housing, and with them those social ills symbolized by jazz, cigarettes, and fashion magazines. This model represented what was best of the indigenous Tennessee mountain cabins while rectifying their problems.

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The Girl Scouts’ national committee paid so much attention to the design of camp buildings not only for the sake of creating a perfect physical plant, but also for the more metaphysical lessons that could be learned in such an environment. In Philip Youtz’s words, such buildings were crucial elements of a camp’s landscape because they were capable of leading “the imagination back to the forest.” Well-constructed camp buildings allowed girls’ imagination to interact directly with their environment and gave them an unmediated experience of indigenous nature. Camp directors thought of camp architecture as part of a nature stage—distinct from culture and disconnected from a linear sense of history—upon which girls could gain access to both indigenous nature and their own natures. Once the stage was set, girls could both participate in and help to shape the programs and pageants that connected them to the soul of the landscape. The Indigenous Program A camp, like a person, must express its own personality if it is to be interesting; it must develop its own genius. It has to take account of the possibilities inherent in its setting, indigenous to its culture. —Abbie Graham, The Girls’ Camp, 1933

The indigenous program as envisioned by Abbie Graham and other camp directors was a concept that defied strict definition. A director who followed an indigenous program might take advantage of a camp’s lake by scheduling water sports instead of clearing the wildflowers from a meadow to create a tennis court. Girls who participated in the indigenous program staged pageants whose characters were Indians or pioneers purportedly native to the camp’s locale, and chose stargazing over listening to the radio as their evening activity. Sometimes directors simply defined the indigenous program as “leaving town things to town and camp things to camp.” The common element that rendered all such pastimes “indigenous” was camp leaders’ belief that these activities would, if properly guided and executed, give their girls more direct access to the meaning imbedded in the local environment. The indigenous program—be it nature study, arts and crafts, or pageantry—allowed a camp to “express its own personality” and “develop its own genius,” and, if all went well, called forth similar developments in the campers themselves.55 Seizing the indigenous potential that was intrinsic to any geographic setting was the task of directors, who were sometimes thwarted by both their girls’ misgivings and their own inexperience. The power of indigenous nature was strong—it wanted to express itself—but nonetheless its fullest

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realization required campers who were receptive to its lessons, and leaders who were willing to facilitate them. Occasionally, supervisory visits to camps revealed groups of girls who did not fully appreciate the indigenous and leaders who did not provide them with the means to do so. The review of a less-than-desirable camp inhabited by a troop from Newark, New Jersey, for example, caused the Girl Scout’s National Camp Committee to conclude that “camp activities frequently reflect the kind of town conducting the camp.” The Newark girls “chose baseball over indigenous activities,” lamented the National Camp Committee, and “did not appreciate the value of pioneering.” The committee agreed that the national office would be forced to redouble its own efforts to encourage the creation of a “‘camp-y’ camp— not schools or playgrounds transferred to the woods.”56 To the national committee, Newark’s urban “nature” had followed its native daughters to camp because local troop leaders did not know better than to allow girls to bring their city preferences with them. Newark Girl Scouts were unable to reap the benefits of the local environment because their leaders had allowed an urban miasma to permeate the camp’s indigenous atmosphere. The good news for camp directors who were sympathetic to the ideals of the indigenous program was the fact that a wide array of activities fell under its rubric. All directors had to do was look around them. “The camping program depends or should depend wholly upon the natural resources” of the local environment, advised the Girl Scout’s national camping department.57 The wise director allowed herself to be guided by what the land itself had to teach, even if that meant leaving some of her own expertise at home. Should a director schooled in botany find herself in charge of a camp in the Southwest, for example, she was advised to take advantage of the clear desert skies and “get a telescope before a microscope.” A director who was willing to be flexible and allow the indigenous program “to develop naturally” instead of “forcing it” could count on the local environment to provide “an open door to one of the treasure houses of science.”58 In other words, a director who was willing to serve as a conduit, albeit a knowledgeable and competent one, could count on a wellspring of inspiration flowing from the indigenous landscape. Directors were repaid for forgoing their own interests and expertise in favor of the indigenous program by their girls’ burgeoning interest in, and attachment to, the local environment. On occasion, campers’ newfound enthusiasm for the indigenous made them willing to strike their own compromises with civilization, choices that thrilled leaders who believed that such girls were actually rediscovering their own “natural” interests. Abbie

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Graham, in a chapter of The Girls’ Camp titled “The Indigenous Program,” related the tale of a young counselor recently awakened to the natural beauty of her camp in the Southwest. One weekend, the counselor’s boyfriend came to visit, bearing a lunch basket and intent on a romantic picnic in the mountains. Instead, Graham happily tells her readers, “they returned that evening with a rumble seat weighted down with fossils, she, delighted with certain specimens, and he—well, he was a mud-splattered and rather surprised young man who had politely tried to cooperate with her wishes!”59 Even on her day off, a much anticipated event for all staff members, this young woman had opted for the messy joys of the indigenous over the pleasures of romance and relaxation. Leaders did not have to worry should their girls, unlike the fossil-collecting counselor from the Southwest, appear indifferent to “the treasure house of science” found in the indigenous environment. For no indigenous activity at camp held a greater promise, or proved more in need of a leader’s guidance, than the arts-and-crafts program. The goal of indigenous arts and crafts, an activity that came to dominate many camp schedules, was not to create artists per se, but to awaken girls’ interest in local folk arts. “Approach the arts from the point of view of folklore and natural materials, seeing what can grow out of the camp environment rather than approaching it from the town point of view of what is taught at art schools,” recommended the national camp advisory staff.60 In attempting to follow this directive, camp directors faced two challenges. Girls who arrived at camp steeped in the formal drawing lessons they had learned in school required retraining so they could appreciate the “natural materials” they would work with at camp. Potentially more problematic for directors, however, was the fact that they were responsible for teaching art and crafts according to the dictates of a folk culture that had largely disappeared, or, in many cases, never existed at all. Similar to middle-class tourists in pursuit of an “authentic” farmhouse vacation, camp directors often possessed a romanticized vision of the indigenous that was based on folklore of dubious accuracy. Camp leaders promoted what they believed to be an indigenous arts-and-crafts program that was in reality composed of activities that local people had either happily abandoned or never really embraced. Girls whittled “natural materials” into clumsy camp furniture and were encouraged to try weaving baskets out of pine needles; they carved animal figures out of acorns and pinecones and decorated their canoes using symbols “reflective of local Indian tribes.” Louise Price advised camp directors to try to “revive” English country

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dancing, an activity she believed held “broad appeal as both art and exercise.” Its reputed broad appeal, however, had not been much in evidence at the time Price visited camps across the nation. “Not many people in the country are doing it and it would be a real contribution to the cultural life of the country if we stimulate it,” she reported hopefully.61 In this particular instance, the power of the indigenous promised to be so strong that a willing director could not only help her girls, but also make a contribution to the entire nation. The methods by which a camp director could facilitate the indigenous program were as multifaceted as the activities that constituted it. Sometimes leaders merely had to allow it to “develop naturally,” but at other times they had to undo the deleterious effects of the urban environment before they could create it. Occasionally, they had the opportunity to help the indigenous environment reassert itself in the face of local inhabitants’ declining respect for it. Of all the activities and methods by which the indigenous program could be “put over” at camp, one of the most popular was the historical pageant. Pageants were complex and richly dramatic tools that camp directors employed to encourage the primacy of the indigenous. They were productions, large or small, in which the real and imagined elements of the indigenous environment blended seamlessly together to foster the actualization of the best possible landscape for a camp. Indigenous Pageants: “The Place Is the Hero” The use of folk lore and local history as material for pageants is recommended. —Visitor’s report of a Girl Scout camp, April 1931

The popularity of pageants at girls’ camps was part of a larger cultural interest in historical pageantry that swept America in the first decades of the twentieth century. The Camp Fire Girls could even trace their organization’s origins to a historical pageant produced by William Chauncy Langdon, arguably the most famous and successful pageant master in America. In the summer of 1911, almost one year before the official incorporation of the Camp Fire Girls, the town of Thetford, Vermont, staged a historical pageant that it called Outdoor Drama of the Town’s Past, Present and Future.62 Langdon, who wrote and directed the production, had been hired largely on the recommendation of Mrs. Charlotte Farnsworth, director of a nearby private girls’ camp and sister-in-law of Luther Gulick’s brother, Edward.63 Langdon had become acquainted with the extended Gulick family during the years he worked with Luther, first at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and later at

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the Russell Sage Foundation.64 Langdon’s goal for the pageant, which had been commissioned in honor of the town’s sesquicentennial, was not only to celebrate the finest moments of Thetford’s past, but also to project a hopeful image of its future. It is in Langdon’s imaginings of Thetford’s vibrant future, a vision belied by the town’s actual social and economic woes, that we can, oddly enough, locate the origins of the Camp Fire Girls. Like many rural New England towns in the early twentieth century, Thetford had fallen on hard times. Its population had shrunk as young people deserted the area to follow jobs that had also slipped away. There was nothing that historical pageantry could do to alter economic trends, but the town leaders’ hope, and Langdon’s passionate belief, was that a pageant might help Thetford’s inhabitants rekindle the can-do Yankee spirit upon which the town was founded. Nearly the entire population turned out for the show as participants or spectators or both. Dressed up as hardy loggers, farmers, and pioneers, they reenacted a romanticized version of Thetford’s progressive march into an ever-brighter future. In staging the future that reinvigorated residents would create for themselves, Langdon chose the setting of the 1915 county fair. Scores of Thetford residents representing visitors from throughout the county marveled at evidence of the town’s material wealth, which spilled from makeshift stalls. Members of the younger generation, representing proof that the town’s youth would stay put and serve as a harbinger of Thetford’s “new social vitality,” walked across the pageant’s stage as “Troops of ‘Boy Scouts’ and ‘Camp Fire Girls.’” At the time of the pageant, however, Camp Fire Girls, like Thetford’s bright future, existed only in the imagination of true believers such as William Chauncy Langdon. The story of the Thetford pageant and its cast of fictive Camp Fire Girls would be worth telling if only for the delicious irony that an organization that vociferously denied charges of excessive imagination, did, in fact, trace its roots to a public flight of fancy. Yet the appearance of mythic Camp Fire Girls in the theatrical production of a rural Vermont town reveals something about the hundreds of pageants enacted each summer by thousands of real girls. One of the interesting aspects of Thetford’s pageant was the seeming inevitability of the girls’ appearance. It was no coincidence that Farnsworth, the director of a girls’ camp, was greatly interested in the town’s pageant, nor was it an accident that Langdon, a man who enjoyed a national reputation as a professional pageant master, spent his summers working with teenage girls. Adolescent girls and pageants went together. Allegedly, girls innately possessed the imagination and empathy required for successful playacting. Adults involved in the camping movement also believed that

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pageants provided girls with an outlet for the “spontaneous expression of their creativity.” Moreover, since one of the goals of pageantry was to project the halcyon days of the past into the future, leaders who believed that the time of the girl had arrived were certain to include them in that future, even if they had to create a new organization in order to do so. Thetford’s pageant was significant not only because it provided girls with a starring role, but also for whom, or more precisely, what, pageant master Langdon cast as the hero of the production. In articulating his theory of how historical pageants helped to revitalize ailing rural towns, Langdon explained that “the place is the hero.”65 This, of course, was exactly the message that girls’ organizations, enthralled with the power of the indigenous landscape, wanted to hear. At its April 1925 meeting, for example, the National Camp Committee of the Girl Scouts approved a motion commending local directors for the extensive use of dramatics and pageants at their camps, but urged them to use more “local historical material” in future productions. Although pageants that employed such themes as “Robin Hood and King Arthur” gave campers the opportunity to indulge their dramatic talents, the committee argued that they did not require girls to turn their imaginations toward the lessons present in the indigenous environment.66 A few years later, Scouting leadership, disgruntled with the continued prominence of nonindigenous pageants, appealed directly to girls in the pages of Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, an official Scouting publication released in 1928. Tramping and Trailing renewed the call for camp pageants based on local stories and gently reminded girls that pageants should be based not on “bookish information, but practical knowledge.” Girls camped in wooded areas were advised to include “native indian tribes” in their plays, while those camped near the coastline could enact dramas about being “lost at sea.”67 These suggestions, given as examples of pageants that used practical knowledge, are in fact indications that as long as such knowledge was related to a sense of place—however far from girls’ actual experience it might be—leadership considered it “practical.” Whatever the features of the landscape in which a pageant was staged—proximity to woods, ocean, or desert—the most important thing such a dramatic production offered girls was a more intimate connection to the “genius” imbedded in the indigenous environment. Sometimes campers chose indigenous themes for their pageants and plays that actually did fall within the realm of their experience. Girls at a southern YWCA camp, for example, created the “Hot Biscuit Festival” to honor the birth of the inventor of baking powder. But why would such a

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festival deserve to be called “indigenous”? “The Hot-Biscuit Festival would hardly be a success in New England,” readers of The Girls’ Camp were informed, because “it is one’s emotional attachment to hot biscuits that helps make it a festival.”68 These YWCA girls proved that they understood the role of the indigenous by homing in on a regional preference and incorporating it into their dramatic production. Thus, girls who were able to temper the “spontaneous expression of their creativity” with an understanding of regional history and customs were rewarded by gaining an insight into their camps’ indigenous environment. In the words of Abbie Graham, author of The Girls’ Camp and admirer of the Hot Biscuit Festival, girls who paid attention to the indigenous gained access to the “genius of the area.” Some girls were able to access the genius of the area surrounding their camp not by reflecting on their own familiarity with local customs, but because they were fortunate enough to live in a place inhabited by people who seemed to embody the indigenous. Activities in Girl Scout Camps, a 1935 mimeographed booklet, contained a report from a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, troop. The campers held “Apple Butter Days,” on which they “dressed in costumes appropriate to the day’s theme” and acted out scenes depicting the customs of the local “Pennsylvania Dutch” people.69 One tableau presented a one-room schoolhouse in which a single teacher presided over pupils of various ages, while other scenes showed a “rag-rug sewing party” and a canning demonstration. This choice of scenes echoed the romanticized vision of Amish and Mennonite communities popularized by the burgeoning tourist industry, and yet the purpose of these displays at camp was not commercial. Girls were supposed to come away from Apple Butter Days with a renewed respect for their local environment and for the role of the indigenous in the history of a place. Although they acknowledged that the Scouts from Lancaster County were especially fortunate, proponents of pageants believed that girls from all areas of the country had the material for indigenous dramatics at their fingertips, provided they were willing to “revive” old customs and reenact lost traditions. Activities in Girl Scout Camps also recounted the efforts of a troop from Virginia to revive customs indigenous to its state, described as “a land rich in tradition.” Like their sister Scouts in Pennsylvania, the Richmond girls produced an activity day reflective of their own indigenous environment. The girls decided to “revive some old customs that have been lost to this generation” by staging “Plantation Days.”70 Of course, the customs lost to the Girl Scouts in Virginia were not quite as innocuous as the quilting and canning that it was hoped Apple Butter Days would revive.

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The pageant of Plantation Days began when a party of “white guests” arrived on the grounds and proceeded to tour the four cabins that had been designated as the “homes of the pickaninnies and their mammies.” After the guests completed their tour, they were treated to entertainment performed by the cabins’ inhabitants. The entertainment did not last long, however, and soon “the lady of the Big House came out and asked everyone to come in to dinner.” Plantation guests joined family members for a meal in the Big House, while the “pickaninnies ate their fried chicken in their own quarters.” After the meal, the reenactment of a day at the plantation drew to a close when family and guests were entertained once again, this time by a performance held in the Big House itself. The “pickaninnies,” we are informed, “watched from the door.” Although it was never explicitly stated, readers of Activities in Girl Scout Camps were left to assume that all the roles in this drama, from “the lady of the Big House” to the mammies in the cabins, were performed—in minstrel show blackface when necessary—by all-white campers.71 It was only at the finale of Plantation Days that other “indigenous” players took part in the drama. “The evening ended at the camp fire circle when a real Negro quartet from a neighboring church sang songs and played to the campers on their banjos.” At the end of the day, the “real” Negro quartet allowed all the Scouts, former mammies and masters alike, to be transformed back into guests who did not have to watch entertainment from the door. In Plantation Days, Scouts did not so much revive a lost custom as rehearse a benign revision of the region’s history. The evening entertainment, which helped to verify the authenticity of the earlier performances of the “pickaninnies,” allowed the girls to step out of their indigenous past and return to the fiercely segregated reality of Richmond in the mid-1930s. Pageants such as the Hot Biscuit Festival and Plantation Days depended on forgoing authentic history in favor of reviving a romanticized past that allowed for a more comforting vision of a region’s indigenous identity. The goal of indigenous programs and pageants was, after all, to affirm the connection between campers and the “soul” of the landscape, and it would not do to revive a tarnished incarnation of that soul. It is therefore difficult to find voices within the organized camping movement that sang the praises of the indigenous program while expressing skepticism about the integrity of mythic pasts. Abbie Graham came closest to being a voice of dissent among supporters of the indigenous program. Graham agreed that indigenous programs cultivated girls’ attachment to place and encouraged respect for the unique aspects of a camp’s environment, but she

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did not want respect to turn into an uncritical “reverence.” “A thing is not necessarily good because it is old, or accepted by the best people,” she pointed out.72 Instead, she suggested balancing the “romance” of the indigenous program with a clear-headed assessment of a region’s contemporary problems. As an example of this balanced ideal, Graham related the story of an innovative YWCA director who ran a camp in an unnamed western location. The girls at this particular camp had a tradition of producing endless pageants that recalled the “glory of the Covered Wagon.” The girls, thoroughly enamored of “all the romance of horses,” never tired of reenacting “cowboy days,” nor did they seem concerned that they were giving short shrift to other aspects of the local culture. The director had nothing against cowboy days, but believed that such pageants did not convey a balanced view of the realities of the indigenous environment. Therefore, one night she invited a “young economist” to give a campfire lecture titled “From the Passing of the Cowboy to the Coming of Oil,” hardly the typical fare of indigenous programs.73 Graham’s admonition to directors that they should be mindful of a region’s complexities extended beyond the inclusion of current economic issues in the camp program. She professed little tolerance for what she viewed as hypocritical evocations of a region’s traditions. “Has a group the right to sing Negro spirituals when public opinion will not permit a highly talented Negro girl in a nearby city to receive musical instruction from the best teachers?” she asked rhetorically.74 Graham believed that the indigenous program was beneficial only to the extent that it did not encourage parochialism among girls or turn camp into an environment sealed off to the realities of the larger world. “The problems of a world now knock at every camp door,” Graham firmly stated, more as a challenge to camp directors than as a warning.75 It was a rare director, however, who had any desire to answer this challenge, because once she acknowledged that her camp occupied a real landscape populated by real local people, she often found that indigenous problems invariably presented themselves at her doorstep. Problems of the Indigenous For the permanent camp, an acre of land per girl is not any too much to provide for adequate layout [and] protection against undesirable neighbors. —Visitor’s report of a Girl Scout camp, April 1931

If camp leaders’ faith in the redemptive power of the indigenous was idiosyncratic, their perceptions of its inherent problems were not. Here camp leaders shared mainstream America’s anxiety and ambivalence toward the

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countryside and the rural people who made it their home.76 When middleclass auto tourists drove past the ramshackle farms that neighbored the old homestead or hurried through declining towns on their way to newly created national parks, they encountered native inhabitants who did not overly impress them. To an American culture already nervous about the threat of dysgenic effects posed by the masses of immigrants who poured into its cities, the alleged degeneration of rural populations was a sore blow. Billed as the “people of Lincoln” and extant pioneers who spoke Shakespearean English, rural people were viewed as both repositories of a lost heritage and distressingly backward. Thus, camp directors were faced with a paradox. The indigenous landscape, and the spirit of the pioneers that lingered within it, commanded their respect; the people who lived in that landscape often did not. Abbie Graham may have believed that the problems of the world knocked at every camp’s door, but directors were much more concerned with the possible consequences of neighbors who came knocking. Despite sharing mainstream misgivings about the condition of rural America, camp directors viewed themselves as progressive educators and potential forces of uplift. Accordingly, camp directors tended to view the problems of rural folk as environmentally rooted, rather than symptomatic of an unfortunate dysgenic inheritance. Yet as camp directors, they were pledged to a reverence for the environment that did not permit the landscape to function as a causal factor for social problems. Given this uncomfortable paradox, it is plausible that directors found relief, and the inklings of a solution, in an article that appeared in an issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal from 1920. “Lifting Up Mountains: Bringing a Knowledge of America to Pure-Blooded Americans” told the story of an eager young doctor who left her postgraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania to aid folk of “pure pioneer strain” living in an inaccessible hollow deep within the Smoky Mountains. The doctor covered a formidable geographic distance in her travels from Philadelphia to eastern Tennessee, but as with girls at camp who enacted pageants of the pioneer past, the most important distance she traveled was a temporal one. When the doctor arrived at her destination, she did not describe it as another place, but as a different era. She encountered “a series of experiences as strange as would befall any American woman of today were she plumped down among the pioneers who followed the trail of Daniel Boone into the Kentucky wilderness.”77 The problem with these rural people was not where they lived, but when they lived. The potential hazard of venturing into the pioneer past was that not all elements of the indigenous past were worth preserving. The mountain

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girls whom the doctor encountered knew nothing of the true spirit of pioneering and suffered under the yoke of undesirable indigenous influences. The girls’ childhoods were ruined by the endless responsibilities heaped on their young shoulders. Although they were solely responsible for the multitude of domestic chores associated with large families, the girls were also expected to labor alongside their brothers in the fields. Not only were they denied all opportunities for wholesome recreation, they were actively encouraged in unhealthy habits. “I was always crazy about [snuff],” an eighteen-year-old girl told the horrified physician; “my mammy teached me to use it when I was three.” According to the doctor, mountain girls could expect no reprieve from such misfortune as they grew older. They were forced into early marriages whereupon they inevitably bore large families of their own, perpetuating the vicious cycle that would eventually claim their daughters’ lives. Little wonder that the doctor concluded that “any woman to-day who seeks an opportunity to do work worth while . . . can find mountains to be lifted up at home.” Girls’ organizations took up this challenge and slowly followed the lead of visiting nurses’ associations and rural social work societies in an effort to restore country girls to their wholesome pioneer heritage while simultaneously bringing them the benefits of modern life. Mrs. Polly Stickney-Jones, a district nurse from Ivis, Tennessee, founded a Girl Scout troop in the mountain hollows of her home state. “Mine is a novel troop,” she reported to the Rally, since it was the only one she knew of that worked with “mountain girls.” Despite its unique status, Stickney-Jones felt certain that her troop represented “a wonderful opportunity to make some real Girl Scouts.”78 Although she was a local herself, Stickney-Jones shared the Pennsylvanian doctor’s assessment of the squalor of rural life. Her troop, she reported, was composed of “mountain girls that have suffered years and years of neglect; mountain girls isolated from the world by mountains and creeks and ignorance; mountain girls of the good old stock of Lincoln who . . . cannot read or write.” Her predictions for the girls’ futures were no rosier. They were destined to “marry and settle down at thirteen to the sordidness of life in a little one-room windowless cabin, without enough for two to live on, to raise, year after year, the inevitable large family.” Her hope was that Girl Scouting would confound this destiny. Despite the seemingly innumerable practical problems mountain girls had to face, most girls’ organizations started their uplift programs by attempting to instill in rural girls a sense of pride in their local environment. Directors of 4-H camps claimed that they helped farm girls recognize the

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“great natural advantages in country surroundings” while also alleviating the isolation that had prevented girls from learning how to play together.79 Farmer’s Wife Magazine encouraged Lone Scouts—girls who wished to be Scouts but did not have access to a troop—to camp out in fields and orchards around farm property, the better to appreciate local beauty.80 The YWCA claimed that their Girl Reserve camps could give “a girl from the country . . . a deeper, more intelligent and spiritual appreciation of the wonderful common, every-day things which are about her.”81 All these promises would bear fruit only if girls could learn a proper appreciation of the indigenous environment. The Camp Fire Girls conveyed the belief that their organization could relieve the plight of country girls in “Any Girl: A Camp Fire Girls’ Play,” a dramatic story that appeared in the pages of Wo-He-Lo.82 The play’s action begins when “Any Girl,” an allegorical figure who starred in many Camp Fire dramas, wanders into a clearing in the woods and sits down despondently on an old tree stump. Any Girl is as yet unaware that she has stumbled onto the campsite of a group of Camp Fire Girls. “Oh! I’m so tired of these stupid woods,” she sighs, “How I envy the city girls, and all the things they can do!” Gazing around in a desperate effort to find something positive in her surroundings, she notices several tents and a smoldering campfire. Her interest piqued, Any Girl explores the campsite and to her great delight discovers a skirt left hanging from a tree to dry. She is immediately hopeful that this might be the camp of “real girls, not stupid country girls [who are] satisfied to churn butter and drudge along day after day.” The Camp Fire Girls soon arrive on the scene, singing a hiking song and swinging the pails of blueberries they have just collected. Any Girl watches as the Camp Fire Girls efficiently, and joyfully, set to their chores: they haul water, gather wood, and rekindle the fire in preparation for their supper. These are clearly girls who, unlike Any Girl’s country peers, know how to invest chores with gaiety and purpose and are not content to allow them to devolve into mere drudgery. Any Girl is so impressed that she begs to join their group. She has “lived in the country all [her] life,” she explains to the Camp Fire Girls, and thus lacks the vigorous goodwill and sense of fellowship the city girls obviously possess—for Any Girl is convinced that the strangers are such confident and cheerful campers precisely because they are from the city. The Camp Fire Girls, although happy to have Any Girl join them, are aghast that she believes they drew their strength and appreciation of nature from their city lifestyles. It was here in her home, not in their urban

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neighborhoods, that they learned how to be “real girls,” they assure her. That evening around the campfire they recite a poem together that expresses their reverence for the rural landscape. Hearing the Camp Fire Girls chant God in the Open Air opens Any Girl’s eyes to the natural beauty that she has occasionally perceived, often rejected, and always, heretofore, lacked the words to express. “How beautiful,” she exclaims. “It’s just the way I feel sometimes when I’m in the woods alone, but I never knew anybody had written about it that way.” Thus the Camp Fire Girls, with their reverence and rituals, have helped Any Girl appreciate the meaning of the indigenous landscape in which she has lived her entire life, but never truly understood. Real flesh-and-blood country girls, however, did not always respond so immediately or enthusiastically to the transcendent interpretation of the camping landscape promoted by girls’ organizations. In 1924, the Southern Women’s Education Alliance requested that a Girl Scout leader, then a student at the University of Virginia, organize a camp in rural Albemarle County outside Charlottesville. The young leader complied, but was soon confronted with a group of girls who, in her mind, did not know how to behave properly in the natural environment of camp. Her frustration with their lack of enthusiasm for the camp program peaked in the evening when they showed disrespect for that most solemn of rituals, the inaugural campfire. “The first camp fire was terrible,” she lamented, “their idea of a camp fire consisted of poor jokes and ukeleles.” She persevered, however, and by the end of the week the country girls had changed quite a bit. “Sunday night camp fire was lovely,” the pleased leader reported. “We learned songs and told Bible stories.”83 Although stories such as these that documented the uplift of real or imagined country girls through the vehicle of summer camp were popular fare in Scout and Camp Fire publications, neither organization ever claimed significant membership in rural areas. More often than not, the “indigenous” person a camp director confronted was not a rural girl who might, albeit with some effort, be transformed into an ideal camper, but a member of the girl’s family who was not inclined to be quite so malleable. Country girls living in the vicinity of camp properties were part of country families who provided many of the services that directors needed to keep camp running smoothly. Mothers cooked and did laundry; fathers maintained camp property in the off-season and worked as handymen over the summer; even brothers served camps as errand boys and lifeguards. The challenge presented by country families was, however, altogether different from that of country daughters. Girls were brought into the fold when they learned to

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appreciate the beauty inherent in their rural surroundings. Family members were supposed to realize that their rural ways were a liability to the smooth functioning of camp. One problem with rural people was that they just did not seem capable of understanding a camp’s mission or evincing the proper respect for camp leaders. Directors constantly experienced communication problems and power struggles with the grown men and women who worked as handymen, caretakers, and cooks. The director of the YWCA’s Camp Tinicum located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, had so much trouble settling a dispute with the camp’s maintenance man that she was forced to give up some of her own authority and call in three local men to act as intermediaries.84 The following summer she had a run-in with the local woman hired to do the camp’s cooking. The woman did provide decent and nutritious food, the director conceded, but she did not understand how to handle the girls whom she served. The cook, like many of her fellow laborers, stood accused of being short tempered and mean spirited.85 Beyond personality conflicts, rural people could not generally be trusted to meet a camp’s standards, directors believed, thus making health and hygiene concerns a constant source of tension between directors and the local community. Local cooks were subject to more extensive medical examinations—including Wassermann tests for syphilis—than staff who came from the city.86 Rural farmers who supplied camps with fresh produce also presented a potential health risk. Publicly, directors boasted of the “fresh eggs, milk and butter supplied from nearby Farm houses”; privately they cautioned one another about the need to test local herds for tuberculosis.87 Eventually, most Scout camp directors broke with the tradition of purchasing local supplies and agreed that it was “generally unsafe to buy loose milk from farmers—better buy it pasteurized and bottled.”88 Still, the desire to act as agents of uplift in rural neighborhoods held a strong appeal for leaders of the camping movement. “Tact and a neighborly spirit may enable a camp to raise the health standards of an entire community,” the Scout publication Kettles and Campfires noted with pride.89

Turning the Camp Program Over to Eve Much as camp directors occasionally aspired to be agents of uplift for local communities, they already had their work cut out for them within the boundaries of their own camps. As girls’ organizations flourished in the postwar years and as camping became the centerpiece of programmatic efforts to

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shape the nature of adolescent girls, camp directors were very busy. Following their own dictum, they had begun with the landscape—from the design of buildings to the feelings of animals—in order to create a “moral geography” that allowed them to facilitate the proper development of their girls. The spirit of the landscape was made manifest throughout the camp environment to awaken the soul of the girl and guide her to a discovery of her own natural talents and desires. It is difficult to convey the full measure of importance that directors attached to their camps and hard to express exactly how much they believed their girls could be reshaped by a positive camping experience. There is one anecdote, however, that goes a long way toward making clear their exuberance. In the first chapter of her quirky little book, The Girls’ Camp, YWCA leader Abbie Graham related an allegorical story that left little doubt about the central importance of camp in the development of female adolescence. In “Getting On with Human Nature,” Graham attempted to impress upon her audience the truths she had learned about girls’ nature, the natural world, and their inevitable interaction. Graham warned complacent directors that they could not count on the beauty of their camps’ surroundings as a de facto guarantee of a successful season.90 “Now a camp is made up equally of nature and human nature,” Graham cautioned. This meant that the “spiritual geography” of even the loveliest landscape could be marred by a director who failed to appreciate that “the seeds of disaffection seem latent in the human mind, irrespective of the beauties of location.” Even a director who many readers might previously have believed infallible, and who worked in an idyllic, in fact Edenic, location, was capable of making a grave error if he did not heed this lesson. Thus Abbie Graham introduced the dilemmas faced by God, “the director of Eden,” whose “first leisure-time experiment on this or any other planet” ran into trouble when it became clear that he did not fully understand his “first campers.” Actually, Graham suggested, it was just the one camper who perplexed him. “Eve’s disconcerting talents for initiative and research in forbidden waters,” Graham informed her readers, disappointed and angered the novice director, who had trusted in his own ability to set up the perfect camping situation. Yet the problem, Graham asserted, was not with Eve at all, but rather with the overly controlling director, who had made ill-advised decisions about the structure of the camping program. God believed his camp to be perfect, but from the “camper’s point of view it was not so ideal. Every star was set in its course, every sea established, every table painted. The Management had gotten all the kick out of being creative;

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the camper none.” And that was the mistake that Eve, with her “disconcerting talent for initiative,” could not tolerate. Eve, like her later-day descendants, was filled with restless and creative energy, Graham explained. Her impulsive spontaneity required free reign to express itself. “Eve did not, from the very beginning, like the program set up; she had no chance to express herself.” Instead of recognizing Eve’s natural impulsiveness as a gift, the first camp director chose to see it as a problem and, worse, interpreted it as a challenge to his authority. In doing so, he not only created a flawed camp, but squandered a talent that he had painfully misunderstood. “Woe to the camp director who does not legitimatize and make use of the pursuits of these creative spirits,” Graham scolded. But, ever magnanimous, she also forgave the director of Eden. “It was his first job, of course, and like many an inexperienced director he may have thought it safer to have things regimented.” Graham’s willingness to forgive his first mistake did not stop her from leveling yet another criticism at the director of Eden. Almost inexcusably, God had compounded the problem caused by his initial rigidity by refusing to explain to the campers the rationale behind his decisions. “The director did not see fit to discuss with the guests in Eden the intrinsic wisdom that underlay the prohibitions, nor did he in any way throw them open to criticism. . . . There was, in a word, no evidence in Eden of wise foresight, no magnanimous handling of difficulties, no realization that these problems were but program successes in disguise.” In short, God did not really understand his creation, especially the willful, creative, and restless nature of Eve. “On the whole,” Graham concluded, “human nature seems to have been a great surprise to him.” Graham’s implicit suggestion was that she, like many other merely human, and undeniably female, camp directors, was not at all surprised by girls’ nature and knew just how to manage it. The most important message of Abbie Graham’s playful critique of God and Camp Eden was that directors had to be equally sensitive to the natural landscape and the nature of their campers. When properly constituted, a camp’s spiritual geography rehabilitated, indeed ennobled, that most problematic of female role models. “There are times when all the resources of Eden should be turned over to Eve,” Graham wrote, “and times when they should not.” A wise director understood this distinction because she understood girls’ fundamental nature. Moreover, she knew that the evocation of the proper landscape would help her in her quest to influence girls’ development. Having examined how directors shaped the inanimate nature of camp, it is now time, in Abbie Graham’s words, to get on with human nature and

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see how girls and their directors interacted to shape the programs that took place in these natural landscapes. In the remaining chapters of this book— “Naturecraft,” “Homecraft,” and “Healthcraft”—I explore this give-and-take between campers and directors by focusing on the three main categories of activities that made up the camping program.

Chapter 4

Naturecraft Restoring Pioneer Heritage


The old frontier is practically gone and contact with simple living in the open has been transferred from the day to day experiences to the field of recreation. So we sometimes say we are trying to restore to the girl her pioneer heritage through our outdoor program. —Louise Price, “Program Building for the Permanent Camp, 1930,” Girl Scout Leader

O

n November 6, 1924, the cover of Life featured an illustration by Norman Rockwell titled Good Scouts. In the brilliantly lit foreground, a girl in a Scout uniform gazes directly at the reader. She is pretty, with sparkling eyes and a bright smile. Given her countenance and the light that surrounds her, the only word to describe this Girl Scout is radiant. It is true, however, that her uniform bags a bit; it appears to be a few sizes too large for her. Yet everything about this girl suggests that she will indeed grow into these clothes and, when her time comes, perform the tasks required of the uniform. As for the other Scout in the drawing, his time has passed. In a background so dark that it is possible to overlook him at first, stands a scout from America’s recently closed frontier. He is square jawed and rugged, sporting a fur cap and holding a rifle in strong hands. His face is as grim as the girl’s is pleasant, as if he knew his image was receding into the illustration’s, if not the country’s, shadows. Nonetheless, there he is, standing behind this girl and looking out for her, for she will have to carry his inheritance into the nation’s future. She is already a “good scout,” and she will grow up to be so much more. Little more than a decade after their organization’s creation, Girl Scouts had become sufficiently popular to grace the cover of one of the country’s best-selling magazines and command the attention of the most famous illustrator of American life. How had this happened? And why 122

Image not available.

Figure 14. Rockwell’s Life cover made visible the Girl Scouts’ desire to depict their girls as the true heirs of America’s pioneer heritage. By permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency, Inc.

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were the Scouts—as well as their rivals, the Camp Fire Girls and the Girl Pioneers—convinced that the vehicle that had carried girls into such prominence was their relationship to the great outdoors? Good Scouts, a fine example of Rockwell’s genius in capturing Americans not necessarily as they were but as they wished to be, clearly shows how important the image of the outdoors girl was to the Scouts. Why had naturecraft become the rhetorical core of girls’ organizations? What did leaders mean when they invoked a “pioneering heritage,” and what did they hope to gain for their girls by restoring it to them? If there was disagreement among girls’ organizations about what exactly constituted America’s pioneer heritage, there was unanimity about where it could be found. “Camp is the best place to study the Girl Scout movement,” a Scout commissioner proclaimed, “for here its ideals find most complete expression.”1 Although they chose different role models to represent their programs—Native Americans for the Camp Fire Girls and pioneers for the Girl Pioneers of America—all girls’ groups concurred on the primacy of the outdoor camping program. To varying degrees, leaders of girls’ groups agreed that young women’s natures had been compromised by the same enervating and overly sentimental Victorian culture that had emasculated a generation of young men. The culture’s excessive femininity had not reflected girls’ true nature, leaders argued, but rather had distorted and damaged it. Their solution was a camping experience anchored in a program of what they called naturecraft or woodcraft skills that would teach girls the proper way of interacting with the natural world. By living at camp, where they could study nature and learn about woodcraft, girls could shed the artifice of urban consumer culture and reclaim their natural heritage. Paradoxically, camp directors soon found themselves stymied by their own success. The growing popularity of camping led organizations to invest more time and money into improving their camps, but these capital improvements threatened to “civilize” the very nature they looked to as an alternative to an overly civilized modern world. Camps were in danger of being transformed into the “little quasi-cities in the woods” that Louise Price had warned against. As camp’s ability to provide girls with a pioneering adventure began to dissipate, directors found themselves suggesting that girls had to leave camp in order to find the romance and adventure that they had hoped to encode into the building and programs of the camp’s landscape. These were the ultimate consequences of a naturecraft program that began with encouraging girls to get out into nature to discover the friends they might make there.

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Nature Study: Meeting Nature Face to Face When you go to camp remember you are not there to spend your time reading and doing fancy work. My advice is leave your embroidery at home and read only when too tired to do anything else while you have the chance learn to fish to swim to row. Learn to cook camp dishes on the Camp Fire. Look for rare wild flowers and mosses; meet nature face to face and strengthen your friendship with her. —Adelia Beard, “Mid-winter Camp Preparations for the Girls’ Summer Camp”

As Adelia Beard suggests in this quotation, a crucial part of a camp’s naturecraft program was facilitating a girl’s relationship, even friendship, with the natural world. Here, girls’ camps followed the lead of a popular educational movement. Nature study had begun in the decades following the Civil War and had, by the time girls’ organizations were created in the 1910s, come to dominate the science curriculum of elementary schools. The primary objective of nature study was to reconnect urban schoolchildren with a natural world to which they no longer had easy access.2 While educators certainly made use of the burgeoning trade in school textbooks, they also followed the progressive-education directive of involving children more interactively in their studies by leading nature rambles and performing experiments in the classroom. Despite nature study’s popularity with students, adult critics grew increasingly disenchanted with how it was taught. They accused teachers, primarily the female teachers who dominated the elementary grades, of being unscientific and overly sentimental. G. Stanley Hall, originally a keen supporter of the movement, complained that female teachers constituted a “regime of sugary benignity” in which they taught from nature books that suffered from “effeminization.”3 Female teachers were not the only ones blamed, however, for nature study’s failings. The most notorious, and best-publicized, battle for the heart of nature study occurred in 1904 when John Burroughs, “father” of American naturalists, touched off a fractious debate that came to be known as the Nature Fakers controversy.4 Burroughs, quickly joined by President Theodore Roosevelt, publicly castigated the authors of children’s nature stories for their saccharine sentimentality and excessive anthropomorphizing of animal “heroes.” One of the individuals caught in the fray was Ernest Thompson Seton, popular author and illustrator of children’s nature books, including the best sellers Two Little Savages and Wild Animals I Have Known.5 Seton, founder of the Woodcraft League for Girls and a Camp Fire board member, was able to emerge from the controversy relatively

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unscathed by staking a position that virtually all girls’ organizations soon adopted as their own. Seton claimed that there were character-building morals to be learned in nature, provided that the observer had been properly trained in the scientific method and did reasonable fieldwork. The best naturalists, he argued, were objective observers of the natural world who were perspicacious enough to realize that animals could, and often did, exhibit traits worthy of emulation. Seton’s successful rapprochement with his critics—he and Roosevelt became hiking partners—did not exonerate the entire nature study movement, but it did provide the underpinnings for a version of nature study that was ideally suited to girls’ camps. Learning Nature’s Secrets Camp had an obvious advantage over school-based nature study. Harried teachers could hurry their students outside to take advantage of any free moments, but brief forays into urban school yards or tinkering in tiny garden plots—much less the window boxes and ant farms that more often dominated the curriculum—could not compete with actually living in nature. It did not require much imagination for camp directors, some of whom were teachers themselves, to decide that camp was the logical successor to what they perceived as nature study’s worthy, albeit failed, mission to bring children and nature together. Camp leaders also countered Hall’s criticism of excessive femininity by suggesting that such attitudes were a thing of the past. “Our grandmothers read about nature in poetry but they played croquet and lawn archery and climbed hills with ornamental canes adorned with ribbons and preferred boardwalks to trails and flat bottomed boats to canoes,” wrote Girl Scout leader Julia Williamson, with clear distain. Not only did these old-fashioned ladies lack the physical prowess to be comfortable in nature, they turned their backs—or worse—on nature’s creatures. “When they met a beetle they squashed it or if they saw a mouse they got on a chair, if a bat flew over their heads they screamed. Very few of them were more than sentimental about nature or knew her secrets,” Miss Williamson concluded.6 Leaders of girls’ organizations refused to believe that these grandmothers had bequeathed their foolish sentimentality to the rising generation. “The joyous exhilarating call of the wilderness and forest camp” was finally getting through to girls, wrote Adelia and Lina Beard, “awakening in her longings for free, wholesome and adventurous outdoor life.” These newly awakened adventurers were calling for books “not adapted to the girl

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supposed to be afraid of a caterpillar or shudder at the sight of a harmless snake.”7 Girls had become tough enough, the Beards proclaimed, to meet nature face to face and actively seek out its secrets. Leaders’ conviction on this score was matched only by girls’ apparent reluctance to give voice to their new longings. Since a fascination for the natural world was an integral part of girls’ character, leaders reasoned, some barrier was preventing the expression of this interest. Leaders concluded that nature study was on the wane because their girls’ nature had been distorted. The culprit was the same pernicious influence that had emasculated a generation of young men—an excessively feminine Victorian society. The first step in resolving this problem was for girls to acknowledge that their interests and the lessons of nature study were inextricably linked. Camp leaders believed that they could facilitate this realization by a simple act of self-identification. “Be sure that your patrols are called by the names of animals, birds, and other familiar outdoor things, to give a touch of romance and arouse an interest in nature,” advised a Scout publication.8 Scout captains were directed to name their troops after natural objects so “nature activities are not thought of as an obligation or a thing apart from other troop interests.” It should come as no surprise then that National Camp Committee secretary Louise Price was appalled when she arrived at the Scout camp near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, during her tour in the summer of 1923. The Chicago troop camped at the lake had named its rows of tents “Cat’s Alley” and “Powder Puff Row.”9 Far from allowing the natural world to define them, these girls had asserted their right to name nature after what mattered most to them. Names were so important because they allowed leaders to finesse the blending of science and sentiment that characterized their naturecraft program. A comparative look at the badges offered to Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in the 1920s captures the complexity of the situation. At first glance the names of girls’ badges—Rock Tapper, Star Gazer, and Flower Finder— seem to suggest a different relationship to the natural world than that implied by the “geologist,” “astronomer,” and “ botanist” badges offered to boys. A close examination of the two Scout handbooks, however, reveals that the requirements for the badges were far more alike than their names suggest. Rather than encouraging a “passive relationship to the world,” as one historian has argued, girls’ organizations combined a “sentimental appreciation of nature’s wonders” with skills as scientifically rigorous as those required of boys.10 Leaders encouraged this view of naturecraft because they believed that it formed a balanced view of both the natural world and girls’ character.

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Camp directors from all organizations displayed a commitment to scientifically grounded nature study. In a rare collaborative effort, Girl Scout, Camp Fire, and Girl Pioneer leadership joined staff from the American Museum of Natural History, located in New York City, to form the Coordinating Council on Nature Activities, under the direction of Bertha Chapman Cady. The council assumed oversight responsibility for all nature study programs, while camps located close to the museum took advantage of staff volunteers as well. The Manhattan Girl Scout Council’s camp at Palisades Interstate Park, for example, featured a Museum and Reptile House, supervised by museum herpetologist Dr. Benjamin Hyde. Camps farther removed from urban centers made arrangements with local Forest Service or National Park personnel to give nature talks or lead rambles. And when it was time to measure the success of their camps’ nature program, directors were provided with evaluation forms that contained dozens of questions regarding the instruction they had provided about birds, flowers, insects, rocks, and stars.11 Girls’ organizations also contracted with scientific publishers to create reference materials tailored to their needs. The Comstock publishers of Ithaca, New York, produced a series of field guides and observation notebooks for the Girl Scouts that contained extensive information on plant, animal, and habitat identification, as well as tips on developing tracking skills. The field guides encouraged girls to collect specimens and learn the rudiments of accurate nature drawing, skills they needed to obtain proficiency badges. Organizations tried further to encourage nature study among the girls by providing their staffs with appropriate training. The first national training school for Girl Scout leaders, for example, included a nature instruction lecture titled “Observation of Birds and Trees.”12 These efforts were reinforced at the local level. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Scout Council sent several leaders to a nature guide school at Case Western University so they could brush up on their skills, while staff members responsible for nature study at YWCA camps in Philadelphia were expected to hold degrees in science. E. Gwen Martin, a longtime Philadelphia Girl Scout captain, was a perfect example of the kind of leader that girls’ organizations tried to encourage. Martin, a devoted naturalist who highlighted nature study with her girls, believed that her extensive collection of field guides and notebooks was important enough to donate in its entirety to the local Scout archives. Over the years, Martin had amassed quite a collection of materials, including guides on geology and astronomy, as well as extensive information on plant and animal identification. Martin’s passion for nature study extended

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beyond the lessons she tried to impress upon her girls; in 1924, she organized a “field education” conference for leaders who wished to follow in her footsteps.13 Girls’ organizations believed that such efforts would go a long way toward turning their girls into clear-eyed, impartial observers of the natural world. A pamphlet detailing the requirements of the Flower Finder merit badge reveals how seriously the Girl Scouts took observational skills. Girls had to be able to identify fifty wildflowers in the field and “make a close study” of twenty others that included habitat range and life cycle information. Girls were encouraged to carry field notebooks with them on all their outings, sketch new plants they were not able to identify in the field, and memorize as much information as possible about the plants they could recognize. “The Field Naturalist and the Scientist have a Code of Honor,” potential Flowers Finders were informed, and it “is not different with the Girl Scouts.” The Scout/scientist code of honor included a grave respect for accurate and detailed observation, as well as careful attention to the storage of specimens. Thus girls were encouraged to view themselves as honorable naturalists, people who understood the natural world as a result of their own skills and on the basis of their own observations.14 The case of Camp Kehonka, a private camp for girls established in 1902 in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, provides an example of a girl who took her duties as an observer of the natural world very seriously indeed. In the summer of 1911 a “reporter” for the Camp Kehonka weekly newsletter had great fun chronicling the mayhem that ensued when fellow campers swimming near the dock found a dead snake floating in the water. The girls must have raised quite a racket because soon after the discovery a counselor “rushed onto the scene . . . and dashed thru the crowd of wild-eyed maidens.” After concluding that no one was hurt, the young man (private camps such as Kehonka sometimes hired male counselors) produced “a set of dissecting implements,” thereby eliciting yet more screams. The girls stayed put, however, as the counselor, who was nicknamed “the Nuisance,” labored over his dissection. The gathered crowd avidly watched the entire procedure until the counselor removed a “half digested toad” from the snake’s stomach. The Nuisance then proceeded to live up to his name and “dangled [the toad] with glee in the faces of some of the nearer girls to hear them scream, which they did.” This proved too much for the girls—they fled the dock, with the exception of one lone observer. The only remaining camper, a girl dubbed the “Nature Fakir” because of “her reputation for identification of all objects in nature,” was undaunted

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by this graphic display of nature red in tooth and claw. Once the counselor put down the toad, clearly pleased with his own joke, the intrepid girl began nonchalantly to finish the dissection, “picking out the brains from the skull of the snake with her feet dangling in the lake.” Now it was the counselor’s turn to blanch before the harsh realities of nature and “[i]n disgust he packed up his tools . . . and retired.”15 In the end, the Nature Fakir was left alone, sitting on the deserted dock, oblivious to all but her “work.” I find this story so charming because of the reporter’s clear ambivalence toward the Nature Fakir. She must have liked her fellow camper— nicknames and protagonist status in newsletters were both signs of affectionate regard at girls’ camps—and yet at some level the reporter found the Nature Fakir’s behavior incomprehensible. While she was clearly delighted that her friend had beaten the Nuisance at his own game, the reporter was just as obviously baffled by the girl’s odd proclivities. The Nature Fakir’s cool detachment won her admiration; she went the Nuisance one better and then actually drove him from the dock. But the cool resolve that overcame the Nuisance also distanced the girl from her peers. The power she gained through her practice of nature study was compelling, but the form of nature study she practiced was something that the rest of the girls would not— could not—be party to. On the face of it, Camp Kehonka’s Nature Fakir found herself isolated from her fellow campers because she was willing to do something that most adolescent girls thought was disgusting. But her actions can be understood in another way. Through her willingness to do what none of the other girls would, she separated herself from them, and she aligned herself, albeit briefly, with the male counselor, before eventually besting him. The Nature Fakir showed that she was willing to be completely like the scientist and field naturalist honored in the Flower Finder booklet—she was going to observe the “truth about nature” directly. But in doing so, she ignored another important theme of the nature study program. Girls were admonished to observe, but not to do so from a detached and dispassionate distance. They were called upon to see themselves as part of nature, as a friend to the natural world that they did not objectify with their gaze, but, rather, came to know intimately. Making Friends with Nature A lecture delivered at the Camp Andree Clark Training School for Girl Scout leaders in June 1922, titled “Why Study Birds?” gave one reason why it was important for girls to cultivate a friendship with the natural world.16 Bird study, like all nature study, was to be grounded in a “philosophic, ethical, or

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religious motive” that would allow girls to realize they were “part and parcel of a mysterious and glorious and terrible creation.” The method by which girls could come to this realization was through “unstinted and unending observation . . . of the living birds in the actual world.” The lecturer conceded that the rules of classification and the handling of specimens was necessary for the serious student, but none of this was to preempt the “study of the actual living bird in nature.” The aim behind firsthand observation was to convince the naturalist that she was “not separate from nature” and should never consider herself “an unrelated creature, amid a subservient environment which [s]he can patronizingly or affectionately dismiss as ‘Nature.’” Although this particular lecture could have come straight out of any natural theology text from the previous century, it was unusual in its emphasis on the glory of God’s creation. The more common theme that resounded throughout the nature study materials used by girls’ camps was an emphasis on intimacy and friendship with nature. Even the YWCA, the most explicitly religious of girls’ organizations, was less concerned with engendering a sense of awe for God’s creation than with stressing the joy girls could feel if they cultivated friendships with God’s creatures. True, the nature program of the Y’s Girl Reserves was sprinkled with messages such as the following: “[As] she watches the march of the stars at night or examines under a microscope the infinitesimal beauty of a flower, she becomes aware of the guiding hand of a Creator.”17 It was more common, however, for girls to experience nature’s beauty as a personal connection rather than as a manifestation of God’s grace. Girls learned to appreciate nature best when they were “discovering new bird or flower or tree friends, lounging under a cool pine tree with an interesting book or going on a hike to the top of a mountain to watch the sunset.” Girls were meant to draw inspiration from the intimacy of their relationship with nature and develop a devotion to favored aspects of the natural world. Charlotte Gulick, cofounder of the Camp Fire Girls, also taught girls to value a particular and personal intimacy with the natural world over a more generic appreciation of divine creation. In the introduction to Sebago Wo-He-Lo, a book named after Camp Fire’s flagship camp in southern Maine, Gulick related one of her oft-repeated tales of how to turn apparent failure into success. Although forced to discontinue nature walks at Camp Sebago because of lack of interest, Gulick declared herself not overly upset. She was, she professed, less concerned that her girls learn expansive lessons of nature study than that they cultivate a personal relationship with particular parts of nature: “[T]o know one bird or one tree and love them meant

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more than to know all the birds and trees of the forest, and what I wanted for them was a love for life about them.”18 Charlotte Gulick did not believe that she was encouraging an overly sentimental view of nature, nor did she see such advice in opposition to the skills of observation. She, like most camp directors, perceived little contradiction between the careful observation and proper identification of natural objects and a growing intimacy with the objects themselves. The intimate relationship that a girl cultivated with nature redounded both to her scientific acumen and to her intimate feelings for the natural world. “A string of blue beads on a Camp Fire Girl’s ceremonial gown indicates that the owner is one that loves to go off on a hike to see our welcomed-back spring neighbors—the birds—or off on a woody path to discover new plants hidden in the shade of tall trees and underbrush,” announced a Camp Fire radio broadcast.19 But a girl could also earn honors by displaying the more traditional nature study skills she might have learned in school. “Besides the nature beads there are local cap honors awarded for adding specimens to our camp museum, collecting leaves or ferns, and knowing the stories of different constellations,” added the same program. The Camp Fire Girls who presented this radio program had learned the value of mixing science and sentiment so well that they used similar language to appeal to their peers. They did not privilege one over the other, but suggested that a combination of the two would best allow the establishment of a true friendship with nature. “Did you know that a falling star is a piece of material thrown from a star or comet as it whirls through space?” asked one presenter. “A falling star or a meteor usually burns up before reaching the earth,” she went on to inform her audience. This bit of “scientific” information was paired with another important lesson that could be learned from watching the stars. “Every boy and girl listening in—even those of you who don’t go to some one of the many summer camps in Minnesota can learn about the stars. . . . It’s so much fun making sky friends,” the broadcast concluded.20 Stars were, however, a bit remote for even the most earnest camper who sought friendships in nature. More often the fauna and flora that inhabited a camp’s grounds were the first natural friends a girl made. “The trusted friendship of animals opens a new path of happiness to girls,” proclaimed the Girl Pioneer Manual. Careful observation and attention to detail helped campers to develop trust in their new natural friends and learn how to judge the character of their animal friends more effectively. Girl Pioneers learned that the “pretty bright colors” and “retiring habits” of the

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coral snake rendered this venomous animal friend “hardly dangerous.” The water moccasin, by contrast, was “ugly all the way through” with the result that “[i]ts deadly viciousness is not redeemed by any outward beauty.”21 Thus, scientific data about coloration and behavior were entwined with subjective standards of beauty, with the result that girls were taught to equate appearance and habits with the character of their animal friends. Character lessons associated with animal friends were abundant at girls’ camps, and there were particular lessons in which camp directors assumed that girls would be “naturally” interested. Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, for example, advised girls that they could benefit from “watching wise mother skunks raise their large but well-mannered families within camp bounds.”22 The same Flower Finder pamphlet that praised the “honor code of scientists and naturalists” also proclaimed, “You have always loved the wild flowers . . . and often wished that you might know something more about their life story.” A girl’s natural interest in flower friends was made even keener by certain appealing traits that these friends displayed. “Since there are mothers and fathers in the flower world, there is also marriage among flowers. Here is a bit of study which is sure to fascinate you.” The text proceeded to describe some of the “marriage customs among the flowers,” which, girls were assured, constituted the most “interesting chapter in the great book of nature.”23 A girl’s interest in the natural world, leaders suggested, mirrored her curiosity about her own nature, a nature that in this particular case revolved around domestic relations.24 Furthermore, girls at camp learned that it was not merely their home life that was being judged, and it was not only animals whose character could be exposed out in the natural world. Jeannette Marks, author of Vacation Camping for Girls, reminded girls that everything they did—indeed everything they thought—could be sensed by their animal friends.25 She warned girls not to disgrace themselves by coming to camp with a mind occupied by “unclean thoughts.” The girl who was preoccupied by such thoughts regrettably found that her ability to make friends with nature and interact with animal friends was severely curtailed. “Do you suppose that there is anything in nature which comes home to us in quite the beautiful way it once did?” she asked rhetorically. “Even the little rabbit we meet in the woods will not greet us in so friendly a way,” Marks warned. Thus girls learned that their friendship with the natural world was a reciprocal arrangement. While nature study might teach girls how to make character judgments about potential animal friends, girls themselves would also be judged by the natural world.

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Perhaps it was this scrutiny that made girls less than enthusiastic about nature study at camp, or maybe it was the fact that nature study had been so closely associated with school, something that even the best students wished to leave behind during their summer vacations. Whatever the reason, it is clear that girls just didn’t take to nature study lessons.26 A 1933 report from Girl Scout National Headquarters, for example, noted that of all the proficiency badges earned the previous year only 6 percent were awarded in the “nature” category.27 Staff at Camp Tinicum, a YWCA camp located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, had girls fill out a “Get Acquainted” questionnaire when they arrived. Asked to provide their reasons for attending summer camp, only nine girls checked “to learn more about nature,” placing it in the bottom third of a list headed by “to have a good time” (ninety-seven votes) and “make new friends” (sixty-two votes). Two weeks of organized nature hikes and lectures only made matters worse. In the “Who’s Coming Back” survey distributed at the end of the girls’ stay, “learning more about nature” had lost ground, garnering just two votes, and outscoring only “get good ideas to carry back to my YWCA group” (one vote) and “get help with personal problems” (no votes).28 Girls clearly wanted to make friends in nature—though not perhaps with nature. And while they enjoyed being in nature, they did not necessarily want to study it. This led directors to promote another facet of the nature program that held more appeal for their girls.

Real Woodcraft Sturdy, independent, self-reliant, [the girl] is now demanding outdoor books that are genuine and filled with practical information . . . and teach real woodcraft. —Lina Beard and Adelia Beard, On the Trail: An Outdoor Book for Girls, 1915

Woodcraft, the more popular part of camps’ naturecraft program, encompassed a great many skills. Mapmaking, animal tracking, and trailblazing all counted as woodcraft, as did whittling and outdoor first aid, knot tying and the proper use of a hatchet. What bound these varied skills together as woodcraft was their ability to confer upon the girl who mastered them “the pluck of the pioneer with the craftsmanship of the artist.”29 Camp directors also impressed upon their girls the belief that skills mastered were positive character traits acquired. Learning woodcraft would make girls, as the Beard sisters phrased it, “sturdy, independent, [and] self-reliant.” Girls who

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followed in the footsteps of their pioneer ancestors and mastered the skills of woodcraft entered a fellowship of other hardy souls. When it came to woodcraft and pioneering, women involved in the camping movement frequently employed a rhetorical strategy similar to that of advocates of nature study. They repeatedly stressed that the impetus for pioneer camping came from the girls themselves. A Camp Fire radio program that aired in St. Paul, Minnesota, asked its listeners: “Don’t you wish that you were rolling up in a blanket to sleep under the stars right now?” The question’s follow-up left little doubt of the correct answer: “It’s a thrill that many Minnesota people have experienced. The technique of sleeping and eating in the out-of-doors is much fun to acquire and more fun to do.”30 Brochures advertising the YWCA’s Camp Tinicum claimed that at night “girls like to take their own blanket and sleep under the stars,” while during the day they enjoyed “blazing trails in the thick pine woods around camp.”31 The Girl Scout publication When You Hike did not define woodcraft in such specific terms, but made it equally clear that it was what girls really wanted. “From your girls’ point of view woodcraft means fun, adventure, endless variety, sun and exercise,” leaders were informed.32 Accordingly, when Scouting’s national leadership reviewed “developments in Girl Scout camping” in 1926, they stressed “the tremendous appeal that primitive camping has to the adolescent girl. The American girl with her pioneer ancestry is particularly stirred by tales of frontier days, and the Girl Scouts feel that living in the woods and making as few compromises with nature as possible, are of inestimable value to girls who are being further and further removed from the more simple ways of living through our urban existence.”33 Consequently, local directors were advised to establish more “pioneer units” in which girls could “learn many of the ways in which to be comfortable with only nature’s resources and their own ingenuity to work with.” Any old style of camping certainly would not do, since it was only pioneer camping that could facilitate the development of girls’ ingenuity. “Girl Scout camps everywhere are getting away from the boarding house variety of mass camping and the old fashioned camp which was merely a school removed to rural surrounding,” the report announced proudly. “Girl Scouts are learning to camp.”34 But what exactly was pioneer camping? Opinions differed both between and within the major girls’ organizations. Sometimes pioneer camping was simply getting “away from the impediments of civilization.”35 Occasionally, it was more specifically defined: “A Pioneer Camp is one where the girls do their own cooking. Equipment is set up before the girls arrive. Board

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floors for tents and permanent stone stoves are allowable,” wrote Girl Scout camp committee secretary Louise Price. She went on to describe a “Primitive Camp,” a configuration that most organizations referred to as pioneering. “The girls select their own site set up and take down their own tents . . . build their own fireplaces, caches, latrines and so forth,” Price explained.36 However they defined pioneering, what leaders all agreed upon was how proud they were of the girls who had heard “the joyous exhilarating call of the wilderness and the forest camp” and who had responded to it by learning the skills of their pioneer ancestors. In offering suggestions for “how Scouts can rally for Scouting,” National Headquarters suggested that girls hold outdoor rallies that highlighted pioneering skills. Program suggestions included “demonstrations of packing for camp; arriving at camp, and unloading; wood and water getting; firemaking; cooking; lean-to built or tents pitched.”37 Girls were also encouraged to emphasize their pioneer affiliation when they held fund-raising bazaars. “The whole affair might be arranged like a camp,” the Rally recommended, with “[i]tems for sale . . . placed in tents, and camp lunches “cooked over an imitation camp fire.” The article concluded, “For the grab bag, of course, the camp kettle is the obvious receptacle.”38 Leaders clearly felt that the public would concur that girls who adopted pioneering were worthy of their support. Occasionally, directors worried that the real woodcraft skills they so highly prized might prove to be a little bit much for their girls. A leader from Philadelphia who attended an outdoor school held in Colorado Springs in 1928, for example, recorded the following advice in her notebook: “[D]o not sit or lie on bare ground—it is harmful & likely to cause sickness.”39 Notwithstanding such cautions meted out at private training lectures, leaders were reluctant to voice restrictions in public. “Can you sleep in the snow?” asked the Scouting publication When You Hike.40 Although the answer was yes, provided a girl had the “right equipment,” the authors admitted that “it is generally not advised for Girl Scouts.” Obviously uncomfortable with even this practical restriction on pioneering skills, the authors enjoined readers to remember that “our Alaska girls know how.” Leaders were uneasy about placing limits on woodcraft because they feared that in doing so, they would place limits on girls’ ability to prove themselves. One of directors’ favored ways of demonstrating how competent and reliable girls became as a result of real woodcraft training was what they called “outdoor emergency work.” “The gain that can be received from closer contact with The Great Outdoors which means increased knowledge of wild life of all kinds, increased ability to handle ourselves with ease in

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emergencies and the joy of living in the open is inestimable,” suggested the brochure advertising the Girl Scouts’ Camp Odakota.41 Invoking a pioneer past when individuals living on the frontier depended on no one but themselves, leaders believed that the wilds of camp was the most authentic place for girls to learn emergency work. All girls’ organizations awarded honors and proficiency badges for first aid, and while some skills were centered on the home, many depended on the emergencies that occurred in the outdoors. The Girl Pioneers went so far as to design uniforms that reflected the vital importance of outdoor emergency work. The official dress of the Girl Pioneers of America was a brown khaki skirt with matching belted blouse and bloomers and was given a dash of color with a neck scarf and hatband of “turkey red.”42 But this uniform was distinguished not by its likeness to soldiers’ garb (its khaki was a different color), but by a unique feature that rendered it indispensable to the pioneering girl. “The uniform has special features which make it of great value in case of accident,” the Girl Pioneer Manual proclaimed.43 “With the aid of the light strong staffs carried by Girl Pioneers when they are trailing, the skirt can be converted into a stretcher without injury to the garment.” This handy conversion was made possible because the skirt’s hems at “belt and bottom are left open, so when unbuttoned and held out flat, the staffs can be slid through.” Once completed, the skirt/stretcher could be used to carry injured Pioneers to safety. This was itself no mean task, but Pioneers were assured, “With practice any girl of ordinary strength can lift and carry another of her own size or even larger.”44 Thus, a Girl Pioneer who was properly outfitted with uniform and walking stick was also a pioneer ready to respond to even quite serious outdoor emergencies. The efficient manipulation of skirt, scarf, and staff did require some practice, the Girl Pioneer Manual proudly acknowledged, and, therefore, girls were advised to consult their handbooks for detailed instructions regarding the Girl Pioneer Uniform Drill. Leaders of Pioneer Bands were advised that the Uniform Drill “should be frequently practiced as soon as a Pioneer group has its outfit,” but girls with outfits did not necessarily have walking sticks, and that meant that a resourceful leader would have to improvise. Leaders were informed that “good strong rake handles will answer” for the lack of a proper staff. Once the Pioneers were “[f]ully equipped, with neck scarfs tied in four-in-hand knots, carrying their staffs upright in the right hand and resting on the right shoulder,” they were ready to begin. Leaders were instructed to “have the Pioneers assemble ready to march into the meeting place,” so girls were sure to begin the Uniform Drill in the right spirit.45

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Girl Pioneers who spent hours rehearsing the Uniform Drill might have dreamed, like their peers in Girl Scouting and Camp Fire, of emergency situations that allowed them to demonstrate their prowess. The fact that many girls took outdoor emergency work so seriously was not lost on those inclined to poke fun at girls’ efforts. Many Scouts “live in hope that an emergency will arise making it possible for them to demonstrate their pioneer woodsmanship,” snickered an article from the Nashville Banner.46 Despite the ribbing girls endured from outsiders, their leaders remained convinced that the children themselves were profoundly grateful for the opportunity to prove themselves through their emergency training. “Girls and boys admire heroes and heroines who have kept their heads in emergencies,” Scout leadership proclaimed. They “like to imagine themselves making dramatic rescues and meeting crises with coolness and competence.”47 In short, woodcraft emergency training gave girls the opportunity to be heroes—a role not generally conceded them by the larger society. Importantly, the heroism that girls could display via their woodcraft skills was not a gender-specific ideal. The soldier upon whom girls patterned themselves during the war might have been the very personification of heroism, but his uncompromising masculinity had proved to be inappropriate for girls who aspired to heroism themselves. Pioneer ancestors, however, were both male and female; thus, both boys and girls could admire them and aspire to be like them. Furthermore, even the heroic pioneer scout himself was not a rigidly male icon. In emergencies he acted as “doctor and nurse combined.” True heroes, leaders of girls’ organizations suggested, did not stop to ask whether a desperately needed task was men’s work or women’s work; they kept their heads and did whatever was required of them. Knot Really for Girls Leaders stressed the acquisition of woodcraft skills—emergency or otherwise—because it gave girls access to a less rigidly gendered definition of heroism and competence. There is “no sense of power and resource like that which comes from the ability to get on easily and handily with boats and ropes and fires and tents,” proclaimed the Rally. “Primitive women knew all about these things quite as well as primitive men, and women today are giving girls everywhere an opportunity to find their way about the woods as deftly as their brothers.”48 Yet even as leaders congratulated themselves for providing their girls with opportunities equal to those of young men, they inadvertently undermined their own position. When leaders argued that their girls should emulate pioneer ancestors, their position was unassailable

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because the proposed role model was mythic. However, when they suggested that girls should have opportunities equal to those of “their brothers,” they moved into a much less secure position. While critics could not really argue that girls should abandon their pioneer heritage, they could place myriad caveats and conditions on claims for equality with real live boys. In The Woodcraft Manual for Girls, Ernest Thompson Seton issued a plea for “campcraft” equality by suggesting that all self-aware youngsters would want essentially the same training. “Every boy looks forward to it and every girl would if she knew the fun and help she would get from camping out.”49 While describing the “degrees” a child might earn while engaged in campcraft, Seton acknowledged that some work would differ between the sexes, but he added, “In many cases, however, both boys and girls may select the same Exploit or Degree.” This was a highly desirable outcome, Seton explained, because “we believe that a sharing of many experiences would help greatly in solving some of the problems which we are facing at the present time.”50 Seton seemed to be advocating a worldview in which boys and girls shared responsibilities and interests. This position, however, shaded easily into one that placed companionable relations between the sexes, and not a girl’s individual development, at the rhetorical center of arguments advocating the acquisition of woodcraft skills. In Vacation Camping for Girls, for example, Jeannette Marks advocated a strenuous outdoor program for girls. She believed that they could prove their competence and test their mettle in the pursuit of outdoor challenges. And yet, as often as she cheered girls on to great feats, she backpedaled on the reasons why they should attempt them: “A girl who has learned to camp will not only have her own pleasures greatly increased, but she will also add to those of her friends, becoming a better companion for her chums, her father, her brother.”51 Marks, whose own life had precious little to do with men, could not bring herself to advocate unequivocally that a girl learn woodcraft skills for her own sake alone.52 From Marks’s suggestion that girls’ outdoor skills redounded to the greater welfare of their relationships with male family members, it was a short step to an argument based on what historians call the companionate marriage ideal. Sex role behaviors converged within the confines of the companionate marriage as men and women shared activities, but what this generally meant was that women were granted cultural clearance to do new things for the sake of pleasing their husbands. Leaders of girls’ organizations, who perhaps feared they were going too far in what they suggested girls could be, used the language of companionate marriage as a safe fallback position.

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“The girl learns to love to be out of doors and to do out-of-door things, all of which make for a better all-round development, mentally, morally, and physically, and incidentally make the girl a better companion for her father, her brother, and later on, we hope for her husband,” suggested the Rally.53 Thus, arguments for the justification of woodcraft skills for girls devolved from shared heroism to a genial sense of camaraderie to becoming better companions for future husbands. The further leaders drifted from the image of the hardy pioneer woman, the less they were able to suggest that woodcraft skills had important ramifications for the development of a girl’s character and her ability to act as a competent individual in the outdoors. There was a particular camp activity, knot tying, that well illustrates the initial promise and eventual decline of woodcraft skills, as well as the degree to which arguments based on relationships rather than individual competence, undermined woodcraft training. In their early years, all girls’ organizations considered the ability to tie knots central to woodcraft training and emblematic of girls’ character. A Rally article titled “Captains of Their Souls,” proclaimed that “aside from their various technical abilities of knot-tying [and] semaphoring . . . Girl Scouts can be counted upon for self-control and self-policing.”54 Camp Fire Girls earned honors by tying ten standard knots, which could include practical knots used to secure a boat, tent, or horse, as well as “fancy or heraldic knots” used to trim a pillow or dress.55 The first edition of the Girl Scout handbook announced, “Everyone should be able to tie knots. A knowledge of knots is useful in every trade or calling, and forms an important part of a Girl Scout’s training.”56 By the handbook’s 1920 edition, it was no longer self-evident that knots were important to girls. “It doubtless seems very strange to you that a Girl Scout should have to know how to handle a rope and tie knots according to rules,” admitted Scouting for Girls. However, girls still had an incentive to tie knots. Although no proficiency badge mandated them, the tenderfoot test required that girls learn to tie four different knots with ease and accuracy. By the 1930s, however, even the inclusion of knot-tying skills in the tenderfoot test required an explanation. A Philadelphia captain recorded this catechism-like justification for a skill that appeared to be obsolete: “Why do we have knots in the tenderfoot test?” Because knot tying “coordinates mind and muscles.”57 A woodcraft skill that had initially been defined as universally important to a girl’s professional success, and emblematic of her strength of character, now had to be justified at every turn. Although girls’ knot-tying skills were clearly in decline, they were still closely enough associated with Scout’s woodcraft aspirations that Life

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magazine chose to feature them in its Girl Scout issue. Woodcraft was an easy mark and in “Knots for Girl Scouts,” Life poked fun at both the individual and relational benefits that mastery of knot tying supposedly conferred upon girls.58 According to girls’ leaders, woodcraft skills made their campers better companions for male family members. This was not so, according to Life. A “good knot much favored among all grades involves twisting Father around the little finger. It is generally resorted to after Father has tried to tie up an allowance.” The magazine also turned the ideal of the companionate marriage on its head. “The tying of the matrimonial knot . . . is popularly supposed to be performed by a minister or civil official. All the more difficult preliminary stages are the work of a painstaking girl scout. It might be added that nowadays farseeing scouts are getting to know more and more about untying that knot,” the article joked. Life agreed that girls were assuming new attitudes toward relationships, but this change of perspective led not to a greater sense of companionship and shared responsibilities, but to the abdication of those ties. “The girls like a true lover’s knot as well as any. Although they regard it as a fancy piece of work not necessarily of any permanence. While it may be termed a kind of slip-knot, it is in no sense a hitch.” The author of “Knots for Girl Scouts” implied that girls had not elevated their character by learning woodcraft; rather, they had come to believe that the rules of good behavior did not apply to them. “With all such modern knots and their tying, the girl good scouts are most adept. But few of them keep up a knowledge of such oldtime favorites as home ties and ‘shall nots,’” the author concluded. Knots notwithstanding, leaders often only had themselves to blame for making the arguments that their critics then took to excess. Nevertheless, leaders were still irked that the public did not take their girls’ pioneering prowess seriously, or appreciate the character benefits that accompanied the acquisition of woodcraft skills. “There are girls in the Girl Pioneer Organization who are as proficient in lighting a fire without matches as any of the Boy Scouts who make much of the feat,” grumbled Lina Beard, clearly put out that her brother’s Boy Scouts had received all the credit for woodcraft skills that her Girl Pioneers had also mastered.59 This lack of appreciation for girls’ abilities caused leaders in the camping movement to up the ante on woodcraft training. Leaders argued that their girls were clever and competent enough to perform woodcraft chores that involved the use of tools typically associated with men. Surely girls who wielded axes and hatchets with aplomb could lay claim to both a hardy pioneer heritage and a sense of equality with the Boy Scouts next door.

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The Tools of Woodcraft When a Girl Scout learns what vigorous fun it is to use an axe, she will spend many of her odd moments chopping. —“Camp Programs,” pamphlet from Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council

The crossed axes that adorned the Girl Scout’s Pioneer proficiency badge made it perfectly clear that the tools of woodcraft played a key role in a girl’s reclamation of her pioneer heritage. A girl whose uniform boasted the Pioneer badge would be able to say that she knew how to select and fell trees that were suitable for either building or fuel; how to build a latrine and incinerator; and how to construct, with the aid of three Scout companions, a shack capable of housing all four of them.60 Girl Scouts might have “vigorous fun” with their axes, but they also applied them to large and important woodcraft projects and, in doing so, constructed tangible symbols of their pioneering competence. However, when girls wielded pioneer tools—which included rod, reel, and rifle, as well as pickaxes and hatchets—they were handling instruments that were almost universally equated with the hardy masculinity of the American sportsman, and thus tested the limits of pioneering for girls. Girls’ organizations encouraged campers to take the handling and maintenance of their woodcraft tools very seriously. The Outdoor Book of the Camp Fire Girls, for example, gave exhaustive directions for the use and care of the ax, which girls were admonished to “treat as a friend.” Girls learned special techniques for chopping wet wood and splitting kindling, and were instructed on how to keep their axes properly honed and safe from fire or frost. Although girls were invited to use The Outdoor Book as a guide, they were advised that book learning could not take the place of genuine field experience. “To become skillful . . . watch an expert and imitate what she does,” girls were told.61 Camp Fire Girls were encouraged not merely to pursue competence, but to cultivate expertise. Yet even the most skilled woodswoman operated under some restrictions. “Girls should not chop down trees,” The Outdoor Book cautioned; “that is the reason we are omitting directions for tree felling.” Although barred from some activities, Camp Fire Girls wielding axes were taken seriously enough that authors of The Outdoor Book felt the need to explain why they withheld certain instructions. Girl Pioneer founders Adelia and Lina Beard, however, felt no need to place restrictions on what girls could do with their axes. Not only did the Beards provide instructions on “how to fell a tree” in On The Trail: An

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Outdoor Book for Girls, they included directions on how to build dozens of pieces of camp furniture in both On the Trail and The Girl Pioneer Manual. From stripping saplings to felling trees large enough to pose a danger when they toppled, Girl Pioneers were clearly expected to spend many of their odd moments chopping. Illustrations in the manual showed girls how to use tree boughs to cover lean-tos, build privacy screens, and create the ubiquitous pine bough bedding. In addition to constructing camp furniture with boughs, girls were taught how to trim larger branches to serve as upright supports for outdoor shelters and how to whittle smaller pieces of wood into numerous camp amenities. The Beards provided girls with so many examples of what they could do with their axes because they believed girls would reap a multitude of benefits from the proper use of real woodcraft tools. To the Beard sisters, the diminution in the design of women’s tools signaled a corresponding decline in women’s ability to handle themselves adequately in the outdoors. In describing the items girls should bring to camp, Adelia Beard advised them to carry “a good substantial jackknife, not a little pearl handled pen-knife, a knife with blades that are sharp and strong.”62 Like the woman with the fancy cane who foolishly attempted to go for a strenuous hike, a camper armed with an ornate, and therefore painfully inadequate, tool would find herself unable to act as a Pioneer. The Beards advised that “the girl of to-day should understand, as did the girls of our pioneer families how to handle properly a hatchet.”63 Once outfitted with the proper tools and the proper attitude toward them, a girl was ready to reap the benefits woodcraft tools brought her. “She will find a genuine thrill in doing real pioneer work with pioneer tools,” they concluded. Girls who took the work and the tools of pioneering seriously found that by extension, they took themselves seriously. Like the Beard sisters, Girl Scout leaders encouraged their charges to learn how to handle real tools of woodcraft. Wary, perhaps, that girls might emulate Boy Scouts’ alleged penchant for clear-cutting their camps, Scouting leadership tended to emphasize the use of knives over axes. Louise Price, for example, recommended that girls practice “[k]nife craft, whittling and possibly some elementary woodcraft and the use of the knife, particularly in connection with firebuilding.”64 The Rally, and later the American Girl, carried numerous advertisements for the official Girl Scout knife, complete with matching leather sheath that snapped smartly onto a Scout’s belt. But the Girl Scout knife was not to serve as mere ornamentation, as witnessed by the many Rally advertisements that emphasized its utility and proper handling. “In making a fuzz stick are you sure of your knife?” queried one

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Figure 15. The Girl Pioneer Manual included instructions for the creation of camp furniture, from simple pine-bough beds to absurdly complicated outdoor dressing tables. This image shows design ideas for cooking apparatuses and a privacy screen.

ad, referring to a frayed stick that Scouts used to light fires.65 But girls did not have to limit themselves to the relatively simple project of whittling a fuzz stick. The American Girl promoted a contest called “What I Can Make with My Girl Scout Knife” in which girls were encouraged to develop higher-level skills and creativity with their blades.

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Figure 16. An ad for woodcraft tools from a 1939 Camp Fire Outfitters catalog. Note that the “lightweight axe” can double as a “camp mirror.” By permission of Camp Fire USA.

Axes and knives, however, were not the only woodcraft tools girls picked up. In the summer of 1934, a group of girls at the YWCA’s Camp Tinicum outside Philadelphia grabbed a few fishing rods and headed down to the creek, mostly in an effort to escape the unbearable heat. They lazed about the better part of the day, catching a few “sunnies,” which they tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to persuade the camp cook were worth the effort to “fry up.”66 However, despite fishing’s long-standing acceptability for women—in 1869 Winslow Homer had painted The Fishing Party, in which three Victorian women, bedecked in frilly petticoats, enjoyed an angling outing—the extant record shows that the sport never figured prominently at girls’ camps.67 Adelia Beard may have believed that girls in handling “their own rods help supply the table with fish caught by themselves,” but there is no evidence to suggest that she described a widespread phenomena.68 Still, the image of a pioneering girl who could supply the needs of the camp dining table had wide appeal. In Vacation Camping for Girls, Jeannette Marks

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advised readers not to include any kind of preserved meat among their provisions because “all that is needed for use you can get at the end of your fishing rod or through the barrel of your shotgun.” But when Marks advocated the use of a gun, she staked out a position few girls’ organizations were willing to embrace.69 The Girl Scouts displayed an uneasy ambivalence toward the issue of guns. The very first issue of the Rally included a report from the Pansy Troop of Pleasantville, New York, who had enjoyed rifle practice during their weekend of camping on Juliette Low’s Westchester estate.70 Almost a year later, the Rally again implicitly endorsed gunnery for girls when it reported that Janice Newberger of the Manhattan Council had won a medal for marksmanship at the Scudder School rifle range on the Upper West Side.71 Although it is possible to view Miss Newberger as an expert marksman who just happened to be a Scout, it is impossible not to see some sort of official Girl Scout sanction for rifle practice held on the property of its founder. Indeed, the frontispiece of the 1920 Girl Scout handbook displayed an image of Magdelaine DeVercheres, “the First Girl Scout in the New World,” standing proudly with her gun in hand.72 Although ensuing years saw no further mention of rifle practice or champion sharpshooters in the pages of the Rally, the subject had not completely disappeared. The National Camp Committee was occasionally confronted with questions from local officials about the appropriateness of gunnery at camp—questions it did its best to evade. When leaders of Scout camps from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, wrote the national office to inquire about rifle practice, they presented the camping committee with a quandary. “None of the Committee felt gunnery should be encouraged although no one felt he would forbid it absolutely,” committee members mused. Instead of issuing a firm declaration, the committee reminded local leaders that “guns handicap the nature program by frightening the animals” and advised more “camp-y activities” such as archery or dart throwing in place of gunnery.73 Reluctant both to override local control and to discourage girls from obtaining certain skills, the committee tried to exert its will by emphasizing the woodcraft program rather than issuing a prohibition against the use of even the most controversial woodcraft tool. Official Camp Fire publications rarely addressed the issue of guns and girls, but given Grace Gallatin Seton’s involvement with Camp Fire, it must have come up in private conversation. Grace Seton, Ernest Thompson Seton’s first wife, was a quirky, voluble, and opinionated woman who

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was frequently at loggerheads with the more staid members of Camp Fire’s governing board.74 Seton was an outspoken suffragist and seemingly tireless clubwoman and world traveler who chronicled her journeys in memoirs such as A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt and Yes, Lady Sahib. Her obituary in the New York Times noted, “Even as she was shooting rapids and going on dangerous jungle trips, Mrs. Seton found time to study native life in the numerous countries she visited.”75 She was also a crack shot. In A Woman Tenderfoot in the Rockies, Seton told the story of a trip that she and her husband took through the rugged American West just before the turn of the century. They traveled long miles on horseback, sometimes in the company of guides, sometimes making their own way through the mountains. A Woman Tenderfoot contained plenty of advice for female readers who aspired to follow in Seton’s footsteps; she mixed tales of adventure with tips for packing saddlebags, recommendations for “travel costumes” of her own design, and advice about guns. “In your husband’s box, ammunition takes the place of toilet articles,” she wrote, but “I shall pass over the issue of guns with the bare mention that I use a 30–30 Winchester smokeless.”76 But Seton, who, her husband admitted, was frequently the best shot even on their professional big-game expeditions, did not pass over the issue of guns lightly. Guns and hunting come up regularly throughout her book, and Seton paid particular attention to telling the story of when she bagged her first elk. Seton obviously meant to set the scene as carefully as a hunter stalking her prey. She described the landscape and weather as well as the circumstances of the elk’s first sighting. She offered advice on where to aim so as to minimize the animal’s suffering. Finally, Seton was ready to fire. “My Woman’s soul revolted,” she informed her readers, “and yet I was out West for all the experiences that life could give me.” True to her reputation as an expert shot and, just as important, true to her “woman’s soul,” which would never cause unnecessary pain, Seton brought the animal down with a single shot. Afterward, she reflected that “I committed murder,” yet she also acknowledged that the “murder” earned both her and her husband a certain prestige among the mountain guides, who had previously treated them as, well, tenderfoots. Seton’s expert shooting elevated her in the men’s eyes and “from that time, the brotherhood was open to us,” she reported with unmistakable pride.77 Members of the Camp Fire leadership never approved of gunnery, perhaps because they, like their eccentric former board member, knew that when used with skill, guns had the power to turn women into members of “the brotherhood.”78

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Gunnery with Cameras Uncomfortable recommending the unrestricted use of guns, leaders looked for another tool of woodcraft that could confer upon girls some of the power inherent to “the brotherhood” without burdening them with the taint of murder. They did not have to look very far. For decades, the camera had functioned as a stand-in for the gun among well-bred ladies and among gentlemen who did not care for blood sport. The trope of the camera as surrogate gun was so widely used because it functioned on so many levels. Nineteenth-century domestic photography had been defined not only as artistic expression, but also as an active, indeed strenuous, physical pursuit. Distancing themselves from other crafts that largely had become prefabricated and mechanistic, adherents of domestic photography depicted their art as an interactive framing of the world. Women constructed their own point of view and exerted control over their world when they framed a “shot.”79 Parallel to the men who had made guns an integral symbol of the “strenuous life,” leaders of girls’ camps adopted the camera as a recognizable icon of fortitude, and as an instrument that conferred upon its user the ability to assert control over the natural world. Lina and Adelia Beard were so taken by the powers of the camera that they devoted an entire chapter of The Girl Pioneer Manual to its virtues and proper use.80 “Those who go a-gunning with the camera stalk their game as carefully as any hunter with a gun,” Pioneers were assured. Girls were given detailed descriptions of how their woodcraft skills would add to the thrill of the hunt. Intimate knowledge of an animal’s habitat helped girls to spot their quarry, after which their stealth and tracking abilities helped them follow it unawares. Next, a Girl Pioneer applied her knowledge of natural camouflage to create a hiding place for herself and, only then, the handbook suggested, was she ready to “set [her] camera like a trap.” With camera set and a long string attached to the shutter, the hunter-photographer could “hie to [her] cover.” Carefully secreted away in the underbrush, the girl awaited her game in what the Beards suggested was a test of her nerve as much as of her hunting technique. “As the animal approaches the camera grasp your cord firmly and steady your nerves to act quickly, and when it is in focus, not before, give a quick, firm pull to the cord, releasing it immediately, and the thing is done,” the manual directed, a bit breathlessly. Grace Seton, armed with a Winchester 30–30 smokeless, obviously had nothing on the Girl Pioneer who could fire off her own perfect shot under such circumstances. Lest girls fear that the camera was merely a surrogate gun palmed off on them as a milquetoast alternative to the real thing, Jeannette Marks

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Figure 17. A Girl Pioneer photographer laying an “ambush.” Drawing by Adelia Beard, with text describing the hunt by Chief Pioneer Lina Beard.

set them straight. “The camera is one of the best guns for the wilderness. It is better to be film-thirsty than bloodthirsty,” she professed in Vacation Camping for Girls. But, she quickly assured her audience, such a preference arose not from any “misplaced sense of sentimentality, but rather from reasoned experiences and opinion.” “I do not write this way because I am unfamiliar with the pleasures of well earned or necessary game, but because I have tried both ways and I prefer a friendly life in the wilderness.” Thus, Marks assured girls that even skilled and courageous woodswomen chose the camera, the same woodcraft tool to which they themselves had access. Perhaps because Jeannette Marks had experience with both camera and gun—but was recommending that girls confine themselves to the former—she felt an especially strong desire to tout the bravery required of woodcraft photographers. Like the Beards, she suggested that a girl would “test her nerves quite sufficiently” while stealthily arranging a secretive shot, but more often she assured girls that shooting photographs depended on the same robust athleticism as hunting with a gun. True camera hunting required “just as much vigor as shooting a gun,” she announced before asking girls to imagine themselves as participants in a fast-paced hunt that

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would lead them over rough countryside in pursuit of their dangerous quarry: “How about facing, or chasing, a six- or seven hundred-pound moose, plunging down through a cut or trail, and having the nerve to press the bulb at just the right moment?”81 But, of course, cameras are not guns, anymore than Girl Pioneers were actually related to the mythic ancestor they were meant to emulate. Yet girls had been promised that woodcraft skills would give them access to unparalleled adventures. Although Scout, Pioneer, and Camp Fire leaders did try to create these adventures, most of their best efforts seem to have been paeans to the thrills of woodcraft adventure, not actual adventures. But what good is rhetoric if it does not reflect reality? Could a twelve-year-old Girl Scout shooting blurry photographs of a white-tailed deer really imagine herself the present-day incarnation of a frontier scout saving his family from marauding mountain lions? Perhaps not, but then again, given the wild excesses of children’s imaginations, perhaps the answer is yes. If we can never accurately assess the impact of fantastic story lines on actual girls’ lives, we can, at the very least, be fair minded in our analysis of the rhetoric. If we fear that a Girl Scout’s nature study achievements were somehow diminished because her badge was called Flower Finder instead of Botanist, then cannot we hope that her photographic exploits were nudged toward real adventure because she was told they were? Maybe girls could not dream of careers as geologists if they saw themselves as mere rock-tappers, but did they come to believe they were brave and capable because they earned pioneering badges? Leaders believed that the growing popularity of organized camping throughout the 1920s and 1930s was tied to girls’ sense of themselves as adventurers. And yet the very success of pioneering camps ironically thwarted any attempts to provide actual adventures. As “natural” camps continued to gain popularity, they became more institutionalized, and directors who had previously scorned the “routine and institutional setting” of war camps came to preside over camps that looked very much like them. The ease of repeating what had been done the year before, and the year before that, made camps into mature organizational structures that grew more stable, but also more staid as time wore on. In their programming and physical plants, camps had become quite settled. Witness the way in which the camp committee of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Scout Council had to retool the requirements for the Pioneer proficiency badge, emblem of a girl’s outdoor competence. Since its physical plant was well established and there were no more building projects

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left, the committee decided that aspiring Pioneers could earn their badge by knocking down the present lean-to and rebuilding it in another spot.82 Camps would continue, even prosper, but real pioneer camping, like the frontier before it, was largely disappearing. The Girl Scout book Campward Ho! may have included following ditty: “How’re you going to keep us happy at home, / After we’ve been to camp? . . . / How’re we going to live in a civilized town, / After we’ve been to Camp?” but the truth was that the adventure for which girls had come to camp was increasingly difficult to find—so much so that directors soon felt the need to offer trips away from camp to satisfy the girls who took their woodcraft skills seriously.83

Venturing Forth The necessary routine and rules of an organized camp would prove unbearable to the all-summer hiker if she did not get away from them once in a while. —Campward Ho! 1920

Only three pages after readers of Campward Ho! learned to declare civilized towns unlivable, they were confronted with the startling admission that their camps, too, were becoming “unbearable.” When girls left camp in search of the adventures it had once been able to provide, they stepped out of the carefully constructed social space that had justified their forays into the landscape in the first place. Assured by directors that they were rightly in search of woodcraft adventure—girls were to “make believe you are your own great-grandmother pioneering in the new world”—those who crossed the borders of camp in fact left their pioneer heritage behind them.84 Beyond them lay the civilized artifice from which directors had hoped to save girls, but to which they ironically returned once camp itself became civilized. Often the first step in venturing forth from camp was a rather innocuous one. Hiking was frequently touted as the vehicle by which girls could seek out the natural adventure that was eluding them at established camps. Hiking adventures began as small walks that fit easily into camp programs, but grew into trips that took girls far beyond camp boundaries. Girls who went pioneering away from their camps were often encouraged to make their hike a bit livelier with some off-the-trail exploration. Girls “need not follow a man-made trail,” advised Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts. Some girls probably took this advice, obtaining a bit of navigational assistance with the purchase of a “United States Army marching compass” manufactured by the Sperry Gyroscope Company and advertised, for two dollars,

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in the pages of the Rally. “Do your girls know the hills and woods or plains around your camp for a radius of ten miles?” Louise Price asked in a report on permanent camps; she obviously hoped the answer would be yes.85 Girls who had successfully pioneered the landscape surrounding their camps were soon ready for the next adventure—the overnight hike. Night hikes, the apotheosis of woodcraft mastery, required courage and a good constitution. The Philadelphia Girl Scout Council had a special health form that required parents to report on their daughters’ nocturnal proclivities, including tendencies toward sleepwalking and talking in their sleep. They also had to consent to potential hardships: “Are you willing for her to sleep in customary camp fashion in blankets on the ground?” parents were asked. Of course, the real adventure on overnight hikes was reserved for those who did not do much sleeping. “It is a great experience in deep woods or open plain with stars in view to sit on guard for two hours at night,” exalted the Scout publication When You Hike.86 Girls courageous enough to take their turn standing guard in the darkest night were rewarded for their bravery, for they soon discovered that the blackness was filled not with dangers but delights. The Girl Reserve Movement Manual for Advisors rhapsodized over what awaited the girl courageous enough to participate in the overnight hike: “The facing of the night (as a girl does on a bed she has made from pine needles or leaves or grass) . . . usually means the overcoming of some hidden, often not recognized sensation of strangeness or timidity.” A girl who found herself ensconced in the “great unknown spaces of nature at night” could count on an experience that would flood her with seemingly contradictory emotions that nonetheless constituted the core of this transformative experience. The “night noises and vastness of space” made girls feel “insignificantly small,” but this humility was tempered by “a spirit of brave conquest over the unknown mysteries of a night.”87 Here, indeed, was the heart of woodcraft—experiences that introduced girls to “unknown spaces of nature,” while acquainting them with the complexities of their own natures. The benefits of venturing forth, however, were sometimes trumped both by leaders’ misgivings about girls’ physical abilities and the girls’ misunderstanding of the pioneer experience. Many leaders were of a mixed mind when it came to strenuous pioneering hikes, and encouraged “sturdiness” at the same time they placed restrictions on girls’ activities. “Best to curb your ambition to outdo the other girls in strength and endurance,” warned the Beard sisters before proceeding to argue that girls should ignore

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fashion trends while hiking, since they needed “unrestricted freedom of arms and legs” for “climbing mountains or hills, scrambling over fallen trees, sliding over rocks, jumping from stone to stone or from root to halfsunken log.”88 Scout leadership warned girls not to be “too adventurous about climbing around on rocks, crags, and canyons,” and then claimed it was perfectly acceptable for girls to be out in violent storms “provided you are exercising briskly.”89 The Camp Fire Girl Outdoor Book seconded the opinion that “sturdy” girls could go tramping in inclement weather as long as they were properly equipped, but then recommended that for safety’s sake girls limit their hiking pace to 2.8 miles per hour, with a five-minute rest every half hour. Although organizations differed on which restrictions they saw fit to place on hikers, there was one issue upon which they all agreed. “A wholly satisfactory pack for girls has not yet been worked out,” lamented Scout leadership—a problem had the potential to seriously limit a girl’s pioneering ability. The problem was twofold. Most leaders were reluctant to allow girls to carry more than twelve pounds, though the Beard sisters allowed almost twice as much—eighteen to twenty-four pounds “is the average weight for a girl to carry,” they wrote. Sturdy girls who had proved their fitness could presumably transcend this restriction, and yet there was another problem with packs that even the strongest girls were unable to circumvent. “The blanket roll carried over the shoulder, across the chest and tied on the opposite side, should not be used by girls. Packs with straps crossing in front should never be worn,” warned Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts. These restrictions made it difficult for pioneering girls to be self-reliant and forced leaders to suggest that “the best method of over night camping for girls is to send the gear to the spot by wagon or truck.” Leaders clearly felt that concessions had to be made for adolescent girls’ developing anatomy, and thus they placed a restriction on pioneer hikers that not even the toughest girl could hope to overcome. Other problems that affected potential hikers were well within their ability to control. Leaders felt that girls needed constant reminders not to put fashion above practicality in choosing their pioneering clothes, especially footwear. All organizations repeatedly advised their girls about the comfort and reliability of appropriate shoes, stressing low, broad heels; ankle support; and durability. The Rally invoked medical science when it reported that a “leading orthopedic specialist” in Colorado Springs had offered free foot checks and shoe fittings as well as a three-month follow-up visit to all Scouts in a local troop.90 Mostly, though, leaders felt they were combating a

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Figure 18. This Camp Fire Girl demonstrates the proper technique for slinging a bedroll over her shoulders. Courtesy of Camp Fire USA.

cultural problem, not a medical one, when it came to pioneer footwear. Motivated perhaps by a sense of desperation, leaders trotted out arguments that they believed would have the maximum impact on girls who most needed to hear them. The wrong kinds of shoes, Girl Pioneers were warned, “not only look unattractive, but may inflict a serious handicap.” When girls repeated back the message they had learned about clothes, however, they altered it to suit their own purposes. The Camp Fire Girls of St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, put on a radio show in which they articulated the moral that they took away from what their leaders taught them about pioneer fashion.91 “Everyone wants to be attractive, everyone wants to be popular,” the program acknowledged, “and nearly all of us have had a few embarrassing moments which it makes us shudder to recall.” With that guiding message in mind, the girls proceeded to relate the story of Rosalind’s ill-fated maiden hike with her new Camp Fire friends. The girls started off early for their daylong hike and were “swinging along at a good pace.” It did not take very long for Roz to lag farther and farther behind. At first the other girls all gamely stopped to wait for her to catch up but they soon began to

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grumble in frustration. “Who wears a tight skirt and Cuban heeled pumps to go hiking?” they asked sarcastically. “And look at that poncho roll. It’s all lumpy and banging around.” Soon only Roz’s friend Betty bothered to wait for her, and when Roz finally, as she was fated to do, tripped over tree roots and sprained her ankle, the rest of the group rather uncharitably expressed their desire to leave her where she had fallen. Ultimately the group helped carry Roz back to town, perhaps because it was clear that she had learned her lesson. “Oh, I hate myself for spoiling the hike for you Betty. I’m so ashamed of my high heels and tight skirt,” Roz said tearfully to her friend on the trip back home. In the program’s conclusion, the commentator informed her audience: “It took Roz longer to become a favorite of the group” because of this incident. Roz, the audience was assured, could have prevented such a fate by “having sense enough to dress right for the occasion. You don’t go to a tea dressed for swimming, or carry golf clubs to a dance, do you? It’s simple.” Yet leaders such as the Beards who railed against “frills and finery” did so with a vehemence that left little doubt they disapproved of fashion regardless of the occasion. The Camp Fire Girls of St. Paul rejected that position. Modern girls, they seemed to say, recognized and were comfortable in many different social situations. Although it had taken Roz longer to become a group favorite, she still ascended to that height. Her high heels and tight skirt constituted a faux pas; they were not an indication that she was forever incapable of becoming a true outdoors girl. Despite their optimism that they could decide for themselves which clothes were appropriate to which occasion, girls ran into trouble when they hiked beyond the boundaries of their camps. Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts was especially careful to impress upon girls that clothing they deemed appropriate for a hike may nonetheless be frowned upon by the larger society. “Special care should be taken that girls make a good appearance in the towns and villages they may pass through,” the text warned, and “this applies to neatness of personal appearance and to their conduct.” Leaders were further cautioned, “Unless you happen to live in one of the few communities where tramping clothes are seen frequently and generally accepted, you will not want to wear bloomers or knickers in town or on trams and ferry boats where they will make you conspicuous.”92 Girls like the ones who created Roz’s radio adventures wanted to believe that they were able to make decisions for themselves, but their leaders knew better. Girls might chafe at their leaders’ scorn for feminine finery, on the one hand, and at their respect for local customs, on the other, yet leaders knew that outside the borders of the

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camp, girls’ dress subjected them to scrutiny and opened them up to criticism not only of their clothes but also of their behavior. One popular adventure story reveals the social dangers girls faced when they left the confines of camp to indulge their woodcraft skills out in the wider world. The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale, heroes of an eponymous adventure series by Laura Lee Hope, were nearly finished with school and eager for an outdoor adventure. The group of four friends decided to set out on a twohundred-mile “tramp” through the surrounding countryside, but before they left, the most experienced member suggested that they do some training for their proposed hike. When the group’s newest member questioned the use of the word “hike,” she was informed that hike was merely “suffragist lingo for walk.” And indeed, once the girls set out across the countryside they were mistaken, at every bend in the road, for suffragists. “Are you a Votes for Women crowd?” one farmwoman asked as the girls tramped past her barn. They denied any such affiliation, but the farmwoman just could not believe them. “No politics?” she asked again. “None whatever,” the girls responded—an answer that clearly relieved the woman, who only then invited them onto her porch for refreshment. After a brief rest, the girls resumed their trek, but before night fell they were once again mistaken for political women. After another woman asked if they were suffragists, one of girls, exasperated, responded with her own question. “That’s the second time we’ve been taken for them to-day . . . Do we look so militant?” “You look right peart!” the farmwoman replied. 93 Apparently, girls who went pioneering in the new world were not mistaken for their own great-grandmothers after all, but rather for political, indeed militant, girls who had to assure the people they met along their way that they had not meant to overstep their boundaries.

Too Far Away? Camp directors were in a bind. They had argued for the centrality of naturecraft skills even as they had to acknowledge camps’ inability to provide them. Despite the rewards of nature study, the thrill of using real woodcraft tools, and the mystical revelations that awaited girls on overnight hikes, girls simply did not get enough adventure out of camp anymore. “There is a dash of the gypsy in everyone of us who is worth his salt,” proclaimed the prospectus for a Pennsylvania Scout camp, yet in the very same year, 1924, results from official camp inspections found that directors struggled to “maintain a spirit of romance and the unexpected.”94 By 1938 the problem had grown so grave that the Girl Scouts published Over Hill and Dale and Far Away,

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a book detailing out-of-camp opportunities for older girls. But when girls, especially the older girls who had learned enough woodcraft to prepare them for “gypsy trips,” went in search of their own adventure, they sought a spirit of romance that surely their leaders were not expecting. A scrapbook dated from the same year as Over Hill and Dale reveals just how far these girls had strayed from the naturecraft programming that was suppose to connect them to their pioneer heritage and satisfy their yearning for adventure. The Philadelphia girls had gone on a two-week “Mariner Scout Trip” on the Chesapeake Bay and its environs.95 Scores of photographs of smiling, suntanned faces suggest that they had a good time; however, their good time did not seem to be accompanied by very much pioneering. Most photos show the girls smoking cigarettes and fraternizing with the male crew of the escort boat that accompanied them on their travels. They might have been having a good time, but they were definitely not having what Louise Price had termed a “Scouting time.” In its proper manifestation, naturecraft was meant to help girls unlock the timeless wonders and adventures that lay hidden in a camp’s landscape. But when girls left camp behind they reentered a very specific historical reality—hemmed in by social restrictions, it is true, but also expansive in its opportunities for a different kind of adventure.

Chapter 5

Homecraft Primitive Maidens and Domestic Pioneers


With a little knowledge of woodcraft, there is almost no wilderness into which a capable girl cannot go and make an attractive home. Jeannette Marks, Vacation Camping for Girls, 1913

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photograph from Our Little Men and Women: Modern Methods of Character Building shows a young girl standing atop a chair so she can reach her work. She is bent over a metal basin that rests on a rough wooden table, washing a cooking pot nearly half her size. It is not particularly surprising to find the image of a dutiful child doing her chores in a 1912 text purporting to teach “Many Valuable Lessons” about children’s “Future Usefulness.” Yet there is something incongruous about the photo. The child is not pictured at home in the midst of a bustling domestic scene; she is washing the dishes outside, in a clearing with a thick grove of trees just behind her. The photo’s caption reads: “Domestic work that may seem tiresome at home becomes fun in the woods.”1 This photo is a perfect representation of the solution posed by girls’ organizations to what many Americans saw as an intractable problem: adolescent girls’ inability, and worse, unwillingness, to perform their assigned household chores. How had even the most respectful daughters of the responsible middle classes become so derelict in their duties, and how could this situation be remedied? Scout and Camp Fire leadership were convinced they had the answer. The rival groups proposed the same rather peculiar solution to this domestic dilemma—send girls away to camp to learn skills they would need at home. And while Scout and Camp Fire leaders were adamant that they espoused very different visions of how, and why, girls should be taught homecraft skills, the fact remained that they shared a host of common assumptions. For all their bickering over the proper place of homecraft lessons in their overall program, leaders agreed 158

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that most of girls’ domestic troubles had started, ironically enough, in the home itself. Scholars suggest that the Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls who grew up in the first decades of the twentieth century did so amid a radical change in the very definition of childhood. Middle-class children, they argue, had become “useless” to a family’s economy, deprived by both law and social custom of employment outside the home. However, the same economic and social forces that rendered children useless also worked to make them “priceless,” as they assumed a pivotal position at the emotional heart of bourgeois culture.2 Parents catered to their whims, schools based curricula on their interests, and children were permitted, even encouraged, to develop distinct personalities. If childhood was becoming commercialized by the attention paid to children by the burgeoning consumer markets, they were also being “sacralized” by the sentimentality with which they were viewed by the adults who were immediately responsible for their welfare. Leaders of girls’ organizations, however, begged to differ. Camp Fire and Girl Scout leaders suggested that girls’ needs, especially in their relationship to the home, were not being taken into account. Both schools and parents still insisted that girls—priceless or not—help out at home, but refused to understand that while girls had changed, many domestic chores had not. Camp Fire and Scouting leadership believed that their homecraft programs could help bridge this divide. They would honor and value girls for their new status in the family while they found a way to redefine homecraft chores to match girls’ changed circumstances. Housework, previously scorned as sheer drudgery, would be turned into domestic chores that were “fun alive” and invested with a sense of romance and adventure. And this transformation would, of course, happen at camp—where tiresome chores could become fun if only they were performed in the woods.

Home Economics outside the Home When girls’ organizations first appeared in the 1910s, the homes in which their members lived were in the midst of transformation. Industrialization, which had reached a frenzied pitch by the turn of the century, was in the process of turning the American home into a unit of consumption rather than production. Homemakers now supervised the purchase and final assembly of the foodstuffs, housewares, and clothing they had previously produced from scratch. The end of World War I accelerated these changes as manufacturers turned their attention from armaments to appliances. More

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and more middle-class homes were connected to the power grid, making electric irons, washing machines, and refrigerators the much sought after symbols of a modern home. Although scholars debate the degree to which these so-called laborsaving appliances actually fulfilled their promise, there is broad agreement that the staggering pace of technological change and the concomitant growth of consumer culture profoundly altered middle-class households and the daily lives of the women who ran them.3 Given that many of these changes took place during the Progressive Era, they had barely begun before there were experts eager to study their impact. Home economists, who traced their discipline’s origins to the Lake Placid conferences of 1899 to 1909, took the lead in applying academic analysis and industrial innovations to the home.4 Early leaders such as Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemist and the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Christine Frederick, with her expertise in efficiency management, were quite serious about the scientific component of domestic science training.5 Modern homemakers, they believed, should be able to wield the latest technologies with aplomb and understand the complex economics of household budgets. Yet even as leaders advocated that scientific advances and precision efficiency inform work in the home, home economics was beset by troubling questions. Was work in the home truly comparable to work carried out in a laboratory or on a factory floor? Could science and engineering be put to the service of homemaking without adverse consequences? And perhaps most important, could the “products” of a model modern home—wholesome meals, clean clothes, pleasant surroundings, and above all, healthy children—genuinely benefit from being equated with the production of so many widgets? Although critics accused home economists of indifference to these questions, in reality these women did care deeply about the impact of efficiency on the emotional well-being of the home. They were just being pulled in a variety of directions. Leaders in the movement were attempting to create a respectable academic discipline at the same time as they oversaw the exponential expansion of home economics into the nation’s secondary and normal schools. Instructors caught up in writing articles, establishing curricula, and training teachers sometime gave short shrift to the emotional elements of their discipline, prompting the American Home Economics Association (AHEA) to issue correctives. Teachers “must be helped to recognize that these activities [housework] are still carried out in the home, often less efficiently than if they could be institutionalized, because they serve the more important and larger purpose, that of providing activities, experiences,

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and relationships which are important for the rearing of our children and for the continued development of members of the family group.”6 No member of the family group posed a greater challenge to the theories and practice of home economics than the adolescent girl. The central question was whether a girl should be treated simply as a family member, that is, another recipient of the homemaker’s domestic attentions, or instead should be viewed as a future homemaker, and therefore rigorously instructed in the art of domestic science. In short, should the home economics movement relate to the adolescent girl as object or subject? Professionals could not seem to decide. The proliferation of instruction in secondary schools suggested that the girl was easily seen as a passing incarnation, important chiefly as a harbinger of the wife and mother she would one day become. Yet the AHEA was clearly uncomfortable with this interpretation of girls’ role. The association issued numerous directives over the years that all said essentially the same thing—take the girl seriously as a person in her own right. A 1933 report went so far as to say that the very success of the entire movement rested on the ability of instructors to evaluate a girl’s “rightful place as a member of a family in relation to its other members.”7 Rank-and-file home economics instructors may have been reluctant to follow these directives, but leaders of girls’ organizations had no such qualms. In fact, Scout and Camp Fire leaders often bragged that they were best able to teach homecraft skills. What made their position tenable was their absolute confidence that they, more than parents or teachers, could work effectively with adolescent girls. Parents could be blinded by love, or exasperated by youthful rebellion, while teachers had their professional interests to consider. Girls’ organizations, leaders argued, were run by disinterested individuals who kept girls’ needs foremost in their minds. Their understanding of a girl’s relationship to housework was not influenced by fears of a lesson plan gone awry or anger over dishes left unwashed. Camp Fire and Girl Scout leadership agreed that a girl’s future role would not be the primary focus of domestic training, but that was virtually the only thing they agreed on when it came to promoting their homecraft programs. Despite the similarity in what Scouts and Camp Fire Girls actually did, as measured by the merit badges and honors they were awarded, the rhetoric leaders used to talk about homecraft couldn’t have been more different.8 To Scouting leadership, girls were fun-loving and reasonable youngsters who were more than willing to discharge their responsibilities as long as they were given some credit for doing so. If girls found their domestic chores tiresome, it was only because they had not been appealed to in the

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proper spirit. Camp Fire leaders, by contrast, were concerned that girls’ natures had been distorted by modern culture, and in reviving their own vision of premodern domesticity, they offered a corrective to this disturbing trend.

Wo-He-Lo: Glorifying Women’s Work The word Wo-He-Lo, title of Camp Fire’s original monthly magazine, name of the organization’s flagship camp, and watchword for the entire movement, was coined by Charlotte Gulick to commemorate ideals central to Camp Fire’s mission—work, health, and love. It was not a coincidence that she chose work as the element to lead off the honored triumvirate, for girls were taught that “glorifying work” was a foundational principle that would assist them in their pursuit of all other Camp Fire ideals. Despite the pivotal importance of women’s work to the Camp Fire program, cofounders Luther and Charlotte Gulick actually espoused quite different views of the nature of domestic chores. Husband and wife agreed that girls were the ones who would ultimately have to perform those chores—it was out of the question for boys to do so—but they differed on the inherent meaning of domestic work. These differences might have presented a problem for the integrity of the Camp Fire message but for the fact that Luther chose to confine his ideas about homecraft chores to his more academic, and less well circulated, publications. Gulick outlined his thinking about the nature of women’s work in a series of three pamphlets titled Wapa: Written Thoughts. Although the tracts are not exclusively about domestic labor, Gulick used them as a vehicle to make some startling pronouncements about the role that homecraft chores played in the lives of women and girls. He was uncharacteristically blunt, and given his wife’s feelings on the subject, unusually honest. “Most of the work of the home is menial,” he acknowledged, “and yet girls must learn in the home to love domestic activities.”9 Gulick did not suggest that girls simply tolerate boring chores; he asked them to love the work that many probably disliked, and that some undoubtedly loathed. Why? Wasn’t it possible simply to say that the chores must be done, and girls must do them, so just get on with it? Such pragmatism was unavailable to him, because Camp Fire taught that a girl’s genuine affection for domestic work, not simply an affectation of tolerance for it, was a direct measure of her character. Although Gulick’s straightforward statement about the mundane reality of domestic chores has the ring of truth to it, he seemed to realize that it was not entirely compatible with either Camp Fire’s directive to “glorify

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work” or its teachings on the foundation of girls’ character. Accordingly, he filled the pages of Wapa I and II with a variety of mutually contradictory efforts to elevate the status of homecraft skills. If domestic work’s menial character could not be changed, then at least society could try harder to respect the women who did it and provide them with better working conditions, he argued. Here Gulick sounded one of his favorite themes: women’s lot had recently been improved by the fact that they lived in a more open society that readily included them in the body politic. These gains, he suggested, had implications not only for women’s civic duties, but for their domestic chores as well. He was hopeful that “society’s opening to women” might alleviate the burden of domestic work even though it could not alter its essential character.10 “Woman’s work is still woman’s work,” he confessed. “The only difference is that while formally it was essentially individualistic, it can now be done socially with other women.”11 But whether he meant to resurrect a romanticized past of quilting bees and canning parties or promote innovative ideas about cooperative childcare and commercial laundries, he failed to say. Gulick’s related suggestion for changing the nature of home chores was to bestow upon them greater social status and financial rewards. “Somehow [housework] must be standardized, expressed in terms of definite accomplishment, and it must be compensated. It has no status now. A woman may be known because she is a good speaker or a good social worker or the best organizer for woman suffrage, but not because she is a good cook or because she understands the fundamentals of social life as expressed in her own nature.” “Women’s work,” he concluded, “will not assume dignity and importance until it is measured and compensated.”12 Here Luther Gulick conflated two very different ideas. The need for measuring and standardizing home chores was the staple, and uncontroversial, position of most home economics experts. Monetary compensation for housework, however, was a radical idea—one most often associated with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of Women and Economics, who argued for a complete realignment of the economic relationship between the sexes. Considering the message imparted by the bulk of his Wapa writings, it is safe to say that Gulick did not generally share Gilman’s worldview, so why did he suggest that women should be paid for work in the home? Luther Gulick was a blithely inconsistent writer, capable of articulating several mutually exclusive theories in a single text, or in the case of his Wapa writings, within a single paragraph. What his writings lacked in way of critical reflection they made up for in exuberance. Gulick believed,

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almost to the point of naïveté, that American society functioned as a selfgoverning meritocracy. Women, and their work, had been unfairly excluded from the rationality of the marketplace and would benefit from being drawn into it as soon as possible. But could Luther Gulick, a man who cherished the products that homemakers created, truly see housekeeping as just another business enterprise? Was motherhood really a mere job description? Gulick was a devoted family man who reveled in the sanctuary his home life provided, and as much as he believed in the rational marketplace, he understood that the home was built on irrational, but intensely valuable, emotions. All of which explains why, shortly after arguing for the compensation and systemization of housework, he changed his mind. Although Gulick had spoken in the language of professional home economists when he stressed the need for defining, measuring, and standardizing women’s work, he quickly admitted that he did not really care for their approach. These women had rendered homecraft chores, and the girls who had to perform them, a disservice when they “systematized and organized cooking and sewing into domestic science and domestic art (how prim and strange they do look in their new clothes) and put courses in these subjects into schools.” Notwithstanding Gulick’s argument that chores could be done better if they were done collectively, he clearly did not believe that the collective into which domestic chores should move was the school. “The result is that our children know more about the use of tools and the physics and chemistry of cooking and the art of sewing than did our grandmothers.” According to Gulick, this knowledge, which one might imagine to be a good thing, was actually quite pernicious. The “paltry lab work of home economics,” Gulick lamented, was designed to take the place of “six to twelve hours a day of real work with a real mother doing real work for real people in a real home.”13 Readers did not need a particularly active imagination to recognize that the contrast to all this reality was the artificiality of a school-based home economics curriculum. Gulick did not completely disavow the science of domesticity, but he found it lacking in substantive ways. “I am not trying to say that the science of cooking is unimportant—but that taken alone it is mechanical,” he concluded. It was the familial commitment these chores symbolized, not their scientific patina, that made them worthwhile. “To break bread or to eat salt together is a deeper thing than the knowledge of physics and chemistry involved in cooking,” he wrote. Therefore, Gulick stressed that girls needed to study the emotional significance of chores in additional to their scientific underpinnings. “The fundamental thing that the girl ought to

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learn is the kind of cooperation needed in the family; the significance of the act of eating together; the significance of the setting of the table and of the selection of the food.” This was Luther Gulick, Camp Fire founder, in full retreat from the pronouncements of Luther Gulick, progressive educator and social scientist. Consequently, the chore of “glorifying women’s work” fell to the Camp Fire founder who wholeheartedly believed in homecraft’s redeeming qualities. Charlotte Vetter, daughter of the Reverend and Mrs. John Vetter, was born December 12, 1865, in Oberlin, Ohio. Lottie, as she was popularly known, graduated from Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, and spent a year at Wellesley College before leaving to marry Luther Gulick in 1887. After their marriage, she studied medicine for one year at the American Missionary Institute in New York so she could assist her husband in his planned career as a medical missionary.14 When Luther chose not to carry on in the familial tradition of missionary work, Charlotte settled down to a life filled with writing, children, and camping. She contributed articles to a variety of magazines, including the American Kitchen Magazine and Outlook and wrote Emergencies, the second book in the popular Gulick Hygiene Series, edited by her husband. Charlotte was also a keen outdoorswoman. She was active in the Appalachian Mountain Club and served as the first president of the Association of Directors of Girls’ Camps. Most of her time, however, was devoted to collaborating with Luther in the creation and promotion of the Camp Fire movement, the work that came to define them both. Charlotte Gulick believed that the Camp Fire program could fill a serious void in girls’ education, and she often referenced her own background to explain why. In her introduction to Mary L. Read’s The Mothercraft Manual, Gulick explained why even well-educated women and girls needed additional training to complement what they learned in school. “My college studies for five years were Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics. . . . I do not remember hearing a reference to motherhood during my college experience,” she wrote.15 And so as soon as their four daughters were old enough to benefit from the lessons, the Gulicks began working out a program of activities designed to teach the content missing in girls’ formal education.16 By 1908, they were in the habit of inviting a few of their daughters’ friends to join them for part of the summer, first at their camp in Connecticut, and later on the shores of Lake Sebago in southern Maine. Thus in 1911, when the Gulicks called a meeting at the Horace Mann School to discuss the possibility of forming an organization for American girls, they already had a few years’ practical experience under their belts.

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Once Camp Fire was under way, one of Gulick’s first chores was to explain homecraft’s pivotal role in the groups’ overall mission, a task she took to with panache. “There is nothing in a man’s world to be compared in its possibilities for rich living with the creation and maintenance of a beautiful home,” she wrote.17 “I think woman’s work is inherently far more fascinating than man’s. It has, for example, the greatest variety. To let it become monotonous is just stupid. We must think as deeply and profoundly about it as men do about their work.”18 Panegyrics to the joys of domestic work aside, Gulick also had an important question to pose to her readers. Why, she asked, were women so “impatient with what they regarded as the restrictions of the home” that they “[felt] that the household environment [was] humdrum and uninteresting and incapable of calling forth their adventuresome spirit?”19 The program for Camp Fire’s 1927 leadership conference provided a detailed answer to Gulick’s question. The program was composed of a series of lessons that chronicled the historical changes that had brought women to their current position. Lesson VII of the “Discussion Outline of the Elements of Camp Fire Girl Leadership” presented the history of women’s relationship to “Home Craft” so readers could understand its central role in the Camp Fire program.20 The lesson, which explained the historical evolution of the domestic sphere, began with this question: “What in your mind constituted a home in primitive societies and throughout the ages?” The correct response cataloged a litany of changes in women’s role from “primitive” times to the current day, and in doing so contextualized the domestic problems facing the modern girl. Although much of the narrative depicted a progressive history of the home—womankind’s march forward into an ever-brighter future—the outline suggested that this domestic progress had been derailed by recent developments in America’s urban industrialized society. At the beginning of human history, the lesson taught, women’s work centered on the campfire and was dominated by child care and food preparation. As primitive society progressed and life-sustaining labors were more efficiently discharged, women were blessed with more spare time and could therefore redirect their labors into more creative pursuits. They learned how to make clothing and cooking utensils, and even began to decorate their simple living spaces with handmade ornaments. Although this progress in civilization meant more work for women, it was all for the best, since the greater demands on women’s creativity allowed them to expand their talents while keeping them focused on the home. “The work of women became more complicated along these lines as civilization advanced,” readers were informed.

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Historical change continued to work toward this progressive end of improving both the home and women’s talents until the Industrial Revolution with its machinery and mass production “did away with handwork in the home.” This was a catastrophe for both the domestic sphere and the women who labored within it because women were now isolated in the home while their old responsibilities had fled into the marketplace. “[R]eady cooked foods of today, delicatessen meals, also ready-to-wear garments, [and] amusements out of home” all contributed to the reduction of women’s work, the outline explained. Contrary to what an uninformed reader might believe, the elimination of tasks from the home was not good news for the homemaker. As the list of her productive and creative chores grew smaller, a woman lost the ability to make a home and in doing so she lost the ability to fashion herself into a worthy being. Thus women’s status diminished, according to the lesson, not only in relation to men’s accomplishments, but in women’s own eyes as well. The lesson concluded on a tautology. Women did not think well of themselves because they took no satisfaction in completing their chores; they did not like their chores because they undervalued themselves. Ironically, they had been brought to this impasse by the so-called improvements that characterized the modern home. Camp Fire’s solution to this apparently intractable problem was to acquaint girls with an earlier, preindustrial time and remind them that modernity did not necessarily equal progress. The method by which the Gulicks hoped to introduce girls to this “primitive” past was a feminine variant on their friend G. Stanley Hall’s recapitulation theory. Hall’s theory sought to reinvigorate American manhood by sending boys out into the woods where they could engage in robust physical activities that were allegedly reminiscent of a more primitive time. The Gulicks believed that it was imperative to reconnect girls to the distaff side of this lost inheritance. “[I]f we go back as far as we possibly can in the life of the race, we come to a very primitive time when human life centered about the camp-fire,” wrote Charlotte Gulick.21 The primitive hearth was both the cornerstone upon which all the “wholesome activities” of civilization were built, and a symbol of the “primitive division of labor” that civilization—and particularly modern women—had recently spurned. In expounding their theories on the domestic dimension of the “racial past” (as opposed to its physical manifestations, which I discuss in the following chapter), the Gulicks were repeating a popular refrain, although, as was their wont, they sang in a slightly different key. A strand of evolutionary thought that adherents traced back to Charles Darwin himself held that an

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Figure 19. Charlotte Vetter Gulick with her three daughters. This picture appeared in Camp Fire publications with the caption “They got a spark at the exact same time!”

increased division of labor between the sexes was a measure of civilization’s advance. Primitives could be recognized by their willingness to disregard such divisions, civilized peoples by the tenacity with which they respected them. Feminists who fought to broaden women’s employment opportunities were harbingers of society’s regression, while women who honored their “separate sphere” offered a hopeful sign that the pernicious effects of modernity might be contained. Any disagreement the Gulicks might have had with this assessment of modern women’s place in the evolution of human society was one of stress, not substance. Picking up another strand of evolutionary thought that was popular among their fellow antimodernists, the Gulicks romanticized their own personal version of the primitive. For them, primitiveness did not exist in contradistinction to civilization, but rather represented a repository of arcane wisdom that modern societies could ignore only at their peril.22 This allowed the Gulicks not merely to criticize those who wanted to do away with distinctions between the sexes, it gave them a model upon which they could base corrective measures. Hall had not been an advocate of recapitulation for girls because he didn’t believe girls could find anything worthy of emulation in primitive societies—their rugged virtues applied only to boys. But

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to the Gulicks, primitiveness contained lessons crucial for the development of girlhood; the only trick was how to make this romantic vision of outdoor domesticity accessible to those who needed it. Thanks to their years of family camping, the Gulicks had an answer. They were unapologetic about the fact that the official Camp Fire organization grew out of their family’s camping experiences. As they saw it, this was actually the ideal birthright for an organization that was created specifically for girls and centered on familial duties. In the introduction to SebagoWohelo, a hagiographic early history of the Gulicks and their Camp Fire movement, Charlotte recalled the lessons that she and her husband learned from their summers spent in Maine. Her text brims with a heartfelt appreciation of life in the outdoors. For Gulick, the “romance of simple living” permeated equally all the activities that made up their days, from canoe trips on a moonlit lake to picnic lunches in sunbaked fields. At first, the Gulicks had hired workers to help with camp chores, believing that this would free them to further enjoy their outdoor pleasures, but, Charlotte admitted, they quickly learned their mistake: “We soon found that when we camped alone and worked together, life had a richness and sweetness that was lacking when the tasks were done for us and opportunities for services were reduced by paid helpers.”23 Besides providing opportunities for service, shared chores introduced a spontaneity into camp living such that the group was able to make “life a daily adventure.” “It was soon discovered . . . that there was more romance and pleasure in eating the evening meal informally, in true camp fashion, than in sitting formally at a table,” Charlotte enthusiastically noted. Here were the beginnings of the Camp Fire program in general, and its homecraft component in particular. Both Gulicks, but especially Charlotte, was careful to explain to her peers the vital importance of leading girls outside in order to revive lost domestic skills. True, many leaders of boys’ camps articulated the “racial” benefits of camp for boys, but as Luther had suggested, boys had plenty of other places to rehearse their primitive instincts. Thanks to the deterioration of domesticity within the home, girls had only one choice. “But of more racial importance is it for women to get training along domestic lines in a play spirit. That is the reason the Camp Fire Girls are adding romance and adventure to their program for girls. A girl goes to the lake, to the river, to the woods, with her friends and cooks her dinner in good, primitive style. It is just as essential for girls to cook over an open fire outdoors as it is for boys to play their team games,” Charlotte explained in The Camper’s Own Book.24

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Once out in the natural world and provided with their very own program, girls could begin to recover the homecraft skills that industrialization and the consumer culture had taken from them. “Camping experience gives practice in neatness of keeping possessions, cooking, punctuality, sharing responsibility and difficult tasks,” Charlotte wrote. Domestic skills were combined with their reconstituted meaning, enhanced by a sense of adventure, and so reclaimed their hold on girls’ imaginations—or so leaders hoped. “I wanted them to think and discover by living in this primitive way, how this part of women’s work can be simplified, and the drudgery turned into a stimulating exercise of talent,” she proclaimed.25 This newly invigorated affection for homecraft duties could then be transferred from camp to the home, under the watchful eye of trained Camp Fire guardians. “Leaders should show the analogy between tasks in camp and home tasks,” Charlotte concluded, thus bringing the adventure of homecraft, rediscovered in the natural world, back to its rightful place in the modern home. Camp Fire literature teemed with testimonials of parents whose daughters had been reawakened to their domestic responsibilities via the interdiction of primitive training. “Recently several of the mothers of my girls have told me how much their daughters have benefited through Camp Fire work. . . . The mothers are delighted with the result of the Camp Fire year. Girls who have never been interested in house work, cooking and sewing, have developed a real interest.”26 Even parents who had been caught up in the rush of modern life were pleased, and chastened, by the power of Camp Fire’s principles. “Having awakened to the fact that girls have needs peculiar to their sex, and that our daughter required a development beyond what our preoccupied parenthood could afford her,” wrote a “concerned father,” he and his wife encouraged their daughter to join the Camp Fire Girls. “We have noted with pleasure the development in our daughter . . . of a new interest in the ‘common-place’ things which make for ‘Womanhood,’” he continued.27 Of course most parents could probably be counted on to be thrilled that their daughters willingly did their chores, but how to convince the girls themselves? The radio shows and newsletters of the St. Paul Camp Fire Girls offer a glimpse of how important it was to Camp Fire leadership that girls repeated back the homecraft messages they had been taught. “Every bit of work well done, no matter how small or uninteresting, is important in helping to turn the wheels of life,” girls solemnly intoned in the Fire Fly, their mimeographed newsletter.28 In a radio broadcast the girls asked, “Wouldn’t you like to know how to make dish washing a glorified art?”29 Any girl who expressed even a moment’s hesitation over the correct response could have

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Figure 20. The Girl Scout publication Campward Ho! tried to teach campers what fun it was to do the dishes outdoors.

consulted the Any Girl dramas that appeared monthly in the pages of her Wo-He-Lo magazine. In one play, when a Camp Fire recruit asked an oldtimer how she had chosen her Camp Fire name, the girl told her, “Minnetoska means Happy Laughter; the law of the Fire says, ‘Be Happy,’ and I have tried to earn my right to this name by washing the dishes every morning for two weeks, and being happy while I was doing it.” Camp Fire leaders filled their publications with examples of joyous girls who had learned to glorify work, and they reminded girls that these impulses were not foisted upon them, but were aspects of their own nature that they had forgotten about. “Mrs. Gulick has always been vitally concerned with girls’ problems and has molded her life, always with the idea of helping girls understand themselves and derive the fullest interpretation from life,” bragged a brochure advertising Camp Sebago-Wohelo.30 Camp Fire leadership was steadfast in its faith that their homecraft program, conducted in the primitive outdoors, was what the girls wanted and what they needed. “Of course an ideal way is to have a real summer camp in the woods, where the romantic side can be developed to the fullest,” Charlotte Gulick explained in discussing how the program would achieve its

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goal.31 And just in case potential members were under the mistaken impression that they could receive comparable training from some other organization, Gulick set them straight: “Boys may be scouts; but girls are going to keep the place to which the scout must return,” she explained. “Scouting is a masculine activity; keeping the fire burning in camp or in a home is a feminine activity.”32

Girl Scouts: Domestic Pioneering Notwithstanding Charlotte Gulick’s accusation, when Juliette Low chose the name Scouts for her organization, she had neither rejected femininity, nor disavowed a programmatic emphasis on domesticity. Rather, she chose a strategy that tried to combine homecraft with adventure. Ironically, Low’s partner in this pursuit was her friend Lord Baden-Powell, the man who had bequeathed Guiding to the girls of Britain because he believed that Scouting was too masculine for them. In his foreword to Scouting for Girls, the first American handbook that did not borrow extensively from his own writings, Baden-Powell explained how even domesticated Guiding could embody dual traits. “The name Guide appealed to the British girls,” he explained, because it invoked an adventurous heritage. The “pick of our frontier force in India is the Corps of Guides,” and these cavalry and infantry troops were chosen for their allaround courage and hardiness. However, guiding also referred to a woman’s responsibility to be a “good and helpful comrade” to her menfolk. Typically, Baden-Powell did not try to explain exactly how a girl could mange to be both a “Guide” on the front lines of Empire and a “guide” who stayed home and inspired men from afar; he merely recorded his thoughts in consecutive paragraphs and let his readers ponder the strange juxtaposition. Where Baden-Powell was content to blithely elide cheery domesticity with a sense of rugged adventure, the leaders of Scouts and Pioneers worked much harder to combine what might seem to be mutually contradictory pursuits. At times, their efforts strain credulity. A section of the Girl Pioneer manual, “Indoor Pioneering,” proclaimed that pioneering “does not belong to outdoor life alone, it is to be practiced indoors as well.” Dedicated Girl Pioneers were assured that they could embark on a “voyage of discovery through [their] own home, be it large or small,” which would reveal possibilities for pioneering that they had “never dreamed of.”33 How exactly did these possibilities, which look strikingly like housework to the uninitiated, turn into pioneering? Pioneering, girls learned, was

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not so much an activity as a state of mind. “When you make a bed you are pioneering and you will try to find the best possible way of doing it.” As long as a girl was doing her best, subduing the wilderness and subduing an unruly home became comparable pursuits. “As a Pioneer you will be glad to use the broom and duster and make your home smile with cleanness, and you will do all these things because you want to be a true Girl Pioneer; because the knowledge of them is a part of the training to make the fine woman you are going to be, because they are the means of helping others to be happy and comfortable and of making and keeping a real home.”34 Girls who aspired to indoor pioneering skills did not have to worry that changes in the modern home would leave them behind. Even in a kitchen filled with consumer goods and the newest technologies, a Girl Pioneer could find use for her training. “You will look into the question of the best soap, and towels and dishcloths, you will put system into this part of household tasks and will take pride in perfecting yourself in it.” It was true, Lina and Adelia Beard admitted, that an old-fashioned appliance might showcase a girl’s talents for “building a fire in the kitchen range,” but her pioneering skills would also find an outlet in a modern kitchen. “If only gas or electricity is used in your home you will be resourceful and contrive to use as little of either in cooking as you can.”35 Modern conveniences need not trouble the modern girl, the Pioneer Manual proclaimed, because woodcraft skills acquired in the pursuit of domestic duties always found a place in the home. The general public, however, questioned whether the adventure of outdoor housekeeping could lead girls to “invaluable discoveries” in their own kitchens. In its 1924 Girl Scouts’ issue, Life lampooned the Scouts’ contention that domestic skills learned in the woods could be flawlessly transferred to the modern kitchen. A cartoon pictured a young woman with bobbed hair and fashionably attired in high heels and a long dress, over which she had draped a checked apron. Although she was ably cooking a meal on a castiron stove, her culinary technique had clearly not been inspired by domestic science professionals. She was broiling a chop by holding it over an open flame, while in the back corner of the stove she had expertly assembled a teepee of sticks over which hung a cooking pot. A man, presumably her new bridegroom, looked on aghast from the doorway. The caption reads, “A former girl scout cooks her first dinner in her own home.”36 If the Life cartoon was not exactly fair—the Girl Scouts did not offer quite the same paeans to indoor pioneering that the Girl Pioneers did—it wasn’t that far off the mark. Girl Scouts were taught to pursue their homecraft chores in a spirit that was supposedly reminiscent of their American pioneer

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ancestors. These hardy women had domesticated the frontier by combining extraordinary courage with very ordinary common sense. Leaders suggested that the heroism of homemaking, whether on the frontier, in summer camp, or in a modern home, was grounded in a practical resolve to do what was needed. Homecraft chores need not be part of some mythic primitive past shrouded in symbolism and ritual; they were merely a pragmatic part of a vigorous girl’s daily life. A present-day Scout just needed a place where she could do her chores, supervised by someone who understood this truth. In the naturecraft program, Scouts were taught to emulate their mythic pioneer grandmothers and ignore the example of real Victorian grandmothers who squashed bugs and promenaded around well-manicured country resorts. In the homecraft program, Scouts were encouraged, however gently, to ignore the example of an ancestor who dwelled much closer to home. The Trouble with Mothers The early decades of the twentieth century may have been suffused with what historians have dubbed maternalist politics, that is, the reification of all things related to motherhood, but that period also witnessed the birth of a culture awash in images of the bad mother. From psychoanalytic theory to the silver screen, mothers were often depicted as the origin of children’s troubles.37 Sandwiched between the conflicting impulses of the culture, leaders of girls’ organizations had to walk a fine line. They were the experts on girls, allegedly knowing daughters better than Mother did, but they still promoted domesticity, and on a more practical level, they still needed parental support for their organizations. The Gulicks reminded women not to allow their education to blind them to the emotional meaning embedded in homecraft chores. Girl Scout leadership at times found fault with women’s ability to teach homecraft skills to their daughters for an altogether different reason. Mothers were problematic not because they were too sophisticated to convey the proper feeling behind homecraft chores, or because they were too old-fashioned to keep up with modern methods. In fact, their problem was not really related to domestic chores at all; the problem was that women did not understand their daughters. In finding fault with mothers Girl Scout leaders suggested that mothers dwelled too much on their daughters’ “future responsibilities as a homemaker” at the expense of helping daughters claim their “rightful place” in their birth family.38 Mothers allegedly failed to understand their daughters because the burgeoning youth culture demanded that girls take their first steps into a

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wider world unaccompanied. Historian Sally Mitchell, though writing of English girlhood, nicely sums up fears of American parents: “The new girl moved into spheres where her mother had no advice to give; she did things her mother had not done and faced issues her mother did not face—if not in reality, at least in fancy.”39 Yet the expansion of the larger social sphere cut both ways: for every unsavory commercial pursuit that tempted girls away from the family hearth, there was a new beneficial institution staffed with a bevy of experts just waiting to help parents understand their daughters’ behavior. Some experts insisted that they alone knew what was best for children; others—especially those voluntary youth organizations that ultimately depended on parents’ support—were more or less content to offer suggestions for improved parenting. Volunteer youth organizers tended to finesse the situation by declaring that only the most competent parents knew enough to entrust their offspring’s upbringing to specialists. Thus, criticism of parents’ skills was diluted with politic reassurances that outside organizations really knew best, as all the best parents already knew. The House That Runs Itself by longtime Girl Scout leader Gladys Shultz is a fine example of this muted critique of mothers. The book tells the story of Elsa James, “a modern mother, a college-trained woman who read widely and eagerly on child training and child psychology,” but who nevertheless lost control of her own home and children.40 Shultz, who also wrote a biography of Juliette Low, sounded several key themes in her critical assessment of this well-intentioned, but sadly ill-informed, modern mother. Mrs. James’s chief problem, according to Shultz and coauthor Beulah Schenk, was her erroneous belief that academic training would readily translate into the practical savvy needed by all mothers. But this was not a simple critique of educated women. Even though Mrs. James admitted, at the beginning of the book, that “her own children fell short of what they ought to be in health habits, in self-reliance, in obedience, in just about everything,” by the end she fixed every problem that had plagued her family.41 Mrs. James drew on her knowledge of architecture and child psychology to redesign her house from top to bottom—always keeping the children’s needs uppermost in her mind. A tiled entryway prevented children from tracking mud onto expensive carpets, while rearranged kitchen cabinets permitted them to fix their own snacks without making a mess. Children in a self-running house, Shultz suggested, were empowered to look after themselves, which meant that mothers did not have to rush home prematurely from club meetings just because the children might get home first. Children became more obedient because a house designed according to their

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needs necessitated fewer arcane rules and allowed them to become more self-reliant. These changes freed up mothers to look after other important elements of children’s upbringing, resulting in improved health and increased happiness for all. It was nearly impossible to miss Shultz’s point. The Girl Scouts were proud of many accomplishments, but they never missed an opportunity to celebrate how diligently they promoted self-reliance, obedience, and healthy habits among the girls with whom they worked. It was one thing for Shultz, even with her prominent ties to Scouting, to offer correctives to women’s childrearing; it was an entirely different matter for the Girl Scout organization itself to overtly question women’s fitness to raise their daughters. Privately, Scout leaders complained about the involvement of “too many mothers,” but publicly they could ill afford to alienate parents who picked up the tab for dues, handbooks, and uniforms.42 Leaders’ ambivalence about the role of mothers in Scouting led them to a series of mutually contradictory policies and pronouncements. On the one hand, it was important to show deference to the mother’s authority and wishes, especially regarding domestic matters. The Scout’s Home Service Award, for example, which girls won by performing five hundred hours of service in the home, required the approval of both Scout captain and mother. (It was the only Scout award that required a mother’s signature.)43 The Home Service Record, a small booklet issued by Girl Scout National Headquarters in which girls recorded their hours of service, was uncharacteristically deferent to parents. “Home service requirements will be decided by the parents of each Scout and are not to be designated by the Captain or Council,” the instructions read. And yet in relinquishing control over the practical aspects of domestic chores, girls’ leaders in fact gave up very little control of their homecraft program. Parents might decide which chores fulfilled badge requirements, but leaders still offered instruction on how chores should be performed, and even more crucially, touted themselves as experts on the adolescent girl whose job it was to do those chores. Scout leaders made it perfectly clear that they, not mothers, understood how to motivate a girl so she would want to perform domestic labors. “Many a girl has scorned her mother’s kitchen until, as a Scout, she has learned that it is not drudgery but ‘fun alive’ to learn to cook a simple meal and set a table correctly,” stated Washington, DC, Scout leader Evelina Gleaves in a 1926 radio address.44 Parents misunderstood girls and consequently did not appreciate the important role they played in the home. In contrast, Scouts leaders knew all about adolescent girls and thus helped them to approach homecraft chores in the right spirit.

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Given the preponderance of badges awarded for homecraft skills— national and local records both confirm that homecraft badges were awarded five times more often than nature badges—homecraft training must have occupied a substantial amount of time at weekly meetings. Leaders, however, often depicted summer camp as the natural place to teach homecraft skills. From a purely practical, if not cynical, point of view, camp was an ideal place for leaders to solve the mother problem. Directors had been granted permission to whisk girls away from maternal control and keep them under a watchful eye twenty-four hours a day. But camp offered much more than an opportunity for round-the-clock surveillance. Tiresome domestic chores became fun in the woods not because the work was different, but because camp directors knew how to affect a transformation in girls’ attitudes toward housework—helping them have “fun alive,” whereas before they had suffered through “drudgery.” Like Elsa James’s house, camps were designed from the ground up to help unleash the talents and abilities girls already possessed. An article about National Girl Scout Camp Andree Clark, “A Camp Where Girls Boss,” reveals how crucial camp was to the transformation of homecraft chores.45 The piece begins with a summary of the domestic problem that played itself out in many modern homes. “You can lead a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter to a well-appointed kitchen. . . . You can lead her to a kitchen which home economics experts have pronounced impeccable—but you cannot make her work.” At Camp Andree, however, Scout leaders proved that they had discovered a solution to this dilemma. Leaders had “found a way to persuade girls to chop wood, build fires, go marketing, and cook and serve their own dinners.” In short, Scouts at camp happily discharged the domestic chores they steadfastly avoided at home. At the root of this domestic problem, the author suggested, was the disharmony that existed between frustrated mothers and their recalcitrant daughters. To prove the point, the writer chronicled the tribulations of one particularly troubled home. A distraught Mrs. Foster had recently discovered that “her Patty was a problem.” The girl “hated everything that was good for her” and refused to accept correction from her mother, who, while well intentioned, failed to understand how teenage girls really felt. “The word ‘ought’ uttered by her mother in a precise, well-modulated voice was like a lighted match to a fuse,” and unfortunately for all involved, “‘ought’ was the pampered darling of Mrs. Foster’s vocabulary.” Once engaged, the motherdaughter battle escalated. “The girl of to-day ought to understand” that she “will probably be called upon to be a wife, a mother, and a professional

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woman,” lamented Mrs. Foster when her daughter refused instruction in some useful domestic skill. “Oh, mother! You talk like a darn old woman’s club!” daughter Patty disdainfully replied. The Foster household continued to be the scene of mutual recriminations until the summer Patty went away to Camp Andree Clark. Camp cured Patty of her adolescent rebellion within a few short weeks. After her stay at Camp Andree, the girl’s “pugnacity was no longer expended in warfare with the older generation. It was harnessed nicely to the job of subduing her physical environment and promoting her own personal development.” How did a summer of Girl Scout camping facilitate this transformation? “No adolescent girl, over-sensitive, emotional, and full of a healthy longing to be an adult, was ever treated like a child,” the article’s author observed. Camp was organized with “no arbitrary regimentation, no hard and fast regime into which every girl must fit willy-nilly. . . . In the small Andree unit each girl is a power.” In other words, Girl Scout camp directors had mastered the lessons that had given Abbie Graham’s first director so much trouble when he established “Camp Eden.” They understood that discrete supervision and a healthy dose of faith in girls’ natural abilities could transform even the most problematic adolescents. Homecraft was best practiced at such camps because there, far from the loving but restrictive influence of mothers, girls were free to become themselves. Camp allowed a girl to be “off in the woods, cut loose from family apron strings, and dependent on herself,” and this had beneficial consequences for the homecraft program. “No fairy godmother appears in the cool of the morning with a ready-made menu. So a pair of grave young things in middy blouses and bloomers seek out the camp counselor and the camp dietician to talk over the day’s bill of fare,” readers were informed. Moreover, these skills learned at camp followed girls back home, and after “a summer at Andree a girl is competent to plan meals and cook for a family of eight or more.” Homecraft skills were transferable from the woods to the domestic sphere because camp leaders dwelled not on the chores but on the girls who performed them. “To be in on the job of running her own camp household . . . gives the young ego a wholesome feeling of importance,” the writer of the article concluded. Unlike Mrs. Foster, who tried to control her daughter, Scout leaders understood the adolescent girl, and that understanding empowered girls. Many leaders believed that two weeks of summer camp could bring about the changes it had taken Elsa James five years and a brand-new home to establish. Of course, it is true that girls’ removal to camp conferred upon

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leaders the in loco parentis status that gave them control over the camp environment. But that is a rather cynical reading of an outdoors homecraft program that stressed girls’ growing independence as well as the satisfaction of a job well done. Many Scout leaders did believe they could invest domestic skills with both a robust sense of adventure and warm feelings of accomplishment. The respected captain of a popular adventure story, The Girl Scouts at Dandelion Camp, gave voice to an attitude that real-world leaders promoted: “What difference did it make in the end whether she was teaching them to build a stone chimney or how to mend a pair of stockings?”46 The answer, of course, was none, and this was because leaders—more than mothers—knew how to give girls the adventure they craved even while they performed routine homecraft tasks. Outdoor Cookery: “Adventure without Hazard” For reasons both practical and fanciful, cooking often dominated the homecraft program of camps, as it did the curriculum of the larger home economics movement.47 Cooking was arguably the domestic chore that most reliably reflected experts’ assertions that housework was much more than the sum of the time and energy that went into the labor. No matter how much foods were processed and packaged, cooking, especially “ home cooking,” retained an emotional resonance that had little to do with the actual labor. Home and hearth remained linguistically tethered, and long after home-cooked meals lost all connection to an actual hearth, becoming instead the province of tin cans and gas stoves, they remained an evocative symbol of the comfort, warmth, and sustenance previously centered around the kitchen cooking fire. Leaders depicted outdoor cookery as a natural and simple activity that nonetheless embodied these profound emotional dimensions. In The Girls’ Camp, Abbie Graham asserted that a “seemingly unimportant” food preference such as the type of butter one preferred on a biscuit in fact had a “vast significance.” “It is such little emotional convictions that send people to war, to the divorce court, and to riotous celebrations,” Graham concluded, her tongue only partly in cheek.48 Given such grave consequences, no wonder leaders declared that cooking “may become a vital part of the daily program.” For camp directors, profound emotional resonance went hand in hand with a sense of natural simplicity. “Since the Girl Scout way of camping presupposes simple camp living, much of the activity will emphasize outdoor cooking and campcraft.”49 Camp leaders were advised to begin lessons in domesticity with “fire-building and outdoor cooking . . . as the girls

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like it best.”50 Similar to their pioneer foremothers who prepared wholesome one-pot meals over an open flame and never let the campfire, that symbolic center of home life, go out, girls learned that outdoor cooking was not drudgery, but an integral part of simple living. In keeping with its honored place in the camp program, outdoor cookery was the subject of many guides and manuals. The Kellogg Company’s Home Economics Department published a pamphlet called Trail Cookery exclusively for the Girl Scouts, and in 1928 the Scouts released their own version of a trail cookery manual. Although Kettles and Campfires contained more than one hundred pages of menus and recipes as well as tips on equipment storage and sanitation, its primary goal was to establish the importance, and excitement, of outdoor cookery. Kettles and Campfires began by announcing that two “favorite Girl Scout activities join forces in this little book: cooking . . . and camping” and admonished girls that camping “loses much of its fun and zest unless every camper does her share in the novel experience of preparing, cooking and eating meals out-of-doors.”51 The text was also careful to remind girls that camp cooking was not simply the chore they hated at home transferred to the woods, but rather a new adventure. Learning “to cook at camp presents a many-sided interest that cooking at home often does not,” girls were assured.52 The St. Paul, Minnesota, Camp Fire Girls displayed an attitude toward outdoor cookery that any Girl Scout could have emulated with pride. In a radio program, a raw recruit watched in awe as her more experienced friends sought honors in camp cookery.” Each girl worked according to her experience level. A relatively new member was “going to try frying an egg on a stone,” and “she’s as nervous as an opera star,” the recruit was informed. A more experienced Camp Fire Girl took the time to explain the finer points of outdoor cookery to the recruit. She had rejected a piece of “shale rock” as her cooking stone. “See how flaky it is? That stuff would explode like nothing at all if it got hot,” she explained to the suitably impressed recruit. Finally the recruit was ready to try her hand. “Don’t get the jitters now,” the girls encouraged her, “just enclose the egg in four walls and show that you’re master.” After she had carefully arranged the “bacon walls” around her fried egg and successfully flipped the entire creation, the recruit was triumphant. “I never thought I could do it!” she exclaimed, while her new friends applauded her accomplishment. “You shouldn’t be shy after the way you’ve conquered the world since you joined Camp Fire. You’re a winner,” they told her. The girl realized her new friends were

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Image not available.

Figure 21. Girl Scouts cooking over an open fire, circa 1913. By permission of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

right; her outdoor cookery skills had transformed her. “I decided to break the spell that was over me and learn things and be happy with all the rest of you. . . . And now I can fry eggs on stones, and everything,” she concluded.53 Outdoor cookery was truly an adventure that had the potential to transform a girl’s entire personality; she could become a master and conquer the world—just by frying an egg. Fortunately for most girls who only got to spend two weeks a year at camp, the adventure of outdoor cooking was available in other forms throughout the year. A Saturday hike, for example, which culminated in girls cooking their own lunches, was frequently billed as an adventure of the greatest magnitude. Some leaders, however, recognized that these romps, a staple of the Girl Scout outdoors program, might not entirely satisfy the most rambunctious youngsters. Accordingly, the Scout pamphlet When You Hike discussed the potential dangers to girls of issuing, and accepting, foolhardy dares while out on hikes. Yet leaders did not wish to completely squelch their girls’ adventuresome spirit and encouraged them instead to “name a sensible dare that might be accepted.” What was an acceptable dare

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for a Scout out on a ramble, the highlight of which was the preparation of lunch over an open fire? “Anything that involves skill and ingenuity and adventure without hazard, as for example, one calling for speed and efficiency in cooking.”54 The adventure of outdoor cooking was kept alive in Kettles and Campfires even over the winter months, when weekend hikes were impractical and the summer camping season had faded to a distant memory. “Patrols may challenge each other to contests in planning menus, preparing special dishes, entire meals, or the inventing of recipes,” it recommended. Lest girls forget that the adventure of cookery was intimately tied to the landscape and out-of-doors, they were encouraged to pair their culinary activities with mapmaking. Girls were instructed to “make a map of the world, showing the geographic origin of the foods used in camp; another of the region surrounding camp, showing which products are supplied locally; and a third of the camp grounds, showing the location of edible plants.”55 Even as Scouts met in their community centers and church recreation halls—where surely they could have negotiated access to the simple cooking facilities required for badge work—their activities recalled the memory of camp. The notion that outdoor cookery constituted a great pioneering adventure was further reinforced in girls’ minds when the summer arrived and they traded weekly meetings and weekend hikes for a stay at camp. Constructing a fireplace and preparing a meal over it were, for example, two of the requirements for the Girl Scouts’ Pioneer badge.56 A girl who could keep a fire going in the rain or broil a chop on a stick that she had carved herself proved she was not only an outdoor cook, but also a pioneer. In fact, outdoor cookery was often the only program feature that distinguished “regular” camping from “advanced” or “pioneer” camping. Indian Run, a Scout camp near Dowingtown, Pennsylvania, advertised its Pioneer unit, named Trail’s End, as a place where girls could “plan and cook their own meals,” an opportunity that gave them “the broadest camping experience.” Girls who had graduated from Trail’s End could return the following year to participate in the Romany unit that went on gypsy trips into the surrounding countryside and took its outdoor cookery skills along. Romany campers were responsible for the wood gathering, water hauling, and provision planning that allowed them to cook two meals daily. “We feel this gives the girls an opportunity to learn new skills,” explained the brochure that introduced this new adventure, to only the most advanced campers.57 The reality of most camp cookery, however, had little to do with either adventure or girls. Summer after summer, directors were faced with the

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Herculean chore of provisioning their camps within the constraints of tight budgets, inadequate refrigeration, and questionable sanitation. Bag lunches for day hikes, stores for gypsy trips, and Sunday dinners for visiting parents all had to be carefully planned. Then there was the daily grind of running the main mess hall. Directors supervised the transportation and delivery of prepurchased foodstuffs and dickered with local farmers about fresh produce and dairy products. The sheer enormity of the task—turning out thousands of meals over the course of three months—often left directors with a less sanguine view of outdoor cookery than the one they encouraged in their girl pioneers. Moreover, many camp directors viewed their job as a viable career choice, not as an opportunity to transfer their own tiresome domestic chores to the woods. Not surprisingly, from directors’ perspective, the adventure of outdoor cookery was supplanted by concerns about the economics and science of a task they viewed as a large part of their professional responsibilities. Directors often tried to delegate responsibility to trained representatives of the newly created professional fields. For example, from their inception, large organized camps prominently advertised that menus were inspected by domestic science experts. By the early 1920s, a standardized form used by the Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and YWCA to assess operations at camp asked, “Is there a trained dietician in charge of selection and preparation of foods?” But trained dieticians customarily limited their involvement to menu creation, leaving directors to supervise the day-to-day needs of camp kitchens, where potential problems were legion. Staffing issues topped virtually every director’s list. Limited budgets forced directors to rely heavily on junior counselors, who worked in the kitchen in exchange for a free week’s stay. But even the most desirable junior staffers were typically little older than the campers themselves, and they often lacked the requisite skills for the tasks they were assigned. “Some knew even less than the girls themselves about cooking and management,” observed a formal report of the Girl Scout national training center.58 The director of the YWCA’s Camp Tinicum, which served girls from the Philadelphia area, had better luck in the sweltering summer of 1929. The camp’s cook not only produced wonderful food, but her “cheerful and untiring energy,” despite “meals eaten in the breathless, sun-baked dining room” contributed to the high morale that characterized the season.59 This was definitely good news for the harassed director, but to rely on a cook’s temperament for a camp’s success was a far cry from the tenets of domestic science, and certainly had little to do with adventure.

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Occasionally, national leadership tried to persuade local directors that the adventure of outdoor pioneer cookery really did apply to them as well as their girls. “Imagination, ingenuity and flexibility are just as necessary to a leader when she plans meals as when she teaches games or holds Court of Honor,” proclaimed Kettles and Campfires.60 Directors were advised to vary their fare as much as possible and not use the limitations of camp kitchens as an excuse for serving bland and repetitive meals. Directors were cautioned, for example, that “all white meals” consisting of cauliflower, cabbage, and potatoes were inferior to those with sufficient green vegetables. But directors who had access to cheap cauliflower bought it, worrying more about the heightened caloric requirements of active growing bodies (twenty-eight hundred to thirty-three hundred calories a day was the recommendation) than how many times they had served the vegetable in a given week. Directors knew what any alert camper could easily figure out for herself—outdoor cookery had little to do with science or sentiment or adventure. Keeping Camp Dainty and Tidy A summer camp has quite often been erroneously thought of as a place where social standards are lowered and the niceties of life completely forgotten. . . . We decided immediately that we would endeavor to make camp a place where character is built and not destroyed. —“Camp Tinicum Reports,” 1931

If the realities of provisioning their camps mitigated the enthusiasm with which directors presented outdoor cookery as a pioneering adventure, they confronted a host of other problems in teaching the rest of the homecraft program. The very wilderness celebrated as the natural home of the domestically inclined pioneer girl was also the landscape that contained rather troublesome aspects of the “primitive.” Camp directors tried to present the primitive as a positive value—the opposite of an overly civilized and artificial urbanity—but as the preceding quotation suggests, leaving behind all the trappings of civilization in favor of the natural world could be problematic. The unfortunate side of the primitive was its backwardness, characterized by dirt and disorder—precisely the traits that the homecraft movement sought to eliminate. And so camp directors were faced with a quandary. How could they encourage the rugged simplicity of the primitive while cleaning up its unsavory side? Camp directors received some help with this dilemma from home economics experts, who had troubles of their own explaining away the

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less-than-desirable aspects of their homecraft agenda. Running a household was not all home-cooked meals and efficient scheduling; there was no denying the mess involved. Experts were hard pressed to convince wary middle-class housewives that they should indeed perform the menial labor their mothers had happily hired out to domestic servants. In her book Perfection Salad, Laura Shapiro argues that home economics professionals relied on a coded vocabulary to draw rhetorical distinctions that in practice did not exist. “Whenever a domestic scientist wanted to emphasize the feminine side of the profession, the adjective ‘dainty’ appeared. ‘Dainty’ stood for many of the most reassuring qualities of womanhood; it was also used to temper any implication of drudgery and to give housework an important boost upward on the social scale.”61 Camp directors used dainty—and its twin tidy—not to reinforce the feminine status of dirty domestic chores, but to counteract the potentially disturbing attributes of the primitive outdoors. The dining room was one of the places where directors used an appeal to daintiness to help girls appreciate the difference between desirable and unwanted aspects of the primitive. Kettles and Campfires, for example, suggested that girls learn something of “primitive methods of cooking,” while it emphasized “simple, though tidy and dainty ways of serving.”62 Directors hoped to facilitate tidy and dainty serving by procuring the proper equipment for the dining room. In her 1923 report on the state of Girl Scout camping, National Camp Committee secretary Louise Price admonished directors to keep “the dining services simple but attractive.” In short, Price was asking camp directors to find the proper balance between competing attributes of the primitive. Accordingly, Price recommended that tables be supplied with “first grade enamelware,” as it was more suitable to camp dining than china, while being superior to the “non-descript assemblage of mess kits” she observed in use at a remote camp in northern Minnesota.63 Yet no matter how nicely food was prepared or how tidily it was served, leaders often had to admit that the biggest mealtime problem was the primitive manners of their campers. Hungry girls who had hiked all day, and then had to collect firewood before they could cook dinner, had to be dissuaded from wolfing down their food with little thought for decorum. “Though trail appetites are naturally keen, attractive and tidily served meals are as vital to good digestion in the woods or on the trail as they are at home,” admonished the Girl Scout publication On the Trail.64 Even more distressing was the fact that girls in the camp’s main dining hall had manners little better than their friends who

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were off hiking. In a chapter on camps in his book Building Character in the American Boy, historian David Macleod recounts the trouble that leaders had in controlling youngsters’ “tendency to rudeness” around the dinner table, where they called “the butter . . . grease, the milk cow juice, or the meat the corpse.”65 But Macleod, like the male camp directors he writes about, implies that this “rudeness” was a tendency peculiar to prepubescent boys. Directors of girls’ camps knew better. Girls’ leaders may have wanted to believe that poor manners were the result of “naturally keen” appetites instead of “rudeness,” but it is clear that they were none too pleased with their campers’ behavior at the dinner table.66 Girl Scout publications tried to set the standard for dining room behavior at camp, but given the adamantly prescriptive nature of the material, and contemporaneous evidence to the contrary, we should read these writings as the expression of an ideal rather than an accurate description of reality. The Rally, in its July issue, which girls could enjoy, and presumably learn from, before they headed off to camp, offered a description of the Manhattan Council’s camp at Upper Twin Lake in Palisades Interstate Park, New York. “Each group of girls sat at meals with its own councilor, who presided as at a family table, where law and order were the rule and good cheer and kindly courtesy the spirit of every meal.”67 Kettles and Campfires did its best to promote civilized dining behavior, noting that “small tables permit quiet conversation and so prevent boisterousness and confusion”; such family-like conditions, it continued, encouraged “good cheer and healthy enjoyment but no loud talking or cheering or clatter of dishes.”68 During her summer-long tour of Scout camps in 1923, Louise Price was distressed to find that published descriptions of camp dining did not match the lived experience of campers and staff. Price “criticized” the practice of permanent camp staff at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to sit at separate tables. Campers, it seems, had failed to understand that social standards were not to be lowered, and “it showed in the girls’ speech as well as in their table manners,” driving the staff to escape to adult-only company. Price objected to this decidedly un-family-like arrangement that so deviated from Scout ideals, but the local director stood up for her staff. “Miss Neill felt that the counselors couldn’t stand it to eat three meals a day at the same table with the girls because the manners of the girls were sometimes questionable,” Price lamented.69 To her relief, Price found that while permanent, full-time camp staff preferred mealtimes away from campers, captains who had accompanied their own troops to camp generally conformed to official policy

Figure 22. Philadelphia Girl Scouts having a meal at Camp Tall Trees, near Media, Pennsylvania, circa 1930. By permission of the Girl Scouts of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

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and ate with their girls. Perhaps the captains’ ongoing relationship with the girls gave them more authority and consequently put their charges on better behavior, or maybe the mealtime rudeness that was bearable during a twoweek stay simply became intolerable over the course of an entire summer. Whatever the case, it is clear that girls resisted the lessons of homecraft that tried to turn camp dining into a dainty and tidy affair. Dining rooms and good manners were only part of an attractive home, of course, and therefore girls had to learn to apply their woodcraft skills to a wider array of homecraft projects. Of all girls’ organizations, the Girl Pioneers of America, under the direction of the Beard sisters, provided youngsters with the most practical advice about how to go about the task of creating an attractive home in the wilderness. Many of the books on which the Beards collaborated, including the American Girls’ Handy Book, On the Trail: An Outdoor Book for Girls, and The Girl Pioneer Manual are filled with instructions for creating objects both large and small, simple and absurdly complicated, that could turn camp into a homey environment. Readers of the Beards’ books learned to construct food caches in the hollows of trees or, even more elaborately, build shelves and “camp cupboards” to hold their supplies. Illustrations drawn by Adelia Beard showed girls how to create a camp kitchen that included a stone and log fireplace equipped with a suspension system that allowed three pots to hang over the fire. Each pothook, cooking utensil, and storage rack that would complete the outdoor kitchen had to be fashioned by hand. Perhaps the most impressive example of the Beards’ efforts to turn camp into a tidy and attractive home was the “outdoor dressing table.”70 The centerpiece of the table was a flat board attached to a tree by several hand-carved cantilevered supports. Although Girl Pioneers were obviously permitted to bring some items along from home—the table boasted a washbasin, drinking cup, and soap dish—most they had to make themselves. Girls completed the table by whittling a large stick to serve as a towel rack and carving two forked sticks to act as a comb holder. For the most accomplished girls, the Beards also included instructions on how to create usable combs and toothbrushes from natural materials found at camp. All these homey amenities that Girl Pioneers could learn to make held at bay camp’s potential for primitiveness and helped girls turn the wilderness into a tidy home. Simple objects created out of natural materials did not facilitate this transformation by their functional utility—storebought toothbrushes tend to be more reliable than ones fashioned out of

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tree bark—instead, the painstaking creation of these objects proved a girl’s emotional commitment to making a home in the out-of-doors and thus linked her to a pioneer heritage of thoughtful simplicity. “The pioneer home contained no luxuries, few comforts and little in the way of conveniences,” admitted The Girl Pioneer Manual, but it was “filled full of family love and mutual trust, of courage, self-reliance and helpfulness.”71 Girls’ ability to go into any wilderness and create an attractive home showed she was both capable and caring. A well-kept camp was the symbol of a girl’s commitment to her camp family, but it was also an important manifestation of her personality. Scouts were taught that lessons of “tidyness, neatness, cleanliness, and thrift” were plentiful in the course of camp living, if only they would pay attention.72 Tidiness and neatness redounded to a girl’s credit as surely as their absence bespoke a flaw in her character. “The girl or woman who keeps a dirty camp is beneath contempt,” warned Jeannette Marks in Vacation Camping for Girls.73 For Marks, nature served as a pristine backdrop whose inherent beauty only served to highlight a terrible truth; a dirty camp was the physical embodiment of a camper’s dirty mind. Campers with impure thoughts might be able to disguise their flaws for a while, but eventually the negativity they brought with them into the wilderness would show. Therefore, Marks’ advice to girls was to keep their minds as “wholesome and sweet and clean as a freshly swept log cabin” lest they mar the wilderness in which they were trying to build a home.74 Camp leaders always insisted that their pioneering programs incorporated fundamentally different lessons from the ones girls learned at home or in school, but it was obvious that outdoor cookery and camp housekeeping owed a significant debt to the home economics curriculum, and in fact did not change very much when they were transferred to the woods. Most of the outdoor cooking done at camp was the province of leaders, who certainly did not have “fun alive.” The chore of keeping a tidy camp was leavened by woodcraft carving skills, but outdoor housekeeping was still largely presented as a referendum on girls’ character—and that certainly was not an adventure. Most camp leaders were unable to interpret cooking as anything other than drudgery and unwilling to separate housekeeping from moral judgments. Yet these attitudes mirrored the very points of familial contention that plagued girls like Patty Foster. Camp leaders had promised to fix girls’ relationship to domestic chores through their outdoors homecraft program, but often they ended up reinforcing the very problems girls faced at home.

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Indoor Pioneering for Future Homemakers Being a good Scout means being an outdoors girl to a considerable extent; but busy as the leaders are in making good woodsmen, good hikers, good swimmers and the like, they are even more interested in developing good homemakers. —“Girl Scouts Continue to Win New Members,” New York Times, September 30, 1928

When they first set up their organization, Scout leaders claimed they understood adolescent girls’ craving for adventure and promised that the domestic side of the pioneering program would satisfy these longings. Camp Fire, of course, had never seen a contradiction between the homemaker and the outdoor girl—its stated purpose was to encourage this combination. Scout training documents, however, belie such glib assurances. In one manual, a section titled “Girl Scouts Are Useful at Home” cautioned leaders not to jump right into domestic skills. “If you are wise, you will not emphasize at first the home-side of the Girl Scout program—dish-washing, bed-making, table-setting and so on. These are not the things for which your girls have joined the troop.” And despite the preponderance of testing for “indoor badges” while outdoors, such skills certainly weren’t the reason most girls went to summer camp. While Girl Scouts leaders obviously noticed the dilemma, they had a hard time giving up on the “Adventure of Outdoor Homemaking.”75 In 1927, the National Girl Scout council released a publication called The Girl Scout Trail that showed how modern girls could benefit from the domestic guidance of their pioneer ancestors. This cheerfully illustrated brochure prominently featured both the ultimate destination of the Scout Trail—a girl’s status as future homemaker—as well as the guide who would help girls navigate this rocky trail to their “future happiness.” At the head of the trail stood the promising, but as yet untested, girl; as the The Trail put it, “[S]erene, poised, radiant, Girl Scouts stand confidently on the threshold of life.” Behind her stood her pioneer ancestors, women who would help the good scout discover “joy in the performance of useful tasks.” Once girls began their journey and stepped across the threshold of life, they would find that the “Girl Scout trail leads out of the past and into a future that is bright with the promise of the glory of womanhood.” But once out of the pioneer past, many girls found that the Girl Scout trail led them right back home. A little more than ten years later, on October 23, 1939, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the women who had gathered for the National Girl Scout convention in Philadelphia. Roosevelt’s speech, as well as the

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keynote address, delivered by Lillian Gilbreth, paid homage to the convention’s theme, “Girl Scouts: Half a Million Future Homemakers.” Had the Girl Scouts repudiated a tradition that emphasized the incomparable benefits of the great outdoors? Had both the citizen-soldier and the rugged pioneer woman abdicated their positions as role models, leaving room for only the homemaker? The answer must be a resounding yes and no. Throughout their history, all girls’ organizations—despite the vehemence of their rhetorical claims—had stressed homecraft skills. The theme of the 1939 convention was nothing new in its homemaking emphasis, but it was novel that the Scouts so publicly, and exclusively, embraced the homemaking ideal.

Chapter 6

Healthcraft Measuring the Modern Girl


Camp days, camp days. Good old happy camp days. Swimming and hiking for health craft beads, Striving to follow where health rules lead, With nine hours sleep for every soul, And three square meals to complete the dole. With hours of play the live-long day, oh that is the life for me! —Camp Fire radio program, 1933, St. Paul, Minnesota

B

y the time the St. Paul, Minnesota, Camp Fire Girls sang this little ditty on their radio show, its truths, which had once been self-evident to girls’ organizations, had begun to unravel. The easy assumption that girls were naturally healthy and enjoyed, even reveled in, a healthy lifestyle had been called into question. The song’s other assumption, that a perfectly healthy lifestyle could best be acquired at camp, had also been challenged. Within the course of just two decades, the definition of a healthy girl—and the nature of the healthy landscape in which she purportedly thrived—had changed radically. Although the evidence for these changes is clear, their trajectory is quite convoluted. The changing definition of a healthy girl interacted in complicated ways with an altered camp environment. The trail to good health had never been quite as smooth and carefree as the Camp Fire Girls made it sound, but by the mid-1930s, girls who followed where health rules led found a path that ventured into a very different terrain than where it had formerly taken them. “Plenty of good food, twenty-four-hour day in the open air, an intimate acquaintanceship with the fields and the woods, and a practical lesson in cleanliness and hygiene.” This description could have come from any brochure advertising Camp Fire, Girl Scout, or YWCA summer camps. Time and again, leaders insisted that the inherent attributes of a camp’s environment—its land, water, and air—combined with the wholesome simplicity of 192

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its program improved girls’ health. The description did not, however, come from a camp’s advertisement. It is a historian’s description of the first tuberculosis “preventorium,” opened in 1909 in Farmington, New Jersey, by founder Alfred Hess.1 Hess believed that the best way to fight this childhood scourge was by inoculating healthy children against its ravages; in other words, he would prevent TB in children by taking them to a place that, for all intents and purposes, looked exactly like summer camp. If preventoria looked like summer camps, it was also true that summer camps often looked like preventoria. Jane Deeter Rippin, the Girl Scouts’ national director, made the following remarks at an international conference in 1926: “We have the problem not only of helping growing girls, but of bringing to maturity a generation of women who shall not be nervous wreaks. We must counteract the speed and hustle and nervous strain of present day civilization.” She concluded that one of the ways the Scouting movement could accomplish this was by meeting with “other health organizations.”2 Rippin clearly cast the Girl Scouts’ lot with health organizations and identified camp as the place girls could acquire good health. By 1931, everything had changed. In a dissertation commissioned by the National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters, J. Edward Sanders made a startling argument: “The data indicated that the longer children remained in camp the more likely they were to become ill.”3 Numerous diseases, great and small—from rare, but devastating, typhoid and polio outbreaks, to colds and summer flu, afflicted children at camp. They suffered heat stroke and constipation, sprained their ankles, and got terrible cases of poison ivy. But, Sanders argued, illness and injuries were not the worst of it. The greatest liability of camp was less tangible and more worrying because the harm it did children was not something easily treated. “It is not possible to estimate with any accuracy the amount of worry and nervous strain that accumulates in the modern, highly organized summer camp but in the opinion of the writer it is very great indeed for many campers.”4 The health problems that beset “modern” camps were not incidental accidents that could be prevented by better management; the danger was now embedded in camp’s fundamental nature. Camps had gone from preventing diseases associated with a hectic and unhealthy city lifestyle to acting as a vector for those very ills. Camps’ relationship to healthcraft grew even more complex when the changing definition of the healthy girl was placed side by side with camps’ decline from being a naturally healthy environment. Changes in the Girl Scout’s Personal Health merit badge make this clear. From 1912 to the 1920s,

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a girl’s health depended on proper meals, fresh air, and regular outdoor exercise—all the things, in other words, that a camping experience provided. As the early Camp Fire publications put it, “girls caught health, not colds,” by being in the outdoors. Given this definition of a healthy girl, the Girl Scout’s Personal Health badge from 1935 is virtually unrecognizable. Healthy girls now earned honors by clipping photographs of models with good posture from fashion magazines. They gave fashion shows and made exhibits of pictures of healthy foods, but a girl who read carefully might notice that she did not actually have to eat those foods to satisfy the badge’s requirements. A girl’s health wasn’t very “natural” anymore; it was a commodity she could find in magazines and acquire by paying attention to fashion trends. Camps now made her more ill the longer she stayed, but perhaps it was all for the best that camps themselves had deteriorated, because the new healthy Scout certainly would not have found them a hospitable place for her new healthcraft lessons. Why had leaders of girls’ organizations changed their definition of health so radically? Natural camps had originally been built to shield girls from the very influences that Scouting leadership had now declared made girls healthy. The preventoria of summer camp was supposed to protect girls from the unhealthy influences of “civilization,” the word girls’ organizations used to refer to what they judged to be the worst effects of the commercialized consumer culture. But now camps had grown so “modern” that they produced nervous strain in children, and girls had grown into youngsters who certainly did not need them in order to be healthy.

Healthy by Nature There is an underlying meaning [of the camping movement] which is revealed by the increasing health and efficiency of the girls of today. —Wo-He-Lo, September 1915

When girls’ organizations began, their members were healthy by nature. Health was a watchword of the Camp Fire movement, the He in WoHe-Lo, and Girl Scouts practiced first aid and home nursing on others—they were not the recipients of such care. Leaders assumed that most girls, especially those who joined the Scouts or Camp Fire, were essentially healthy children, requiring only gentle reminders to put them back on the path to health if they had momentarily stumbled. Although girls did have to monitor their health habits and tick off boxes on their health charts to prove they had complied, the prevailing attitude of leadership was that this was a simple way for most girls to claim credit for what they were already doing as a matter of

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course. Girls “caught health” by going about their preferred activities, and they proved that “holding on to health,” a popular Camp Fire slogan, was not a burden they were forced to bear, but a pleasure they enjoyed. Girls enjoyed looking after their health because it both helped them realize their potential as individuals and redounded to the greater happiness of their friends and families. In Ten Talks to Girls on Health, a publication of the YWCA’s national board, Dr. Augusta Rucker enticed girls with all the benefits they would enjoy if they took good care of themselves. “Exercise unites the body, mind and soul,” she informed readers, and promoted feelings of “health, joy and freedom in the individual.”5 Good health gave girls the energy and “good spirits” that would help them achieve their personal goals, but a girl who possessed good health also made a good friend. Official Scout and Camp Fire publications, as well as Scout and Camp Fire adventure novels, were full of stories about girls who learned that being sickly was the same as being selfish. The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale, the Girl Scouts of the Roundtable, and even the Moving Picture Girls all had an initially weak member who learned that being hale and healthy was a debt she owed her group.6 “Our ideal camp girl has attained physical perfection and mental balance. She understands the importance of physical control and is master of her body. She is loyal to herself and community,” bragged J. Halsey Gulick, Luther and Charlotte Gulick’s only son.7 As it turned out, the communities to which girls owed their loyalty included not merely the families, troops, and Camp Fires they belonged to in the moment, but also “future generations.” The earliest Scout handbook, How Girls Can Help Their Country, taught readers that by exercising their willpower they could mold their bodies “as a sculptor shapes a statue”— which was a good thing, since the possession of “a weak infirm physique is nothing less than a crime.” This crime was perpetrated not merely against friends, family, or self, but against the “race.” “It is the duty of each one of us, both for our own sakes, and for the benefit of future generations, to perfect our physical frame,” the handbook concluded.8 Girls could fulfill their duty to these future generations by following the Scout health program, but it certainly wasn’t only the Scouts who were concerned about teaching girls these healthy lessons. Characteristically, the Gulicks were blunt: “Camp Fire education is helping to shape a new race,” asserted Charlotte Gulick in a 1926 radio address.9 Talk of shaping a “new race”—a practice known variously as eugenics, racial health, or racial hygiene—was as widespread as it was ill defined. Proponents, and there were many, ranging from university presidents, such

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as Stanford’s David Starr Jordan, to ordinary Americans who participated in “Fitter Family” contests at Midwestern state fairs, generally divided eugenics into its “positive” and “negative” manifestations.10 Negative eugenics, which reached its murderous apotheosis in the death camps of Nazi Germany, was directed at cleansing the “race” of those considered unfit and was practiced in the United States chiefly in the form of forced sterilizations. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s infamous opinion in the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision—“three generations of imbeciles are enough”— captured the sentiment. Positive eugenics was harder to define. From Fitter Family contests to marriage advice columns that helped people chose “suitable” mates to the oft-repeated complaints that many of the country’s finest youth were too selfish to raise families, the language of eugenics appeared to be everywhere. It is therefore unsurprising that it occasionally made its way into the healthcraft program of the Girl Scouts. In 1922, the Scouts’ education secretary Louise Stevens Bryant delivered a lecture on health principles at Camp Andree’s training school. She stressed “the racial importance of women’s health” and suggested that this should be acknowledged in “all modern programs for girls, whether primarily religious, civic, or educational.”11 Two years earlier, however, when Scouting for Girls, the first handbook that did not borrow heavily from Baden-Powell’s original text, was published, all his references to future generations and the criminality of a weak physique—the mildest of eugenic language—had been removed. In the absence of a clear historical record it is impossible to make definitive remarks about what racial health meant to Scout leadership in general. Was vague eugenic language such a given in the larger culture that there was little need to record it, or was it simply not a pressing issue on most leaders’ minds? The preponderance of writings on the Scouts’ healthcraft program suggests that concerns for racial health occupied a continuum in which a girl’s health had meaning beyond the strictly personal. For the Girl Scouts, racial health was trumped by an ideology that stressed girls’ responsibility to her immediate community; her body was not a conduit to future generations, but nor was health strictly her own individual possession to squander in selfish pursuits. Girls who belonged to Scouting’s rival organization, however, received a rather different message about the relationship between their health and the health of their race.

I

n May 1916, Mary L. Read, educational director of the National Association for Mothercraft Education, contributed an article to the Journal of

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Heredity. Read argued that the journal—which had begun twelve years earlier as the American Breeders’ Magazine but recently expanded its focus to include human heredity alongside animal husbandry—should embrace her organization. After all, she asserted, improved motherhood was the key to racial uplift, and that meant groups such as Read’s had to reach out not only to actual parents, but also to those who would parent ensuing generations. “It is the adolescent girl . . . who holds the control of the future of the family and the race. . . . According to her ideals, her foresight, her wise direction of instincts will society progress or deteriorate at its very foundations.” But how to impress upon adolescent girls, widely viewed as impetuous and illogical, the enormity of the eugenic responsibilities awaiting them? “Naturally she is not interested in technical essays, charts, diagrams, research reports, controversial discussions in genetics and social psychology,” Read announced, probably quite accurately.12 Her proposed solution involved a program of mothercraft education that emphasized “practical training” over intellectual discussion and was ostensibly more to the liking of adolescent girls. However, as Read well knew, her association enjoyed only limited success in small numbers of public schools. Had she consulted a previous issue of the Journal of Heredity she might have discovered why. “Fitness for motherhood is a happy by-product of Camp Fire activities, which make for splendid physique and intelligent control of one’s own body and mind,” wrote A. E. Hamilton in the June 1915 edition of the Journal.13 His article, “Putting Over Eugenics,” went on to explain how Camp Fire had become an organization “which will create eugenic ideals in women in an indirect but effective way.”14 Fitness for motherhood a mere “by-product” of activities sponsored by an organization committed to creating eugenic ideals—how could that be? In case a reader wondered if Hamilton had got his facts correct, the author proceeded to quote no less an authority than his mother-in-law to be, Camp Fire founder Charlotte Gulick. The Camp Fire movement contained “no particular training or instruction . . . that could be labelled ‘for motherhood,’” she insisted.15 How to reconcile Gulick’s comment in the Journal with her oft-repeated insistence that Camp Fire was “the expression of the Mother Spirit brooding over society and the world”? Camp Fire partisans who were also proponents of eugenics found themselves in a difficult position when they tried to talk about exactly how their organization would incorporate eugenic principles into its program. Ironically, their problem was rooted in biology, the very issue with which they were so concerned. Beginning at the turn of the century, changes in the American diet brought about by agricultural and manufacturing advances

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started to produce larger and healthier children. Well-fed children grow faster, and girls who are physically robust at a younger age also menstruate earlier. Charlotte Gulick, born in 1865, most likely reached menarche in her late teens with the majority of her age cohort; her daughters probably matured at an average age of thirteen. Girls’ early physical maturation felt frighteningly precocious to many Americans—some even viewed it as a sign of evolutionary regression, as “primitive” peoples were believed to reach sexual maturity earlier than the “civilized” races. And given that early physical maturation was achieved in an era that also witnessed the birth of a sexually sophisticated youth culture, adults were increasingly nervous about the subject of parenthood. After all, it is one thing to teach mothercraft to girls when those skills are to be used in a reassuringly distant future; it is another issue entirely to fear they might be pressed into immediate service. Eugenics proponents, including many contributors to the Journal of Heredity, were more than willing to find fault with college women who married less frequently and had fewer offspring than their peers who did not pursue higher education. These women, mostly native-born whites, were sometimes held responsible for “the passing of the great race,” to invoke the inflammatory title of Madison Grant’s infamous 1916 text. But few people suggested that the adolescent girls who filled the ranks of girls’ organizations should take up the slack where their older sisters had failed. Charlotte Gulick did occasionally suggest that one of Camp Fire’s goals was to remedy the fact that “there is a great deal of pent-up motherhood that has been denied its natural expression,” but such proclamations were few and far between.16 Mostly she had to content herself with praising Camp Fire’s influence on girls who had long since graduated from its programs. “I already see a new race of mothers among my old campers,” she said of several women in their late twenties who had attended a Camp Fire reunion. “Such babies as they have, sturdy, healthy, and happy with proud healthy mothers and not too busy to care for them properly.”17 More often, Camp Fire officials cleaved to the line of argument that Hamilton promoted in the Journal of Heredity. Fitness for motherhood may have been a by-product of Camp Fire activities, but the real product was a “splendid physique and intelligent control of one’s own body and mind.” This was Camp Fire’s racial health program in a nutshell, its “indirect but effective” method for “putting over eugenics.” Girls who performed the prescribed racial exercises would grow stronger bodies, but more important, they would learn self-control and self-restraint. Attention to racial health strengthened girls’ minds and emotions and gave them “intelligent

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Figure 23. This popular image appeared in several Camp Fire publications. In A. E. Hamilton’s article about Camp Fire in the Journal of Heredity, it was captioned “Gaining control of self,” while the Vacation Book of the Camp Fire Girls had simply, “A tilting match is great fun.”

control” over the physical impulses that raged through their precociously mature bodies. Camp Fire’s healthcraft program safeguarded their girls’ racial health—and if Mary Read was to be taken seriously, the very foundations of society—by ensuring that girls had the self-restraint not to become mothers. One photo, labeled “A test of self-reliance,” showed a lone girl paddling her canoe through choppy water. Its caption read: “Only those who have tried paddling a birch-bark canoe in rough water and wind can appreciate the kinds of qualities that this girl is developing.” “Gaining control of self” read the caption of another photograph showing two girls jousting with long poles while they stood in canoes. Hamilton, who worked for Charles Davenport at the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, epicenter of American eugenics research, filled his Journal of Heredity article with a variety of ways in which the Camp Fire program promoted eugenic goals. Girls could pursue honors in patriotism, for example, learning the names and occupations of their grandparents—a task that would invariably lead them to an interest in genealogy, and hence to a study of their family’s heredity. Alternatively, a study of the “ventilation and sanitation in stores and factories employing women” would allow girls to more readily appreciate the differences between the effects of the environment and the “strictly racial modifications” that also influenced women’s lives. Although Hamilton clearly wanted readers to understand that once you looked for eugenics in

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the Camp Fire program, you could find it virtually anywhere, the bulk of his article was committed to positive eugenics as expressed through healthcraft. Here Hamilton, like other Camp Fire leaders, attempted to overturn older, conventional wisdom about the ill effects of exercise on adolescent girls—“what ever is spent is denied their offspring,” declared Hall in Adolescence.18 On the contrary, Hamilton argued, energy well spent benefited both girls and their future offspring. The most striking part of the Journal of Heredity article, and the form in which its chief arguments were expressed, was the photographs and their captions, which took up fully half the article’s allotted space. There appeared to be virtually no limit to what girls could gain through racial exercise properly completed. The same photograph of the lone girl in the canoe that appeared in the Journal under the title “A Test of Self-Reliance” was featured in the 1914 edition of the Book of the Camp Fire Girls. Its caption promised: “This girl is having intense pleasure sitting in an Indian birch-bark canoe. She knows she is master.” 19 In addition to photographs depicting self-control and self-reliance acquired in canoes, there were several pictures of girls practicing their diving techniques. “Physical fitness . . . in the interests of the race, is naturally insisted upon,” read one caption, while the picture of a girl performing a back dive said only “Developing the Body.” Why all this attention to girls diving and jousting in canoes? “Water sports and other carefully chosen forms of recreation are . . . developing a spirit of physical and mental freedom in girls that will affect for good the parenthood of the next generation.”20 Chances are good, of course, that most Camp Fire Girls did not read the Journal of Heredity in their spare time, and so perhaps they did not realize just what girls in birch bark canoes were masters of. The racial health message that was directly imparted to girls tended to soft-pedal issues such as self-control and self-reliance—improved parenthood was definitely not mentioned—and instead focused on the more vague language of community favored by Scouting. The water sports that Hamilton believed formed the core of racial exercise were depicted as almost transcendentally enjoyable activities to which girls were naturally drawn. The Wohelo Bird, a pamphlet advertising Sebago-WoHeLo, Camp Fire’s flagship camp, offered the following ostensibly firsthand description of canoeing: “Into our places we sprang, and paddled peppily out of the cove into the wind swept lake. I dipped and pulled with my paddle, watching the muscles breathe in Peggy’s arms and feeling a glorious new strength of my own.” But not only did this girl feel physically connected to her friend, she was suddenly overcome by a larger sense of belonging to the entire natural environment. “Suddenly there

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Figure 24. The mastery of diving techniques held a special place in early Camp Fire lore. Charlotte Gulick was extremely proud of her diving accomplishments and promoted the idea that diving helped girls learn control of their bodies. Courtesy of Camp Fire USA.

were tears in my eyes; it was so big and I was a part of it. I had a part in an infinite rhythm!”21 These were the types of feelings about racial exercise the Gulicks tried to encourage in their campers. Walking is “as old as the hills,” Charlotte Gulick proclaimed in a 1925 radio broadcast, and such “things learned through the muscles are never forgotten. The nervous processes involved in walking are profoundly established. This is an activity so old that it flows readily along well-worn channels and tends to give strength rather than exhaustion.”22 Girls were invigorated by racial exercise, energized by it, and, of course, the place they could best enjoy it was at camp. Hiking and swimming, Gulick informed girls, were “what may be called racially old activities, those activities which we turn to with joy and relaxation. We do not play basketball or have track athletics [at camp], these are for congested areas and are used during the school year.” “The racially old,” she concluded, “is seized by the individual with ease and joy.”23 But Charlotte Gulick was wrong. Girls did want to play basketball at camp, and tennis and badminton, too. In fact, they easily and joyfully seized upon a great many different kinds of athletic activities and most likely were not overly concerned with how much racial health they acquired by doing so.

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Figure 25. It was not only Camp Fire leaders who believed in the mythic qualities that could be imparted by exercise. This photo appeared in the Girl Scout publication Campward Ho! with the caption “The true inwardness of rowing.”

Playing Like a Healthy Girl Since the last decades of the nineteenth century—and despite Victorian injunctions against sweating and in favor of ladylike deportment—middle-class girls had been exercising. Vigorous walking regimes that required three or four hours at a brisk pace, calisthenics, and dumbbell exercises were all part of a girl’s physical fitness routine. The purpose of this physical activity was not, however, the cultivation of a perfect body, but rather the training of a perfect character.24 Girls who engaged in such exercise regimes proved they knew how to make good use of their free time and showed they were willing to discipline their bodies for the sake of others. A delicate girl, inclined to fainting spells and sick headaches that forced her to spend the day in bed was a girl who did not show proper respect for her family’s needs. Alternatively, a robust girl’s physical vigor redounded to a greater good, even as it depended on individual discipline and effort. By the first decades of the new century, physical activity had acquired a very different meaning. “Gibson Girls,” iconic figures of female fitness created by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, were armed with tennis racquets and golf clubs and were intent on recreation—and, perhaps, a slimmer waistline—not a more admirable character. Given the popularity of Gibson

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Girls, there can be little doubt that the image of the sporty girl had won the day, but girls’ participation in actual athletic endeavors was still hedged with deep concerns about their character. The two main questions were whether sporting activities enhanced or detracted from a girl’s femininity and whether sports encouraged undue competitiveness.25 Basketball, for example, was considered too vigorous and potentially dangerous; in short, it was too masculine. Accordingly, the governing bodies of girls’ athletics put “girls’ rules” into effect for the game. All physical contact was forbidden, and to limit the potential for exhaustion, games were played half-court with each individual girl’s movements were restricted to just a few steps. Despite these modifications, basketball, like all team sports, came under fire for a flaw that no amount of rule changes could rectify; critics charged that they inherently encouraged unnecessary and potentially harmful competition. Although it seems counterintuitive that team rather than individual sports should have been the subject of this critique, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), the governing body of women’s collegiate sports, joined many physical education teachers in condemning the competitiveness engendered by team sports. (In the late 1920s, the AAU was under the direction of Girl Scout supporter, and former First Lady, Lou Henry Hoover.) Critics argued that team sports put too much focus on winning at the expense of good sportsmanship and thus encouraged the rise of star athletes instead of fostering full participation by all team members.26 Ironically, this argument rested on precisely the opposite rationale from that proposed for why team sports were so good for boys—in males, team sports encouraged teamwork. Occasionally, this same argument was made in reference to girls—Baden-Powell, for example, suggested that “team games are especially valuable for girls as they need the moral discipline of learning to efface themselves as individuals and to play as a member of the team”—but for the most part team sports remained suspect.27 Despite Charlotte Gulick’s injunctions, camp seemed to be just the place to rehabilitate some of the deleterious effects of problematic sports. Unlike schools that were predicated on individual achievements, and whose competitive atmosphere also affected the games played within their walls, camps were organized with a cooperative spirit. Directors emphasized the importance of the well-functioning group—there was little, for example, that Girl Scouts were more proud of than their patrol system—and often meted out rewards, and punishments when necessary, to entire groups, rather than individuals. Girls played games organized as cabins or color squads, rotating members to avoid crowning a perennial champion, while losers made up

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self-deprecating songs in which they promised revenge when teams were reconfigured. In a way, camp looked like nothing so much as an extended play day—that noncompetitive athletic alternative to interscholastic competition promoted by many women’s colleges.28 Most camps’ informality undoubtedly added to the noncompetitive atmosphere. It would take an utterly unrepentant competitor to get worked up over a tennis match played on a court where two trees held up the net and the camp dog chased every miss-hit backhand. Besides, the favorite camp sport was one that virtually all directors agreed was cooperative and graceful, perfectly healthy and perfectly suited to the developing bodies of adolescent girls. “Water Queens are superb creatures admired by everyone who understands that physical control is a matter of self-respect,” rhapsodized the authors of a Camp Fire brochure advertising the joys of swimming in Lake Sebago.29 Even though their language waxed poetic, the underlying sentiment was widely accepted—what was a summer camp without easy access to a cool, refreshing lake, or at the very least, a big swimming pool? Any camp that could, bragged about the natural beauty of its ideal lakeside location, and most camps prominently advertised the water sports available to campers. So strong was the connection between camps and water that Camping Magazine dubbed Sea Rest, a resort in Asbury Park, New Jersey, the first summer camp for girls. The Philadelphia YWCA had started Sea Rest as a “summer vacation project” for young women who were “wearing out their lives in an almost endless drudgery for wages that admit no thought of rest or recreation.”30 As the name suggests, the YWCA women obviously viewed Sea Rest more as an inexpensive and welcoming alternative to upper-class seaside resorts than as anything approaching a precursor to girls’ camps. The idea was for young women to restore themselves by basking in the healthy influence of the seaside’s salty breezes. Camping Magazine’s claims notwithstanding, camps defined themselves largely in opposition to, not as part of, a continuum that embraced such rest houses. The benefits of water at girls’ camps stemmed from a program of healthy exercise, not the salubrious effects of sea breezes and relaxation. And besides, girls wanted to swim, not lounge beside the camp’s lake. Indeed, girls liked swimming so much that left to their own devices—which was decidedly not an option most leaders considered—they would spend most of their time in the water. Sixty years after leaders of the Philadelphia YWCA offered girls a chance to rest near the ocean, the director of the Y’s Camp Tinicum marveled at her girls’ penchant for vigorous recreation in the camp’s lake: “Not content with a splash before breakfast,

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morning instruction at 10:30, afternoon swim at 4, the girls clamored for moonlight dips.”31 Her report does not indicate if she granted their request— directors generally frowned on the practice, as it made a mockery of bedtime routines and seemed to exude a certain unorthodox, disruptive pleasure. At the other end of the day, however, most directors insisted on the morning dip, often scheduled as early as 6:30 a.m. Although it is possible that rules governing the extreme ends of the swimming schedule were steeped in a vaguely moralistic sense of discipline, most restrictions were grounded in concerns for girls’ well-being. Camp directors who scrupulously followed all official suggestions must have felt that they spent most of their time keeping girls out of the water. Virtually all authorities recommended that swimmers wait at least two hours after meals; this rule, paired with a less universal, though still influential, injunction about not swimming during the hottest portion of the day (the practice allegedly caused an unhealthy fluctuation in body temperature) knocked out a good portion of the afternoon. There were restrictions about how long a girl could safely spend in the water; some authorities recommended as little as an hour, especially in water less than eighty degrees, a rather prohibitive restriction in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, where many girls’ camps were located. Add restrictions on swimming in inclement weather and the near-universal prohibition on swimming during the “monthly illness,” and it is surprising that girls ever had the opportunity to earn their swimming badges. To make matters worse, leaders occasionally attempted to restrict swimming for reasons of propriety rather than health. When waterfront construction closed down the lakeside bathhouse at Girl Scout Camp Andree, one leader, a Miss Leahy, worried that her girls’ well-being would be compromised by how far they had to walk to the temporary changing facilities. Although she initially couched her fear in a concern for the girls’ health, she betrayed an ulterior motive in her following sentence: “It would be unfortunate to have the girls wondering [sic] over the hills in their bathing suits.”32 There is no record of the girls’ reaction to Miss Leahy’s efforts to restrict their movements, but nine years earlier, during Camp Andree’s very first season, some Scouts had rebelled against their leaders. That year, 1922, the staff felt so burdened by the popularity of swimming among both campers and their guests that they restricted access to the lake to an hour each on Friday and Sunday and an hour and a half on Saturday.33 Apparently, even this did not satisfy all staff members, and they soon asked the girls who served in the Court of Honor—a council of girls chosen by their peers to represent

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them—to consider eliminating guest swimming altogether. The girls refused. In an uncharacteristically blunt display of authority, the counselors overruled the Court of Honor and banned all guests from the lake. It would be disingenuous, however, to imply that directors and counselors placed restrictions on swimmers simply to make their own lives easier, or to force girls to accept their standards of propriety. Swimming was potentially dangerous. Although they did not publicize it, Camp Fire and Scout records reveal that virtually every season a few youngsters did, in fact, drown at camp. (Obviously, Camp Fire and Scout authorities were happier to point out that their girls often saved drowning children, and these stories of girls’ bravery more often found their way into the pubic record.) Officials were quick to point out that fatalities at camp were lower than for the general population of children left unsupervised during summer holidays, but they were equally hasty to assure parents that every girl who goes to camp should learn how to swim. Compliance with this directive meant directors had to devote significant resources to hiring trained personnel, and putting strict safety measures in place—regulations that ranged from the eminently practical to the vaguely humiliating. Most camps instituted buddy systems and designated lifeguard assistants. Lakes were equipped with cribs—underwater structures that demarcated the area set aside for novices and prevented girls from straying into deep water. Some camps used a system of color-coded bathing caps to give lifeguards an easy way of keeping an eye on beginners; most employed a grading system that separated swimmers into categories and gave them names such as tadpoles, minnows, or frogs. Everyone familiar with the euphemisms used for children’s reading groups would recognize what these names meant, although occasionally camps did simply call swimmers what they really were: during the 1923 season, the beginner group at Girl Scout Camp Andree was dubbed the “sinkers.”34 The presence of “sinkers” notwithstanding, conventional wisdom held that girls and women were naturally suited to swimming, thanks to the special features of their female bodies. “The round contour and beauty curves of a woman’s body require a greater portion of fatty tissue which provide greater buoyancy and resistance to cold water,” wrote Australian Annette Kellerman, arguably the early twentieth century’s most famous swimmer, in explaining why women were better than men at long-distance, open-water swims.35 Kellerman, a New South Wales swim champion who had made three determined but unsuccessful attempts on the English Channel while still a teenager, was, however, reluctant to suggest that women’s swimming

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prowess had any larger implications.36 She ridiculed women who “aped men” by competing in masculine sports, and she proclaimed herself more proud of her fashion and celluloid successes—she starred as a mermaid in several films and designed a very popular swimming costume—than of her athletic accomplishments. Although Kellerman occasionally made unequivocal statements about women’s physical superiority, more often she claimed that it was women’s natural “ease and grace of movement,” not their stamina or strength, that allowed them to excel in water sports. After nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle shattered the men’s record for crossing the English Channel in 1926, apologists for women’s aquatic success had a lot of explaining to do. Most, like Kellerman, chose to focus on what they saw as the feminine attributes of water sports, and camp directors were no exception. “Swimming to music is a very popular form of exercise and very popular in girls’ camps,” proclaimed H. W. Gibson, past president of the American Camping Association and author of Camp Management, “as advanced swimmers find music helpful in ‘smoothing out’ their strokes.”37 Gibson went on to relate the story of the girls at Camp Wasibo, who stood in the water listening to the music until “they were sure of the rhythm, then they started swimming, keeping excellent time to the waltzes played on an ordinary phonograph with a loud needle.” Nor did the girls’ mastery of grace and delicacy end there; later they “worked out an effective evening program, swimming in various formations to music while holding lighted candles in one hand.”38 Despite the apparent need to render girls’ aquatic prowess more feminine, some female directors couldn’t resist tweaking men over the issue. A Campfire Girl in Summer Camp is a typical girls’ adventure story until the very last chapter, in which a neighboring boys’ camp accepts the girls’ challenge to compete in a swimming contest.39 Eleanor Mercer, the girls’ guardian, issues the unusual challenge after enduring teasing from the Boy Scout camp director. “He says we just imitate the Boy Scouts, and that we just pretend we’re camping out and doing all the things they do,” she tells her girls, so she offers to put her girls to the test against his Scouts: “I said my girls could beat his boys in the water.” The girls, having suffered the same insults back home, are quick to rise to the challenge, “My brother’s a Boy Scout, and I know just what they’re like; they think we’re just the same as all the other girls they know,” says one indignant girl. The two adults set up a variety of swimming challenges that “called for skill rather than strength,” and “to the surprise and chagrin of the Boy Scouts, who had expected, as boys always do, when pitted against girls, to

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win so easily that they could afford to be magnanimous,” the girls develop an early edge in the competition. After winning the diving portion of the competition, the scoutmaster, still sure of his boys’ ultimate triumph, offers the girls a handicap in the lifesaving competition. Needless to say, Miss Mercer refuses on her girls’ behalf: “Women have been taking handicaps from men too long,” she informs her chivalrous friend. “This Camp Fire movement is going to show you that that’s all over and done with.” And sure enough, in the lifesaving contest the girls win—thanks to the plucky Zara, the team’s only nonswimmer, who offers to act as “victim” in order to spur her friends on to do their very best. “I really would be drowned if they didn’t save me,” she sighs with an odd wistfulness—a comment that evokes the admiration of the impressed scoutmaster: “That’s the nerviest thing I ever heard of!” he exclaims. The majority of swimmers, however, were neither lifesaving heroes nor nearly drowned victims; they were simply girls who acquired excellent lessons in character building from their exploits in the water. YWCA staff were taught that “swimming . . . develops the sense of value, and develops courage,” in their campers and were encouraged to cheer their girls on to the mastery of new skills. “If the child feels she is capable of swimming in deep water or trying anew strokes, she has developed a certain degree of selfreliance.”40 Some experts unaffiliated with girls’ organizations doubted that girls should attempt all feats of swimming prowess, and one expert stated in an instructional manual for swimming teachers that “long distance and under water swimming are omitted because it is the consensus of opinion that they cause undue strain on the girl.”41 But her suggested restrictions did not convince the Girl Scouts, who include a twenty-five-foot underwater swim in the Swimmer merit badge requirements.42 As was so often the case, Camp Fire leadership could be counted on to reiterate the ideas of other girls’ organizations, but to do so with a certain extra flair, and their opinion of the virtues of swimming does not disappoint: “The value of swimming and diving can hardly be over-estimated, for they are more than physical exercise. There is a distinct mental and moral value in the control of the muscles and in the self-confidence required of anyone who makes a plunge into deep water.”43 It was the members of the “Water Queens,” the highest rank of swimmers, who were most admired by all. These girls excelled at a healthy activity that was perfectly suited to their female bodies and that allowed them to pursue honors and heroism, not individual gain or recognition. Moreover, they understood that “physical control is a matter of self-respect.” Natural

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girls, adept at the art of natural exercise, enjoyed physical activities that harmonized with their feminine graces, as well as the interests of the race. But increasingly, healthy girls had a companion. Walking alongside the girl who happily pursued her healthcraft beads was another camper, clutching a notebook and charting the healthcraft gains made by her hardy friend. Healthy girls were taught that their days—even their good old happy camp days—were filled with opportunities to follow where health rules led, and that they must not only follow that path, but be certain to record their progress along the way.

Standardizing the Girl For an entire year, beginning in November 1920, Sophie Stern, age twelve, of the Oak Lane Girl Scout Troop in Philadelphia, dutifully recorded all the habits of health and hygiene that would enable her to win the Personal Health proficiency badge. In a two-by-four-inch booklet called “My Health Record,” she kept track of her weight and height and recorded measurements of her waist and bust. She ticked off boxes showing that she bathed biweekly and washed her hair twice a month. She noted the dates on which she slept with the windows open, resisted the temptation to eat sweets between meals, and walked to and from school. She even recorded a daily bowel movement, another requirement of the Health Winner badge.44 Sophie was willing to record even the most intimate aspects of her daily routine because that was what her success depended on—not only the acquisition of healthy habits, but also their meticulous recording. Girl Scout Health Winners learned that monitoring good health was as important as possessing it. Embedded in Sophie’s tiny text were a host of assumptions and convictions about what constituted the health of an average adolescent girl. Most prominently, children’s health was a measurable, and very public, commodity. Indeed, school officials, public health authorities, and health insurance companies seemed determined to weigh and measure every child in America.45 Doctors, in the early stages of organizing the new specialty of pediatrics, weighed in on what all those numbers meant. Averages and standard deviations were calculated for virtually every feature of children’s bodies. Like the clothing they wore, children’s “correct” size could now be determined, and increasingly, evaluations of general health were equated with age-appropriate developmental standards. Moreover, although adults created the scales that evaluated children, kids were taught that they should learn to use them. Sophie and her friends could record objective data about

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themselves that would tell them where they stood in comparison to each other, not only in their height, but also in their health. Measuring Up If each girl has her card it is a great incentive to her to develop herself at odd times when she has a few minutes to spare. —How Girls Can Help Their Country, 1916

This notion of health as a measurable commodity was present from the beginning of girls’ organizations. In the Girl Scout’s first handbook, the health section included a lesson called “Measurement of the Girl,” along with suggestions for healthy games and exercises and tips on caring for various body parts.46 “It is of paramount importance to teach the young citizen to assume responsibility for her own development and health,” the handbook proclaimed. Scouts could discharge their responsibility by filling in the “My Physical Development” chart found on page 101, or, for three cents, they could purchase official Scout measurement cards on which they could record their weight and height and the size of their neck, forearms, biceps, and chest. (Juliette Low had ordered a shipment of self-measurement cards in 1912, even when her treasury contained four dollars and the girls did not yet have uniforms.) “Fill in this page quarterly,” girls were directed; “the progress shown should be a useful incentive.” But toward what end exactly was it an incentive? It is actually surprising that leaders of girls’ organizations encouraged their members to take such an obsessive interest in observing their own bodies. After all, girls who so closely scrutinized their faces were chastised for their vanity. How could minute attention to the body be not merely acceptable, but desirable? Leaders did not seem to worry that their girls could be harmed by what historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg calls the “body project”— an obsessive attention to physical beauty fueled by the growth of American consumer culture that became a defining characteristic of girlhood in the 1920s.47 The reason leaders did not worry was twofold, and, as it turns out, they were wrong on both counts. Leaders believed that the ills associated with this full-body vanity, a trend they clearly recognized and of which they strenuously disapproved, had not yet afflicted their members, who at twelve or thirteen, were younger than the high school and college girls most often implicated. Leaders also believed that they could control the attention girls paid to their bodies, turning it into a reflective exercise on character, rather than an obsessive scrutiny of beauty. By the 1930s, however, girls’ organizations had proved

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themselves to be not so much a “protective umbrella” shielding their members from an obsession with looks as a vehicle for helping such attitudes to trickle down to younger girls. Still, the story is complicated. By promoting health as a reflection of character, and a window into a girl’s personality, organizations promoted an ideology that would come to equate “being good” with being on a diet, but asking girls to examine how their habits effected their health was not inherently problematic. Healthy habits—enough sleep, good food, and exercise—are actually good for people. This was the complicated terrain in which girls’ organizations asked their members to carefully chart all things related to health and interpret those charts for clues about their own character. The Rally and Wo-He-Lo, as well as girls’ magazines and adventure stories, were rife with tales of youngsters who did not attend to their health. The plot line was almost always the same: a basically good girl temporarily gave in to the temptation to develop poor health habits, a weakness that not only led to problems for her, but also caused grief to those who loved her. In a typical story that appeared in the Camp Fire Guardian Handbook (leaders also had to learn the proper health lessons to pass on to their girls), a “frivolous girl” neglected her health in favor of her social life, despite the earnest warnings of her physician father, another stock character in such dramas. She began to frequent dance parties and indulge in midnight suppers afterward. On the rare night she stayed home, she sat up into the wee hours reading the latest novel and eating chocolates. Surprised that she couldn’t wake up in the morning, and slightly chagrined to be repeatedly late for school, the girl finally consented to her father’s suggestion that she keep a Camp Fire health chart. After only a few short days, the girl concluded that her lifestyle was not compatible with good health and immediately reformed her ways.48 Clearly, there was nothing subtle about the basic health message: girls encountered stuffy, overheated rooms in theaters, not at home. They lost sleep not because of too much schoolwork or burdensome domestic chores, but because of the pursuit of commercial pleasures. Home-cooked meals were good; store-bought sweets and party fare were not. Unlike the cultivation of beauty, which depended on interaction with consumer culture, attention paid to good health actually coaxed girls away from commercialism. The other important lesson that all such stories emphasized was that ultimately a girl’s health was her own responsibility. It was not that caring adults failed to realize what would happen when girls overindulged in frivolous pleasures; they simply knew that girls would have to make their own

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choices for the lesson to be truly meaningful. A girl might find a health chart slipped under the diary on her nightstand, but no one would force her to fill it out. Those were the lessons, and those were the signposts that pointed to the best place for girls to acquire proper attitudes toward health—a place that was “natural,” not filled with artificial temptations, and therefore a place where her healthy nature could flourish without much difficulty. According to the Camp Fire Girls, health and camp were a carefree combination that any girl could enjoy. It was a lark to be in the fresh air, go hiking, and satisfy a healthy appetite. Although the Camp Fire Girls did not include it in the song that opened this chapter, they often made it clear that health charts were part of this fun. “The health chart makes it interesting to follow” where health rules lead, they chirped; “even people who are not connected to camp fire have been known to keep this chart.”49 Leadership could not agree more. “In fact camp should be the place for every girl to begin to keep the chart, if she has not previously begun to,” proclaimed the Guardian Handbook. But if girls who snuck a peek at their guardian’s handbook read on, they might have been given pause by the sentence that followed. Calling up an image more reminiscent of an infirmary than a rustic cabin, the handbook recommended that “the card or chart should be kept near her cot, and the results handed in weekly for checking up.”50 Although camp was depicted as a perfect place for girls to begin monitoring their own health, albeit with a little help, they were only taking over a task that had been started for them before they arrived. Camp directors most frequently recommended the family doctor as the person best equipped to fill out the prospective camper’s health form. It was assumed they could knowledgably answer all standard questions about a girl’s inoculation history, food and drug allergies, and the establishment of menstruation. Doctors were queried about recommendations for appropriate activity levels, amounts of rest, and special diets. The Girl Scouts, however, mindful of the cumulative cost of two weeks at summer camp, and interested in standardizing procedures across local councils, were willing to consider different options. To standardize the medical examination, the Education Department at Girl Scout National Headquarters created a health certificate, for sale to local councils. The national board recommended that councils arrange health exams themselves and suggested that it was often possible to get local physicians, particularly female ones, to donate their services or offer them at a reduced rate.51 “We take the physical examination so much for granted these days . . . that it sometimes surprises us when we find a girl who has not had a

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physical examination,” admitted the Guardian Handbook.52 But sometimes campers had not had an exam, and directors were forced to depend on parental reports. Whether or not a girl had a received a clean bill of health from a physician, there were still health concerns that only parents could answer. Parents were asked to supply information about their daughters’ “health behaviors”—bed-wetting and sleepwalking caused the most concern—and other health issues such as constipation and fainting spells. Like the doctors, parents were supposed to list any activities from which campers should be debarred, and directors sought parents’ assurances that their daughters had been informed about the “maturation process,” whether or not the girls had reached menarche. Overall, parents were expected to be conversant with a camp’s health requirements and familiar enough with the exam to verify or supplement the physician’s work. Despite standardized forms and the extensive questioning of physicians and parents, directors were not always satisfied that girls would arrive in good condition. Camp nurses were often called upon to make last-minute decisions about a camper’s fitness—with H. W. Gibson complaining that “the average family physician [was often] rather superficial in his examination”—and refuse her admission if need be.53 Nurses were expected to recognize serious health problems, such as “contagious disease,” and also to examine campers with, literally, a fine-tooth comb.54 “No Scout should be allowed to come to camp infested with vermin, and yet this happens repeatedly unless definite precautions are taken,” grumbled Campward Ho!55 Girls were taught to take the nurses’ role as gatekeepers of the camp’s health very seriously: “The nurse tells me that three girls failed to report to her yesterday. Every one in camp must report to the nurse each morning,” solemnly intoned a girl on a Camp Fire radio program.56 None of these admonishments were purely hysterical responses to nonexistent threats; in Camp Management, Gibson listed typhoid, polio, and malaria as unfortunate, but regular, occurrences in summer camps. Notwithstanding these rather dire scenarios, the truth was that a girl’s health exam was most often put to a very different use from that of ferreting out potential health risks. Each Girl Scout camper received a “thorough medical exam,” reported the Porter Sargent’s Guide to Summer Camps, upon which was based a “constructive physical program for the camping weeks.”57 And to Sargent, not only did a girl’s health dictate the camping program, the camping program in turn focused on the girls’ health. “The Girl Scout Camp program is carefully planned to teach good health and to develop character,” he assured readers. Despite his warnings about contagious disease, H. W.

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Gibson agreed. The medical examination had to be thorough, he wrote, so that “camp management may be truly guided in its work.”58 “A Weighty Discussion” No part of the “physical program” at camp received more attention, was measured as often, or was charted as meticulously as girls’ weight. In fact, the measurement of a camper’s weight often seemed synonymous with a judgment about her health. Changes in a girl’s weight were carefully tracked, but who was going to decide what those changes meant? There was no simple answer to this question, as the meaning of weight gain and loss was in a state of profound transition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, young women still wrote home from college to describe late-night feasts in loving detail and brag about how much weight they had gained over the course of the semester. 59 Overly robust figures might have been falling out of fashion, but parents still wanted to hear that their daughters were not suffering ill-health effects from the rigors of academic pursuits, and young women were happy to comply. Weight gains meant that a girl was successfully coping with college life, with no ill effects on her physical fitness. By the time younger girls started going to camp, older girls were facing rather different standards. “Reducing” had become the vogue among college girls, who now lamented the “freshman ten” and tried to lose it as soon as possible; even high school girls obsessed in their diaries about the latest diets. The picture for younger girls, the twelve- to fourteen-year-olds who populated most camps, was far more complex. In some ways, they were still children, and concerned adults viewed weight gain as a healthy expression of their growing bodies. However, even girls this young were being absorbed into a consumer culture that regaled them with the same fashion imperatives that obsessed their older sisters. Their parents and leaders sometimes lamented this trend, but at other times seemed to support it. At what age did a camper stop being a child who should gain weight, and turn into girl who needed to watch her weight? Girls, of course, brought their own answer to this question to camp with them. Their counselors, who were typically college girls, surely had a fair amount of influence over youngsters who looked up to them, and directors themselves seemed to be of mixed mind. Had the slimming trend already affected their girls or were they oblivious to it? If adolescent girls had been affected, was this for good or ill? If the answers to all these questions raised doubts about girls’ proper relationship to dieting, there was unanimity that girls did have a complex

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relationship to food in general. Since girls had begun asserting their will at the Victorian dinner table, using food refusal as a way to claim some power within their families, it had been very clear that food had meaning well beyond simple sustenance.60 All girls’ organizations recognized this, and all made moves to curtail girls’ ability to use food as means of control. Staff at the YWCA’s Camp Tinicum were asked to rate campers on a “Behavior Frequency Rating Scale.” Girls who complained about the food they were served lost points, while those who were “unselfish with food and belongings” received positive marks.61 Most directors never gave girls a chance to be selfish with food—they banned, or severely regulated, the parentally bestowed treat boxes that caused so much trouble. All directors, however, had to cope with problem eaters. Typically, directors invoked camp traditions—the Scout’s Kettles and Campfires proclaimed that “we always eat a little bit of everything here”—to turn meals into communal rituals, rather than allowing them to be opportunities for the expression of individual preferences. And if that did not work, Scout leadership appealed directly to girls’ maturity: “Camp is a place to acquire a scientific rather than emotional point of view about food.”62 This lesson, leadership agreed, would serve camp directors and staff, as well as girls. Directors were constantly inundated with advice about how “meal planning should not be a haphazard affair, but should be done scientifically.” They had to wade through countless sample menus—a typical one recommended meat at every meal, though directors could vary the fare between fish, chicken, lamb, hamburger, and creamed beef. Girls had to be served plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, and most guides suggested desserts with every dinner and supper, in order to round out a balanced meal plan. Occasionally, the chief concern seemed to be sheer quantity, Camp Fire guardians were advised to consult The Manual for Army Cooks, but for the most part directors were urged to have a trained dietician on hand. Whether or not rhetoric approached reality, leadership did not advertise their dining rooms as mess halls, and they wanted to give at least an impression that campers’ individual needs were met. Camp Tinicum’s brochures stressed that “skilled dieticians” would pay individualized attention to campers’ health and would “personally supervise the planning of well balanced meals.”63 But individualized attention invariably steered the conversation about food away from generic caloric requirements and toward a judgment of whether a particular camper was too thin or too fat. “Weight is Watched!” insisted a Tinicum brochure, and not only that, it was “carefully watched and charted.”

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It was in conversations about individualized meal plans that directors showed their disagreement over whether the culture of slimming that obsessed older girls had trickled down to their charges. YWCA and Girl Scout officials tended to believe that it had: girls were “under weight and underfed,” complained one Scout leader, not because they lived in poverty, but because they were “over privileged [and] over-cultured,” a condition that led them to apply cosmetics in order to hide the effects of ill health rather than incorporating “sleep, vegetables and fresh air” into their daily routine.64 Given that diagnosis of girls’ health woes, camp was clearly the required medicine. “Under-nutrition and anemia will usually be automatically corrected by life in the open and the consequent increased appetite,” opined Campward Ho!65 Directors verified such pronouncements in virtually the same language; one counselor at a YWCA camp in Pennsylvania claimed that by the end of the season, her girls were such good eaters “it was hard to believe that some of the girls had come to camp because of loss of appetite.”66 The Sargent Handbook on Summer Camps, however, appeared to reserve judgment on the culture’s effect on girls’ health. “An under-weight girl joins the ‘milk squad,’” it stated frankly, invoking the most popular and allegedly wholesome method of gaining weight, “while one who is over-weight receives advice on diet and exercise.”67 Camp Fire officials tended to voice a different opinion. The Wohelo Bird, a booklet advertising the organization’s camping program, in general, and its flagship Camp Sebago-Wohelo, in particular, offered its readers a little story called “A Weighty Discussion.”68 The tale, told in the voice of the camp’s scales, opened by asking whether girls had ever “wondered why Hiiteni [Charlotte Gulick’s Camp Fire name] keeps me so near the dining tables.” The scale’s answer? “It is to be a constant reminder that I am always here to do my part—if you will do yours.”69 Girls were then asked if they recalled the “beautiful little opening ceremony” in which their weights were announced: “Don’t you remember what fun you had being classified?” Girls might not have been thrilled by this practice, but for the Wohelo scales it was the high point of the day: “How I look forward to our little before-breakfast chats— that intimate, chummy time, when I whisper secrets to you.” The scale did not whisper very softly, however; classifications were read out for the whole hall to hear. Girls “listened breathlessly” to hear if they were “going to get out of the ranks of the ‘Toughs’ and be a ‘Regular,’ or if [they had] at last become a ‘Husky’ instead of a ‘Too Fat.’” Lest girls find these public labels offensive, the scales reassured them: “I am a true friend to all of you. I never tell lies about you nor flatter you. No true friend ever does.”

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Regardless of the methods employed by the Wohelo scales, Camp Fire Girls had their own ways of navigating the demands of diets and social pressures. In a 1933 radio broadcast, the first of three recorded by a St. Paul, Minnesota, Camp Fire, the girls told their own story of how a girl could handle the problem of dieting. The lead character, Betty, is on the lookout for a hobby. “I’m going to reduce so my mother can’t say I’m too fat to have a white party dress. . . . I’m going to starve myself,” she announces to her friends. Although they are indignant on her behalf, they are also seriously concerned about her attitude. “I don’t think Miss Dorothy will let you starve yourself,” they tell her, invoking the authority of their Camp Fire Guardian, and “besides, you can’t call reducing a hobby.” When Miss Dorothy appears, she is noncommittal on the question of whether dieting can count as a hobby, but she does support Betty’s goal. “I don’t see why you couldn’t diet if you did it wisely. . . . I know something else that would be good for you too,” the guardian tells her, encouraging Betsy to get back to playing tennis. “It would be part of the scheme.” After months of tennis practice, and sensible dieting, Betty emerges victorious. She wins a difficult match to clinch the champion’s cup for St. Paul over rival Minneapolis. As the hometown crowd cheers her accomplishment, one spectator turns to the Camp Fire Girls. “Is that Betty?” she exclaims, apparently unable to recognize the newly svelte athlete out on the court. “She’s lost seventeen pounds since last October,” boasts her proud friends in reply. Betty, they tell the astonished spectator, overcame the odds to beat “the big Swedish girl Olga Anderson” who was “twice Betty’s size” and played “like a man.” In this case, bigger was obviously not better, the friends conclude as they enjoy a celebratory piece of cake at a postmatch party. “I guess it’s okay to have just a teeny piece,” jokes the now teeny Betty.70 Like the “frivolous girl” who staved off future health problems by reforming her ways, girls concerned about their weight could “hold on to Health” by following a Camp Fire–approved reducing scheme. As the fictional Betty showed, and as real girls at camp learned, weight loss not only improved physical health, but also enabled girls to follow a physical program that led to myriad benefits. The Guardian Handbook taught leaders that they were responsible for helping girls to learn these truths. “The Girl Who Was Fat,” for example, presented a unique challenge. She was a pleasant and cooperative child who was nonetheless aloof when it came to interacting with her peers. After patiently gaining the girl’s confidence, her guardian discovered the reason for the child’s reticence: “She is fat,” the handbook straightforwardly explained.71 Had the guardian been

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politely oblivious? Had she needed the girl to confess her obesity? We are never told, but what we learn instead is that all that really mattered—at least for girls who believed themselves overweight—was how the girl felt about herself. The thoughtful guardian accompanied the girl to a physician, who gave her a diet and exercise regime. She began to keep a health chart and was increasingly willing to participate in activities she had previously shunned for fear of looking “ridiculous” and embarrassing herself in front of her friends. She felt more attractive. The Girl Who Was Fat had learned an important lesson that had always been present in the health teachings of girls’ organizations, but increasingly came to dominate them by the 1930s—a girl held on to health by losing weight, and in losing weight, she became a better person.

The New Health Winner Positive health attitudes should be woven into the texture of the girl’s personality. —“The Health Winner Badge,” Girl Scout Leader, May 1935

In the mid-1930s, the Girl Scouts overturned two decades of healthcraft policy. “It is considered neither necessary nor advisable for a girl to keep the health record,” declared Girl Scout Leader Magazine. Why the apparent change of heart on something that had been a core responsibility of a healthy girl? “The record keeping tends to isolate her health attitudes as if they represented something that could be set down in black and white and finished with, like a problem in arithmetic.”72 If health was no longer something a girl should chart, or indeed something she could be “finished with” like a healthy meal or a vigorous walk, then what exactly had it become? Health, the Scouts proclaimed, was now an integral part of a “girl’s personality.” Personal health had become a “way of living” and as such it merged not only with a girl’s personality but with her “appearance and behavior,” too.73 Girls, in other words, could never be isolated from health attitudes, because health was now embedded in every aspect of their physical and mental makeup.74 Charts had become superfluous, because a girl now had to constantly monitor every part of herself to stay healthy—internal control had taken the place of check marks and a captain’s signature. Scout leadership recognized that this self-regulation might prove a daunting challenge for even the most earnest girl, who was bound to come up short on some health standard. “There is no necessity for sugar coating the element of personal responsibility,” leaders were advised, “But you can

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make this attractive by showing that she can create an agreeable well-balanced personality by paying attention to health.” And how could leaders best assist girls with the acquisition of a healthy personality? “Perhaps one of the most successful approaches that can be made to the question of individual health is the appeal to the girl’s desire for personal charm and beauty.”75 Leaders were advised to seek out the guidance of female physicians who had a “modern outlook” so that they might assist girls with recommendations for the proper care of skin and hair, and give advice on physical grace and good figures. Leaders themselves might remember that girls cared about popularity, and that this, too, was an avenue to better health, as the selection of clothing and cosmetics now had a place in the healthcraft program. “Our Senior Girl Scouts are interested in health primarily from the personality development angle,” concluded the Girl Scout Leader. Leaders might have made the policing of girls’ personal responsibility for health more attractive by focusing on issues the girls cared about, but that did not necessarily make the chore less onerous. The solution, leaders were informed, just might lie with a troop as a whole. One method a leader could try was a health-based secret Santa game in which each troop member would draw another girl’s name and become responsible for checking up on her. “Since no girl knows who has her name and since the check is made over a period of time, the girls are observed when they are off guard and natural,” advised Girl Scout Leader magazine. Several times a year, girls would report on their clandestine health observations, and leaders would add their analysis before sharing results with the subject. Leaders who balked at the thought of signing off on a report that might be tainted by schoolgirl jealousies were reassured that proper precautions had been taken. The checklist, they were informed, only covered “readily observable facts—such as posture—rather than traits of character, which might be made worse instead of improved by ill advised comment.” Regardless, leaders always had the final word, and since they had “a good understanding of the psychology of the adolescent girl, and are trying to give each girl the particular help that she especially needs,” there was no reason to fear the secret health charting would go awry.76 Of course, Girl Scout healthcraft was not all personality development and surreptitious surveillance; there were still merit badges to be earned. Unsurprising, the specific requirements for the new Personal Health badge outlined in The Girl Scout Leader in the spring of 1938 reinforced the more general ideas about health that had been present for the past several years. Scouts had to complete seven required activities and four electives, the latter

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from a list of twenty-two possibilities. Some requirements involved the entire troop’s well-being—girls had to work out a “cold-prevention campaign” for everyone and help create a pamphlet file on interesting health issues. Other requirements were less obviously related to anyone’s health. Girls had to make a scrapbook of photographs from fashion magazines that showed models with good posture, and for the requirement that followed they had to study the figures they had chosen and “work to be like them.” Another requirement asked girls to put on a style show where they exhibited seasonal fashions that were “attractive, suitable, and healthful” for a girl their age. Personal health, apparently, was now not merely a reflection of a girl’s personality, but a commodity that could best be understood by observing, and emulating, models from the commercial marketplace. Girl Scout Health Winners had come a long way from 1912, when a long hike and fresh air were integral to good health. Scouts in the late 1930s, it seemed, had little left to learn at camp, and in this they were not alone. Lester Scott, who had taken over Camp Fire after the Gulicks’ deaths, agreed that camping had reached a time of limited utility. In an essay, “Catching Health”—a title that described something that Camp Fire Girls used to do simply by being at camp—he suggested that a camping experience was no longer synonymous with a girl’s improved health, but instead had to be “seen in its proper perspective, as an important part, it is true, but only as a part of the foundation of personality.” For Camp Fire, too, health had become personality, “and the acquiring of health as a basis for character development as the adolescent grows into the adult is the most important contribution to modern civilization which this program can make.”77 Health might be girls’ greatest gift to civilization, but they could no longer catch it at camp.

Epilogue

A Tale of Two Girls


T

he following two stories—one from the diary of a Camp Fire Girl from Minnesota, the other from a Pennsylvania Girl Scout—show what happened to girls when they left the landscape of camp. Alice Gortner, Shirley Vincent, and their friends set out on gypsy trips under the official care of their organizations. They went as Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts, not merely as girls, yet the experiences they encountered in this “graduate school” of camping had little to do with the sanctioned ideals of the two movements. Girls’ organizations liked to view their proffered camping excursions as educational experiences carefully crafted to meet the needs of developing adolescent girls. But these stories show that pioneer training, and indeed the much lauded pioneer heritage itself, was largely inconsequential when girls went seeking adventures that would truly challenge them. It was not so much that directors lost control of the girls, but rather they had lost the ability to define the nature of girls’ adventures.

Alice Gortner’s Forest Jaunt In 1933, sixteen-year-old Alice Gortner went on a gypsy trip with the Nawagami Camp Fire Girl group of St. Paul, Minnesota.1 Otauye (Alice’s Camp Fire name, which meant “friendship”) and her companions left Camp Ojiketa near Chisago City and headed north for the shore of Lake Superior, then, as now, a popular tourist destination for residents of the Twin Cities. The seriousness with which the campers viewed their “gypsy trip” was echoed by the local paper, which announced their departure under the headline “Camp Fire Girls Start Forest Jaunt Monday.” The paper duly reported, “Each has passed the gypsy test, the highest national rank in camp craft.” To be eligible for this advanced camping experience, girls also had to have passed tests in swimming and first aid. As the week progressed, however, it 221

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became obvious that the group would have been better served by training in auto repair than in advanced campcraft. The girls had a terrific, if rambunctious, time on the first two days of their forest jaunt. Alice, happily ensconced in the rumble seat of one of the cars, recorded how much she “loved the smell of the pines” as the group of eight girls and six counselors made their way up the Gun Flint Trail toward the town of Ely in the central part of the state. The girls enjoyed hearty meals: pancakes with syrup, bacon, and cocoa for breakfast; ribs, roast corn, and bread twists for dinner; “Club House” sandwiches and the traditional camp favorite, “some mores” around the evening campfire. Not counting meals, the girls’ favorite pastime seemed to be amusing themselves at their counselors’ expense. Miss Florence, in particular, was a butt of the girls’ jokes. She found “vanishing cream instead of toothpaste” in her toilet kit and only too late discovered the eggs that had been hidden on her seat in the car. Much to the delight of the pranksters, she thoroughly “scrambled” them when she slid in behind the wheel. Unfortunately, practical jokes gave way to real trouble just outside Ely when the car Alice was riding in wound up in a ditch. Girls in the front seat were flung against the windshield, while those in the back slammed their heads into the roof. “My head was killing me,” Alice complained. “I thought I must have broken something but I didn’t.” Men from a local Civilian Conservation Corps camp helped the Camp Fire Girls fix two flat tires but could do nothing about the “bent axel and fenders, [and] wheels out of line.” After recording a litany of injuries sustained and mechanical failures endured, Alice added, apparently without irony, that “otherwise [we were] fine.” With their traveling companions in the other car already well on their way, and no passers-by on the road to flag down for help, the stalwart girls limped along by themselves to the evening’s rendezvous point. “On the way home we had to get out several times and push the car up the hill. My back was about broken when we arrived at the tourist camp at about 1:30 AM,” Alice complained to her diary. Too tired to eat supper, the girls stumbled into bed only to be woken in the dead of night by rain dripping onto them from a leaky roof. They spent the last few restless hours before dawn trying to sleep on tables in the dining hall. “Oh, it’s a great life,” was Alice’s parting comment on that ill-fated day. But the Camp Fire Girls’ wild ride was not over. The group continued to be plagued by mechanical troubles and their weeklong ramble turned into a daily struggle to keep the cars on the road. They tried valiantly to prevent automotive mishaps from becoming the dominant theme of their trip and

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stuck to a prearranged schedule of hikes and canoe outings. Luck was not with them, however, as they were thwarted by fatigue, inclement weather, and faulty equipment in the form of “unmanageable canoes.” Moreover, like the fictional Girls of Deepdale, the St. Paul Camp Fire Girls ran into people who viewed them askance and wondered out loud what a group of city girls was doing wandering around northern Minnesota. “People get a big kick out of us,” Alice wrote; they “gave us funny looks.” Finally, the girls arrived at their last stop, Duluth, where they paused at the docks on Lake Superior to watch the big freighters unload their cargo. Given the circumstances of their trip, it was perhaps a bit wistfully that Alice noted the day’s highlight as “watching the new cars from Detroit coming in.” Alice Gortner and the Nawagami Camp Fire Girls certainly did have an adventure when they ventured forth from their established camp for a week of “advanced camping”—it just wasn’t the adventure for which they were prepared. All their pioneering skills, including those that had helped them acquire the “highest national rank in camp craft,” went unused. True, their itinerary had been scuttled by mechanical troubles and inclement weather, but even if the planned trip had come off without a hitch, it would hardly have been the promised wilderness excursion in advanced camping. In fact, Camp Fire leaders had arranged a naturecraft adventure that looked exactly like a commercial auto tourist vacation. The girls didn’t seem to have minded. Alice had had a good time, and felt she had learned more than a few things about camaraderie and perseverance; however, she clearly had not required a ceremonial gown, primitive rituals, or racial exercise in order to become master of her situation.

Shirley Vincent: The “Scout’s Own” All Alone Shirley Vincent and Camp Indian Run grew up together. Shirley, who hailed from suburban Philadelphia, kept a scrapbook that chronicled her progression through Indian Run’s various levels of camping and woodcraft adventure from 1934 to 1942.2 Camp Indian Run, a 136-acre camp eleven miles from Downingtown, Pennsylvania, looked like a model Scout camp. Indian Run prominently featured the patrol system of which Scout leadership was so proud. The camp had room for several specialized groups, including Never Never Land for ten- and eleven-year-olds; Juniper Meadows for older girls who were at camp for the first time; and Romeny, which accommodated the bulk of the campers. Indian Run also featured an advanced pioneering unit called Trail’s End for girls with two or more years

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of camping experience. It should have been a place where the pioneer heritage could thrive. When Shirley, at age thirteen, first encountered Indian Run in the summer of 1934, she must have had prior camping experience, as she was permitted to bypass Juniper Meadows and go straight into Romeny. The following summer, as Scout leadership intended, she signed up for Trail’s End, the pioneer unit that offered more adventure than mass camping at Romeny. The year after that, with two summers of Scout camping under her belt, Shirley had grown beyond the experiences offered. But Camp Indian Run had a solution. As was mandated for all established camps that wanted to maintain their good reputation, in the summer of 1936, Indian Run offered its first gypsy trip. And so Shirley set off with a handful of other advanced campers for an excursion under the auspices of Indian Run, but far from its 136 acres. The girls traveled to the Pocono Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania accompanied by their leader, Mrs. Zimmer, and her husband. The gypsy trip, which had cost an additional ten dollars on top of the regular camping fee, had promised girls a more “primitive experience” off in the mountains. If the girls who went on this pioneering trip had read any Scouting publications, or listened to a word their leaders had said, they would have been primed to enjoy both a rugged adventure and the romantic thrill of being out in nature. The American Girl and Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, as well as their handbook, depicted pioneering trips as the acme of adventure in the natural world. Internal reports and memoranda from the national office to local directors always stressed this attitude, and even if girls received a whisper-down-the-lane version of this message they indeed were ready to have a wonderful time in the Poconos. “Several of the girls said that their ideas came in the early morning when they woke up too early to get up and looked out of their lean-to at the pine clad mountains and the blue sky piled high with numerous clouds,” one memo enthusiastically reported.3 According to camp directors, this was the feeling Scouts could hope to experience when they gave themselves over to the power of genuine pioneering. Shirley Vincent had been listening, even if her friends had not. On the morning of their first full day in the woods, Shirley rose with the sun, eager for the promised inspiration. She dragged her tent mate out of bed at five thirty to enact a revered early-morning Scout ritual, but discovered a rather different ambiance from what she had been trained to expect—not a single other soul was stirring. “We intended to have a Scout’s Own but no one else got up,” she lamented. There was nothing to do but

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go back to sleep and wait for the rest of camp to rise at the more civilized hour of eight o’clock. Disappointed, though undaunted, Shirley attempted to interest the group in a display of favored woodcraft skills. “We tried to cook bread twists over an open fire,” she recalled, but “they were a mess.” After that first morning of unfilled Scouting promises, Shirley learned that if she could just realign her expectations and stretch the definition of a pioneer outing, she would have a good time after all. With pioneering expectations on hold, Shirley saw that she had fallen in with a pretty nice group. She and the other girls hiked into town for ice cream almost every day, except for the time Mr. Zimmer piled them into his car for a drive. She stopped getting up early—the group never did manage a sunrise Scout’s Own service—but overall Shirley enjoyed her trip to the Poconos; it just did not turn out to be the pioneer trip that she had expected. Still, she was glad to return “home” to Indian Run, where she could see her friends and pick up her mail. Shirley Vincent had tried to carry out the advertised woodcraft adventure program of primitive campers but found little enthusiasm among either her fellow pioneers or the adult guides. Finally, in the summer of 1937, Shirley found the adventure she had been looking for. Once again under the auspices of Indian Run, she and her friends ranged much farther afield, and in doing so left all remnants of pioneer Scouting behind. The girls set out on a bicycling tour that began in Montpelier, Vermont, and headed south toward Brattleboro, before finishing up in Northfield, Massachusetts. They were supposed to stay in youth hostels along the way, but the Vermont terrain must have got the better of them some days, and the girls found themselves sleeping in haylofts when they could not make it to their intended destination. The weather, typical for a Vermont summer, subjected them to chilly nights—“it was very cold and we wished for more blankets”—and sweltering days of intense heat and humidity. Yet the group soon learned that any climate-related discomfort was minimal compared to the bane of all cyclists in Vermont—long, grueling uphill climbs. The girls quickly figured out another lesson familiar to all who travel on two as opposed to four wheels—mountain roads look quite different to those who provide their own locomotion. Shirley constantly noted the faulty reports the group received from motorists they encountered along the way. One day the girls were told they had a “bad mountain to climb” ahead of them and, like true Girl Scouts, Shirley wryly commented, they “took care to be prepared.” The girls found the terrain they faced that day laughable compared with the pair of mountains that local residents assured them would pose no problem. “They never went over either on a bicycle,” Shirley

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theorized the night after a climb that had exhausted the entire group. These Scouts were definitely “learning by doing,” as leaders liked to say, but, of course, they had had to literally go on the road to learn the things that camp could no longer teach them. True to the spirit of pioneering, the Indian Run girls discovered that danger, as well as adventure, abounded in the wider world beyond camp. Shirley and a friend were chased by a “mad bull” whose pasture they had inadvertently wandered into; the girls had to crawl through a barbed-wire fence in order to escape. Even when they did not stray into the wrong places, the girls found physical danger near at hand. The heavy summer rains caused one to loose control of her bike on a steep descent, falling and, according to Shirley, “nearly killing herself.” Such accidents represented the most egregious dangers to bodies that were already being tested to their physical limits on a daily basis. “The riding was hard. Everyone was tired and worn out,” Shirley noted with emphasis after one particularly grueling day. Still, the Scouts tried to keep up their plucky resolve. Shirley and her friends rewrote a favorite campfire song in which overburdened Girl Scouts took the place of the “merry, merry kukaberra.” “The heavy laden girls scouts tramp, tramp, tramping up hills . . . pushing, pulling [their] heavy bicycles on the roads through Vermont,” sang these hardy pioneers.

A

lthough separated by geography and institutional affiliation, Shirley Vincent and Alice Gortner were a lot alike. Both girls were active members of their respective organizations into their late teens, something that could not be said for most of their peers. Both respected their groups’ program enough to earn the honors that allowed them to systematically progress through the all the ranks of advanced camping. Both cherished fond enough memories of their camping excursions that they donated scrapbooks to local archives. Yet both girls ultimately discovered that the finest adventures Scouting and Camp Fire had to offer could no longer be had at camp.

The Age of Imagination Draws to a Close From their inception, girls’ organizations had believed it was their mission to launch their members into an exciting and imaginative future had held myriad possibilities. In one of its first issues, Camp Fire’s Wo-HeLo magazine perfectly captured the vision all girls’ organizations held of themselves. It told the story of a pageant in which the Spirit of Progress was desperately trying to rely a message into the Future.4 Indians, representative

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of the Age of Barbarism, used smoke signals, but the signals faded away into unrecognizable wisps almost as quickly as they could be produced. Then the Age of Militarism attempted the task. Two soldiers expertly, but ultimately ineffectively, performed a wigwag drill—their perfectly executed signals invisible to a Future that waited behind a line of distant hills. Their failure brought forth the penultimate attempt. The Age of Invention, armed with the latest technology, valiantly employed both telegraph and wireless—but to no avail, as the equipment failed at an untimely moment. Finally, the Age of Imagination entered the pageant’s stage. Embodied in Camp Fire Girls and Boy Scouts, the Age of Imagination did not send a signal at all, but formed a living chain of children, whose outstretched clasped hands reached over the hills and into the valley where the Future awaited them. At the time its script was written in June 1914, this pageant perfectly captured the vision girls’ organizations held of themselves as vehicles that would enable their members to become emissaries to a brighter future. All girls’ organizations—Camp Fire, the Girl Pioneers, the Girl Scouts, the YWCA’s Girl Reserves—wanted their members to be strong links in this living chain that reached into a future adult leaders themselves could never visit. Their yearning was palpable. “The girl has come into her own kingdom and she opens the way to a new birth of freedom for the people of the world. . . . We, of the older day, salute her,” proclaimed a small booklet titled, simply, The Girl Scout. The adults who founded girls’ organizations could not imagine a future in which their girls’ imagination did not secure them an equal place alongside boys. The problem, perhaps, was that many leaders of girls’ organizations had depended too heavily on their own imaginations, to the extent that they forgot to turn their visions into reality. In hindsight it is possible to read this pageant as an uncannily accurate depiction of the failed paths leaders had attempted to take while guiding their girls into the future. Ironically for a Camp Fire pageant, the first failure came at the hands of their revered icon—the primitive, now barbarous, Indian. Camp Fire leadership had always known it was out of the mainstream in placing such weighty psychological symbolism on Native American iconography, and by the late 1930s, its position was untenable. Girls could still have fun by dressing up in ceremonial gowns, but no serious scholar talked about recapitulation theory any more. The words savage and primitive were not bandied about quite so lightly, and most educational theorists had the sense to be embarrassed that their field had once equated white children with adults of other, allegedly lesser, races.

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The Age of Militarism had not fared much better. Girl Scouts in particular had been roundly criticized for the autocracy and militarism that had crept into their camp programs. In the aftermath of the Great War it seemed obvious to many Americans that martial training, far from being a prerequisite of democracy, was, in fact, its opposite. Many reform-minded women, including those involved in progressive education, recreation, and Scouting, cast their lot with pacifism and internationalism. Girls’ home front advances on securing civic rights and duties via their martial training had fared little better than the Allies’ initial assaults on German trenches. In perhaps the sorest blow of all, girls’ organizations had stumbled when they encountered the Age of Invention. Girls’ camps had claimed to turn their backs on modernity and all the inventions and commercial pleasures they believed had harmed their girls. But then camps themselves had become civilized, and unhealthy to boot, while girls’ organizations proved they were willing to embrace the modern consumer culture when it suited their purposes to do so. Girl Scout leadership might still believe that their respect for the natural world had led girls into the future—“’Twas a wise woman who led the way along the trail to the camp fire and the balsam bed. ’Twas someone who knew the spiritual reward of the mountain climb, the comforting weariness of the evening swim, who led the girls to the hills,” wrote one believer—but the truth was that girls had traveled over the hills and into the future largely on their own.5 None of this is to say that girls’ organizations or their camps failed; clearly they did not. As they approach their centennial, the Girl Scouts boast more than three hundred local councils with a membership of 2.7 million girls and estimate that more than 50 million Americans have been served by the organization since its founding in 1912.6 And as anyone who surfs the Internet or reads a newspaper can attest, summer camps are booming. There are camps that specialize in weight loss, equestrian skills, college preparation, language instruction, and virtually any other pursuit that could productively occupy an adolescent for the course of a summer. Yet this seemingly endless litany of camp activities belies the loss of an ineffable enthusiasm with which camps were founded at the beginning of the last century. Natural camps were supposed to be transcendent, the embodiment of a youthful imagination set free to discover its own powers and potential. Girls were meant to lose themselves in the mystical experiences inherent to camp’s physical landscape and, in doing so, come to recognize the contours of their own souls. Despite the fact that camp has remained an enjoyable experience for thousands of girls, it has reneged on this original

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promise. Leaders of girls’ organizations designed camp to be a place apart, and even if they did not always realize their goal, the possibility of its attainment remained with them. In fact, it was the heady promises of summer camp that people remembered when they reflected on the lives of the leaders of girls’ organizations. Consider this testimony from the 1933 obituary of Girl Pioneer founder Lina Beard: “Today we think nothing about it if a girl loves outdoor exercise or even if she beats her brother at tennis or swimming or paddling a canoe. We see no more reason why a girl should not enjoy athletic sports as much as a boy, and we count it a great gain that the modern girl is stronger and healthier than the girl of a generation or two ago.”7 In a way, summer camp lost because girls’ organizations had won. Girls no longer had to be removed from the dominant culture and packed off to the transformative nature of camp in order to prove their mettle; they could simply go out into the world and do what they wished. And so they did.

Notes

Introduction: What Is the Matter with Jane? 1. “The Matter with Jane,” New York Times, November 3, 1920, 10. 2. Jane H. Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 3. For an excellent discussion of Hall’s relationship to Late Victorian masculinity, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 4. See Amy Susan Green, “Savage Childhood: The Scientific Construction of Girlhood and Boyhood in the Progressive Era” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995). Green directly links the child study movement, deeply influenced by Hall’s work, to the nature study movement, to explore recapitulation as applied to children. Although the title promises otherwise, her work focuses almost exclusively on boys. 5. Almost all scholarly work on boys’ organizations—the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, the Woodcraft League, and the Sons of Daniel Boone—affirm the importance of Hall’s theories. See David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Robert MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 6. For the classic articulation of the middle-landscape ideal, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. For the middle landscape applied to zoos, see Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton University Press, 2002). 7. Most sources support Kehonka’s claim to being the first girls’ camp, although camps, particularly Camp Wyonegonic in Denmark, Maine, contest that claim. See Yankee, July 1997, 58–70. 231

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Notes to Pages 4–13

8. “The Camp Movement,” 8, folder, Camp and Camping—General, National Historic Preservation Center, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, New York (hereafter GS-USA). 9. Porter Sargent, A Handbook of Summer Camps, 3rd ed. (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1926). 10. Girl Reserve Movement Manual for Advisors (New York: National Board of the YWCA, 1921), 567. 11. Historian David Macleod argues that boys’ camps did not develop the same mystical attitude toward the wilderness. See Building Character in the American Boy, chap. 13. 12. A. E. Hamilton, “Putting Over Eugenics,” Journal of Heredity 6 (June 1915): 281–288. 13. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 14. J. Halsey Gulick, “Do the People of Maine Know What Their Summer Camps Are Doing?” Sun Up: Maine’s Own Magazine, August 1930, box 508, Camp Fire Girls Papers, Special Collections, University of Maine–Orono. 15. Charlotte Gulick with Hartley Davis, “The Camp-Fire Girls,” Outlook, May 25, 1912, 185. 16. Louise M. Price, “Report on Camps During the Summer of 1923,” 6, folder, Camp and Camping—Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Reports, GS-USA. 17. Unidentified newspaper clipping, September 30, 1928, folder, Camp and Camping—General, GS-USA. 18. Jane Deeter Rippin, quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, n.d., Box 1 Inventory, Archives of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council, Conshohocken, PA (hereafter GS-SEPA). 19. Josephine Daskam Bacon, Your Girl and Mine (New York: Girl Scouts, n.d.). 20. Lina Beard and Adelia Beard, Girl Pioneers of America/Official Manual (New York: National Americana Society, 1914), 7. 21. Things Girl Scouts Do and The Way They Do Them (New York: Girl Scouts, 1929), 13. 22. Scouting for Girls, (New York: Girls Scouts, 1920), 17. 23. Things Girl Scouts Do, 3. 24. The Boy Scouts insisted—to the point of threatened litigation—that even the name Scouting belonged to boys. Lawyers retained by the Girl Scouts in 1924 rejected this claim, as do I. Throughout this text I use the unmodified terms Scout and Scouting to refer to girls.

Chapter 1

Fashioning Girls’ Identities

1. Luther Gulick, Wapa I: Camp Fire Girls and the New Relation of Women to the World (New York: Camp Fire, 1912), 3. 2. For accounts of Low’s life, see Gladys Shultz and Daisy Lawrence, The Lady from Savannah: The Life of Juliette Low (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1958); Anne Hyde Choate and Helen Ferris, Juliette Low and the Girl Scouts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928).

Notes to Pages 15–23

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3. For biographical information on Luther Gulick, see Stephanie Wallach, “Luther Halsey Gulick and the Salvation of the American Adolescent” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1989); Ethel J. Dorgan, Luther Halsey Gulick, 1865–1918 (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1934). 4. “National Society for Girls Like the Boy Scouts,” New York Times, April 10, 1911. 5. Helen Buckler, Mary F. Fielder, and Martha F. Allen, Wo-He-Lo: The Story of Camp Fire Girls, 1910–1960 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961). 6. Ibid., 30. 7. Lina Beard to Daniel Carter Beard, September 18, 1911, file, Family Correspondence—Lina Beard, box 4, Daniel Carter Beard Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 8. Camp Fire Girls, The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp Fire Girls, 1914), 16. 9. Ibid. 10. The first Camp Fire handbook detailed more than three hundred honors in seven categories: homecraft, healthcraft, campcraft, handcraft, nature lore, business, and patriotism. Homecraft offered the most choices, with eighty-nine, while campcraft and business offered only twenty-four each. 11. Hartley Davis and Charlotte Gulick, “The Camp-Fire Girls,” Outlook, May 25, 1912, 184. 12. Wo-He-Lo 1 (February 1914): 10. 13. Gulick, Wapa I, 16. 14. Wo-He-Lo 1 (May 1914): 2–10. 15. Camp Fire Girls, Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 16. 16. Davis and Gulick, “The Camp-Fire Girls,” 184. 17. Camp Fire Girl Radio Program, May 22, 1933, folder 4, Alice Gortner Johnson Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, MN. 18. Starr Murphy to John D. Rockefeller Jr., July 31, 1912, folder 38, Campfire Girls, General, 1914–1927; box 4; RG2, Welfare—Youth Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, NY (hereafter RAC). 19. February 10, 1914, Memo, folder 38, Campfire Girls, General, 1914–1927; box 4; RG2, Welfare—Youth Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC. 20. W. S. Richardson to Starr Murphy, March 13, 1913, folder 38, Campfire Girls, General, 1914–1927; box 4; RG2, Welfare—Youth Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC. 21. Ibid. 22. See Shultz and Lawrence, The Lady from Savannah and Choate and Ferris, Juliette Low and the Girl Scouts. 23. Charles E. Strickland, “Juliette Low, the Girl Scouts, and the Role of American Women,” in Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History, ed. Mary Kelley (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977). 24. See Rose Kerr, The Story of the Girl Guides, 1908–1932 (London: Girl Guide Association, 1932). For a scholarly study of the Guides, see Tammy M. Proctor, “On My Honour”: Guides and Scouts in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002).

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Notes to Pages 23–35

25. Katharine O. Wright, Twenty-five Years of Girl Scouting (New York: Girl Scouts, 1937), 14. 26. Quoted in Richard A. Voeltz, “The Antidote to ‘Khaki Fever’? The Expansion of the British Girl Guides During the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992): 627–638. For other work on the Guides and militarism, see Allen Warren, “‘Mothers for the Empire’? The Girl Guides Association, 1909– 1939,” in Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialization and British Imperialism, ed. J. A. Mangan (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990); Anne Summers, “Scouts, Guides and VADs: A Note in Reply to Allen Warren,” English Historical Review 102 (October, 1987): 943–947. 27. Quoted in Voeltz, “The Antidote to ‘Khaki Fever’?” 632. 28. There are several biographies of Baden-Powell that make this observation. See Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986) and Timothy Jeal, The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell (New York: William Morrow, 1990). 29. Paul M. Pressly, “Educating the Daughters of Savannah’s Elite: The Pape School, the Girl Scouts, and the Progressive Movement,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 80 (Summer 1996): 246–275. 30. Juliette Low to Luther Gulick, August 11, 1912, file Hp1 Girl Scouts (Guides), 1911–1913, Camp Fire Archives, Kansas City, MO (hereafter CFA). 31. Juliette Low to Luther Gulick, August 11, 1912, ibid. 32. Baden-Powell to Luther Gulick, December 5, 1912, ibid. 33. James West to Luther Gulick, January 10, 1913, ibid. 34. Luther Gulick to Baden-Powell, January 17, 1913, ibid. 35. Edith Johnston to Juliette Low, July 1913, GS-USA. 36. Baden-Powell to Juliette Low, February 13, 1913, file Hp1 Girl Scouts (Guides), 1911–1913, CFA. 37. Juliette Low to Ernest Thompson Seton, April 6, 1913, ibid. 38. In a line that must have irked even the mild-mannered Seton, Low suggested that people had actually contacted her about boys’ training. “I have referred all the people who make inquiries to you because your training is identical.” Juliette Low to Ernest Thompson Seton, ibid. 39. Edith Johnston to Juliette Low, May 1, 1914, GS-USA. 40. Cora Neal to Juliette Low, Sept 24, 1914, GS-USA. 41. Wo-He-Lo 5 (July 1917): 2. 42. Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 43. Wright, Twenty-five Years of Girl Scouting, 32. 44. Ibid., 24. 45. Harold P. Levy, Building a Popular Movement: A Case Study of the Public Relations of the Boy Scouts of America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1944), 86. 46. Wright, Twenty-five Years of Girl Scouting, 27. 47. Rally 1 (September 1918): 6. 48. Levy, Building a Popular Movement.

Notes to Pages 35–49

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49. Said Scout commissioner Josephine Daskam Bacon of Low’s penchant for uniforms: “She loved that big hat; she loved that ridiculous whistle; she loved her whole uniform! She wasn’t wearing them, as some of us were, because it was necessary or because it seemed best; she loved to wear them.” Wright, Twentyfive Years of Girl Scouting, 50. 50. Rally 2 (November 1918): 16. 51. Rally 1 (November 1917): 11. 52. Luther Gulick, War Call to the Girls of America (New York: Camp Fire Girls), vi–xviii. 53. Luther Gulick, “Girls Enlist,” Journal of Education 85 (May 3, 1917): 485–486. 54. Ibid., 486. 55. Ibid. 56. See Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). 57. Gulick, “Girls Enlist,” 486. 58. Harriett C. Philmus, Brave Girls (New York: Girl Scouts, 1947). 59. John D. Rockefeller Jr., March 4, 1918, file, Girl Scouts of America, General, 1917–1961, number 25, box 3, RG2, Welfare—Youth Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC. 60. W. S. Richardson to John D. Rockefeller Jr., March 1918, file, Girl Scouts of America, General, 1917–1961, number 25, box 3, RG2, Welfare—Youth Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC. 61. Anne Hyde Choate to John D. Rockefeller Jr., March 12, 1918, file, Girl Scouts of America, General, 1917–1961, number 25, box 3, RG2, Welfare—Youth Series, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC. 62. “Statement of Policy Concerning the Relationship between the BSA and the GS and Other Organizations Engaged in Work for Girls,” n.d., 1, Hp1, file, Historical from 1918, CFA. 63. Emily Hammond to Colin H. Livingstone, May 16, 1918, ibid. 64. Baden-Powell to James West, 13 June, 1919, ibid. 65. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton, 1904); see esp. chap. 17, “Adolescent Girls and Their Education.” 66. “Resolution: Excerpt from Western Round-Up of Boy Scouts of America, Berkeley, California,” n.d., Hp1, file, Historical from 1918, CFA. The remark found in the epigraph at the beginning of this section and attributed to Teddy Roosevelt is found in this same source. 67. LeRoy T. Steward to Executive Committee of the Chicago Boy Scout Council, January 31, 1921, Hp1, file, Historical from 1918, CFA.

Chapter 2

“A Splendid Army of Women”: Mobilizing Girl Soldiers

1. Nina Macdonald, “Sing a Song of War-Time,” in Scars upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War, ed. Catherine Reilly (London: Virago, 1981), 69. For an excellent discussion of this and other literary themes related to

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2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Notes to Pages 49–62

women and World War I, see Sandra M. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” Signs 8 (Spring, 1983): 422–450. Presentation Address to Andree Clark Memorial Camp from Senator William Clark, folder, Camp Andree Clark—General, National Historic Preservation Center, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, New York (hereafter GS-USA). For details of Hoover’s tenure at the Food Administration, see William Clinton Mullendore, History of the United States Food Administration, 1917–1919 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1941). Herbert Hoover’s 1920 report on the activities of the Food Administration serves as an introduction to Mullendore’s text; George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Master of Emergencies, 1917–1918 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 117–123. Kennedy, Over Here, 118. Hoover, preface to Mullendore, History of the United States Food Administration. Rally 1 (January 1918): 3. “Health Winner Badge,” in How Girls Can Help Their Country, adapted from Agnes Baden-Powell and Sir Robert Baden-Powells’s Handbook (Savannah, GA: M. S. and D. A. Byck [1916]), 40. Rally 1 (November 1917): 8. Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 129. Luther Gulick, War Call to the Girls of America: Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Campfire, 1917), ix. “Americanning Party,” Scouting Magazine 19 (September 1918), back cover. Rally 1 (March 1918): 8. Ibid., 5. Rally 1 (October 1917): 6. Rally 1 (January 1918): 6. Kennedy, Over Here, 99–107. Christopher C. Gibbs, The Great Silent Majority: Missouri’s Resistance to World War I (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 84. Kennedy, Over Here, 105. Gibbs, Great Silent Majority, 84. H. M. Craig to James West, September 16, 1918, RG 53, box 2, file 7, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. Rally 1 (November 1917): 8 and (December 1917): 3. Rally 1 (April 1918): 7. Ibid., 2–5. Rally 1 (June 1918): 8. Rally 2 (March 1919): 2. Leonard P. Ayres, The War with Germany: A Statistical Summary (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 26–29. Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996) and Allan M. Brandt, No Magic

Notes to Pages 62–67

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

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Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), see chap. 2, “Fit to Fight.” William J. Breen, Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, and the Council of National Defense, 1917–1919 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), see chaps. 7 and 8 on the Women’s Committee. Women who made careers out of working with girls often worked with youngsters from varied backgrounds. Jane Deeter Rippin was typical; she was a settlement house worker before taking over the CTCA’s section on women and girls, after which she became chief executive of the Girl Scouts. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Constance Nathanson, Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997). Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 80–84 and Bristow, Making Men Moral, chap. 4. Angela Woollacott, “‘Khaki Fever’ and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age, and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 325–347. Baden-Powell, quoted in Richard A. Voeltz, “The Antidote to ‘Khaki Fever’? The Expansion of the British Girl Guides during the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992): 627–638. For a discussion of female sexuality during the war, albeit pertaining to older women, see Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. chap. 4, “Women’s Wild Oats: Sexuality and the Social Order.” CTCA pamphlet, quoted in Bristow, Making Men Moral, 113–114. “Lecture for Women,” quoted in Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 81–82. William I. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923). Mrs. Ethel S. Dummer, foreword to Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl, xi. Wo-He-Lo 5 (October 1917), 59. Rally 1 (January 1918): 7. For a study of sibling relationships, see Angela Woollacott, “Sisters and Brothers in Arms: Family, Class, and Gender in World War I Britain,” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). For a study of the mother-son bond, see Susan Zeiger, “She Didn’t Raise Her Boy to Be a Slacker: Motherhood, Conscription, and the Culture of the First World War,” Feminist Studies 22 (Spring 1996): 7–39. Rally 1 (November 1917): 13. The Rally generally depicted girls’ visits to soldiers as unremittingly happy affairs, but when a troop from Lockland, Ohio, arrived at Camp Columbia to deliver the bounty of their campaign Pies for Soldiers, they were treated to a potentially

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45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Notes to Pages 67–80

macabre scene. To thank them, the men put on a skit called Dying for Pies—a performance likely to give thoughtful Scouts a moment’s pause. Rally 1 (October 1917): 11. Angela Woollacott, quoted in Voeltz, “The Antidote to ‘Khaki Fever’?” 633. Presentation Address to Andree Clark Memorial Camp from Senator William Clark, folder, Camp Andree Clark—General, GS-USA. See Linda K. Kerber, “May All Our Citizens Be Soldiers and All Our Soldiers Citizens: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation,” in Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Shelia Tobias (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990), 92. “A Review of Girl Scout Camping, November 14, 1934,” folder, Camp and Camping—General, GS-USA. Postage stamps released in 1999 still emphasized this link between character and the outdoors. The obverse of the stamp commemorating the founding of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts claims that the organizations “introduce youth to a variety of outdoor activities and promote self-reliance and resourcefulness.” U.S. Boy and Girl Scouting Begins, Celebrate the Century series, 1910, United States Postal Service. Gulick, War Call to the Girls of America, x. Wo-He-Lo 5 (July 1917), 6. Wo-He-Lo 5 (June 1918), 224. Ibid., 224. Wo-He-Lo 5 (July 1917), 3. Photographs, files, Camp Hilldale, Camp Odakota, and Main Line Day Camps, Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council Archive Center, Conshohocken, PA (hereafter GS-SEPA). “Mid-winter Camp Preparations for the Girls’ Summer Camp,” 2, folder, Family Papers, Adelia Beard—miscellany, box 8, Daniel Carter Beard Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC. “Seventy-fifth Anniversary Story,” folder, Camp and Camping—General, GSUSA. Rally 2 (November 1918): 10. Brochure for Camp Odakota, box, Main Line camps, GS-SEPA. Scouting for Girls: Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts (New York: Girl Scouts, 1920), 501. Rally 1 (October 1917): 10. Rally 1 (March 1918): 7. How Girls Can Help Their Country, 68–82. Scouting for Girls, 528–529. Scouting for Girls, 97. Life, November 6, 1924, 17–18. Ethel Reyburn Scrapbook, file, Camp Hilldale, GS-SEPA. Rally 1 (November 1917): 2, 12. Wo-He-Lo 5 (July 1917), 4. “Scout Rally Brings Quick Response,” Rally 1 (December 1917): 5. “Girl Scouts to Aid Taking of Census,” New York Times, January 5, 1920, 9.

Notes to Pages 80–85

239

72. 73. 74. 75.

“Girl Scouts Get $12,000,” New York Times, October 28, 1919, 21. “Deserter,” Life, November 6, 1924, 7. “Why Don’t You Raise Your Girl to Be a Girl Scout?” Rally 1 (October 1917): 12. There were several different versions of the original lyrics, but all were unabashedly antiwar, calling on men in power to fight their own battles and asking “who dares to place a rifle on [my son’s] shoulder. To shoot some other mother’s darling boy.” “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” music by Al Piantadosi, lyrics by Alfred Bryan (New York: Leo Feist, 1915). 76. Scouts were clearly willing to borrow songs favored by all political persuasions, as this untitled ditty was sung to the more patriotic tune “America, I Raised My Boy for You.” Rally 1 (November 1917): 16.

Chapter 3

The Landscape of Camp

1. Abigail A. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 2. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover, 1996; reprint of 1953 edition). On conservation and preservation, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993). 3. For national parks, see Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); for regional tourism, see Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 4. Polly Welts Kaufman, National Parks and the Woman’s Voice (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996) and Carolyn Merchant, “Women of the Progressive Conservation Movement: 1900–1916,” Environmental Review 8 (1984): 57–85. 5. Merchant, “Women of the Progressive Conservation Movement,” 59. 6. See Margaret Bell, Women of the Wilderness (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1938); Mountain Magazine is also an excellent source. For secondary accounts, see Janet Robertson, The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). For women vacation campers, see Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 6. 7. Laura Waterman and Guy Waterman, Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club, 1989). 8. Susan A. Miller, “‘It Takes a Primitive Woman’: Women and the Appalachian Trail,” paper presented at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 1996, Chapel Hill, NC.

240

Notes to Pages 85–92

9. Horace Albright and Frank Taylor, Oh, Ranger! (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1928). 10. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 11. Thomas J. Schlereth, “Chautauqua: A Middle Landscape of the Middle Class,” Old Northwest 12 (1986): 265–278 and Richard N. Campen, Chautauqua Impressions: Architecture and Ambience (Chagrin Falls, Ohio: West Summit Press, 1984); for the middle landscape ideal applied to zoos, see Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); as applied to suburbs, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) and John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 12. See Brown, Inventing New England, esp. chap. 3; Kenneth O. Brown, Holy Ground: A Study of the American Camp Meeting (New York: Garland, 1992); Charles A. Johnson, The Frontier Camp Meeting (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985); and Ellen Weiss, City in the Woods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 13. Marguerite Shaffer, “See America First: Re-envisioning Nation and Region through Western Tourism,” Pacific Historical Review 65 (November 1996): 559– 581. 14. Brown, Inventing New England. 15. “Report on Camps during the Summer of 1923,” folder, Camp and Camping— Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Reports, National Historic Preservation Center, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, New York (hereafter GS-USA). There are several duplicate page numbers in Price’s 1923 report. When they occur, letters have been used to differentiate between two pages with the same numeration. 16. After her tenure with the Girl Scouts, Price would go on to become a psychologist, student counselor, and author. See obituary of Louise Price, New York Times, March 2, 1964. 17. “Report on Camps,” 2. 18. Ibid., 12a. 19. Ibid., 17. 20. Ibid., 12b. 21. Ibid., 3. 22. Ibid., 20. 23. Ibid., 15. 24. Ibid., 7. 25. Ibid., 15–16. 26. “Program Building for the Permanent Camp,” 1–2, folder, Camp and Camping— General, GS-USA. 27. “Report on Camps,” 23. 28. “Then and Now,” October 25, 1966, 1, folder, Camp and Camping—General, GS-USA. 29. “Report on Camps,” 8.

Notes to Pages 92–96

241

30. “Some General Items to Consider When Building a Camp,” January 1945, folder, Architectural Plans-Cabins Part I, GS-USA. 31. Fire Fly, June 1931, file, Camp Fire Girls, St. Paul, Alice Gortner Johnson Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. 32. Letter to Scout Commissioners, Camp Committee Chairmen and Local Directors, July 1924, folder, Camp and Camping—Camp Andree Clark—Reports, 1921– 1933, GS-USA. 33. David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Judith K. Major, To Live in the New World: A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); and Kenneth Hawkins, “The Therapeutic Landscape: Nature, Architecture, and Mind in Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1991). 34. Downing’s Landscape Gardening, for example, was reprinted in its tenth edition in 1921. A. J. Downing, Landscape Gardening, 10th ed., rev. Frank A. Waugh (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1921). 35. A. J. Downing, quoted in Pauline Fancher, Chautauqua: Its Architecture and Its People (Miami: Banyan Books, 1978), 14. Downing’s recommendations for paint colors were more precise than simply using “natural” colors. He suggested, for example, that green should not be used on buildings, since, while “natural,” it was the color of leaves and grass, natural items not used as building materials. As gray and brown were the colors of stone and wood, they were more appropriate for buildings. 36. Andrew Jackson Downing, Victorian Cottage Residences (New York: Dover, 1981, reprint of 1842 edition), 163. 37. Philip N. Youtz, 1896–1972, served as director of the Brooklyn Museum, taught architecture and philosophy at Columbia University, and at the end of his career served as dean of the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Michigan. Youtz, together with collaborator Tom Slick, received the Frank P. Brown Medal from Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute for their invention of the Youtz-Slick method of lifting reinforced concrete slabs. See Youtz’s obituary in Architectural Forum 136 (March 1972): 62. 38. Philip N. Youtz, “Camp Buildings and Equipment,” Give and Take (March 1931), folder, Architecture Plans—Cabins, Part I, GS-USA. 39. Youtz did not confine himself to anthropomorphizing animals. He opened his book Sounding Stones of Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1929), ix, by suggesting that the attentive reader could, if he or she listened carefully enough, realize that the stones near a small village in Brittney were “capable of making the most beautiful music in the world.” Youtz, Sounding Stones of Architecture. 40. Injunctions even applied to campers’ clothing. Caroline and Adelia Beard, founders of the Girl Pioneers of America, devoted an entire chapter of their book On the Trail: An Outdoor Book for Girls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 84, to the issue of proper camp attire. They cautioned girls to “avoid wearing [colors] which frighten the timid wild life, for you want to make friends with the birds and animals, so do not wear metal buttons, buckles, or anything that shines or sparkles.” Caroline Beard and Adelia Beard, On the Trail: An Outdoor Book for Girls.

242

Notes to Pages 97–108

41. Youtz, Camp Buildings and Equipment, folder, Architecture Plans—Cabins, part I, GS-USA. 42. Youtz, Camp Buildings and Equipment, folder, Architecture Plans—Cabins, part I, GS-USA. 43. This way of thinking about camp architecture was still in vogue twenty years later. In a memo titled “A ‘Q’ for Camping” (folder, Camp and Camping—General, GS-USA), the National Girl Scout Council recommended the use of navy Quonset huts as a way around the rationing of building materials. Although the huts were “originally designed to serve as a garage and machinery storage building,” they could be “readily adapted for camp use.” Local leaders could obtain “further information on adapting these buildings to blend with camp surroundings” by writing the National Camp Bureau. 44. Unidentified diary, July 11, 1938, box, Main Line Day Camp, Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council Archive Center, Conshohocken, PA (hereafter GS-SEPA). 45. Laura Mattoon, Camp Kehonka’s founder, insisted on “clothes [that] did not clash with or stand out above the environment . . . thus Kehonka’s campers and staff wore simple blue and white uniforms which blended into the natural surroundings.” Robin Eileen Butler, “Camp Kehonka: A Reflection of American Society 1902–1946” (master’s thesis, DePaul University, 1989), 42. 46. The Girl Reserve Manual for Advisors (New York: Woman’s Press, 1921), 574. 47. J. Halsey Gulick, “Do the People of Maine Know What Their Summer Camps Are Doing?” Sun Up: Maine’s Own Magazine (August 1930), 5. 48. Foreword to scrapbook, folder, Architectural Plans—Cabins, part III, GS-USA. 49. Ibid. 50. Abbie Graham, The Girls’ Camp (New York: Woman’s Press, 1933), 26. 51. “Some General Items to Consider When Building a Camp,” January 1945, folder, Architectural Plans-Cabins, Part I, GS-USA. 52. Photographs, folder, Architectural Plans—Cabins/Mainbuilding, part IV, GSUSA. 53. “Cabins—Pre-fabricated,” folder, Architectural Plans—Cabins/Main Building, part IV, GS-USA. 54. “Cabins,” folder, Architectural Plans—Cabins/Mainbuilding, part IV, GS-USA. 55. See David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) and Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). 56. “Minutes,” September 14, 1926, folder, Camp Committee, Meetings/Conferences, GS-USA. 57. “Visitor report of Girl Scout Camp, April, 1931,” 2, folder, Camp and Camping—Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Report, GS-USA. 58. Graham, The Girls’ Camp, 41. 59. Ibid. 60. “Visitor report of Girl Scout Camp, April 1931,” 4, folder, Camp and Camping—Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Report, GS-USA. 61. “Program Building for the Permanent Camp,” folder, Camp and Camping—General, GS-USA.

Notes to Pages 108–117

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62. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 71–78. 63. Farnsworth founded her private camp in 1909 with the aid of her husband, Charles, professor of music and speech at Teachers College, Columbia University. See the obituary of Charlotte Joy Allen Farnsworth, New York Times, October 27, 1946. 64. Langdon had visited the Gulick family’s summer retreat in Maine, where he helped Luther and Charlotte work out a program of camping, ritual, and activities for the Gulick daughters and their friends. This planted the seeds of the Camp Fire organization. 65. Langdon quoted in Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 78. 66. Minutes of National Camp Committee, April 17, 1925, box, Meetings/Conferences—C.A. Clark to Camp Committee, 1934, GS-USA. 67. Girl Scouts of the USA, Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts (New York: Girl Scouts, 1928), 44. 68. Graham, The Girls’ Camp, 82. 69. “Apple Butter Days,” Activities in Girl Scout Camps, 1935, box, Program— Camping, GS-SEPA. 70. “Plantation Days,” Activities in Girl Scout Camps, 1935, box, Program—Camping, GS-SEPA. 71. Stereotypically racist representations of African Americans were certainly not confined to southern camps. The girls at Camp Kehonka in New Hampshire were treated to a minstrel show performed by the neighboring boys’ camp. The “black men” were dressed in costumes that were “fearful and wonderful reproductions of the usual minstrel show type.” Kehonka, August 14, 1911, private collection of Althea Ballentine, Camp Kehonka, Wolfeboro, NH. 72. Graham, The Girls’ Camp, 47. 73. Ibid., 48. 74. Ibid. 75. Graham, The Girls’ Camp, 49. 76. These contradictory attitudes toward rural peoples are most thoroughly explored in the scholarly literature of Appalachian studies. For the extreme opinions expressed within the eugenics movement, see Nicole Hahn Rafter, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 77. Gerald B. Breitigan, “Lifting Up Mountains: Bringing a Knowledge of America to Pure-Blooded Americans,” Ladies’ Home Journal (July 1920), p. 45. 78. Rally 1 (April 1918), 4. 79. “Report of Camp Advisory Staff,” 1935, folder, Camp and Camping—General, GS-USA. 80. Undated clipping from Farmer’s Wife Magazine, box, Meetings/Conferences, GS-USA. 81. The Girl Reserve Movement: A Manual for Advisors, 567. 82. Wo-He-Lo 1 (May 1914): 2–10. 83. “Minutes of Camp Committee,” September 15, 1927, box, Meeting/Conferences, GS-USA.

244

Notes to Pages 118–129

84. Camp reports, October 13, 1938, Camp records book, box 24, Papers of the Germantown YWCA, Temple University Urban Archives, Philadelphia, PA. 85. Occasionally, leadership recognized that their girls might be the source of problems with neighbors. Leaders who camped near farms were advised to “send a letter to the farmer thanking him for permission, and ask for criticism of the girls’ behavior.” Notebook, Leadership Training Course, 1928, Colorado Springs, box, Nature Program, GS-SEPA. 86. “Visitor Report of Girl Scout Camp, April, 1931,” 7, folder, Camp and Camping—Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Report, GS-USA. 87. Odakota Prospectus, 1919, GS-SEPA. 88. Girl Scouts of the USA, Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, 19. 89. Kettles and Campfires (New York: Girl Scouts, 1928), 69. 90. Graham, The Girls’ Camp, 1–6.

Chapter 4

Naturecraft: Restoring Pioneer Heritage

1. New York Times, September 30, 1928, folder, Camp and Camping—General, GS-USA. 2. Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Amy Susan Green, “Savage Childhood: The Scientific Construction of Girlhood and Boyhood in the Progressive Era” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995). 3. Kim Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 183. 4. Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1990); Loren Owing, Environmental Values, 1860–1972 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1976). 5. H. Allen Anderson, The Chief: Ernest Thompson Seton and the Changing West (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1986); Betty Keller, Black Wolf: The Life of Ernest Thompson-Seton (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1984); John Henry Wadland, Ernest Thompson Seton: Man in Nature and the Progressive Era, 1880–1915 (New York: Arno Press, 1978). 6. Philadelphia Evening Ledger, April 6, 1925, Scrapbook, box 1, inventory, Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council Archive Center, Conshohocken, PA (hereafter GS-SEPA). 7. Lina Beard and Adelia Beard, On the Trail: An Outdoor Book for Girls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), vii. 8. Things Girl Scouts Do and the Way They Do Them, 10, box, Nature, GS-SEPA. 9. “Report on Camps during the Summer of 1923,” 20, folder, Camp and Camping—Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Reports, GS-USA. 10. Green, Savage Childhood, 2. 11. “Camp Inspection Report, 1924,” folder, Camp and Camping, Camp Andree Clark—General, 1921–1933, GS-USA. 12. Rally 1 (October 1917): 10. 13. For Martin’s field guides, see box, Nature, GS-SEPA.

Notes to Pages 129–135

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14. “Requirements for the Flower Finder Merit Badge” (Girl Scouts, 1924), box, Nature, GS-SEPA. 15. “Dissection by the Doctor,” Kehonka, July 1911, 3, private collection of Mrs. Althea Ballentine, Wolfeboro, NH. 16. “Outline for Bird Study,” outline of lectures given at first session of Camp Andree Clark Training School, June 10–16, 1922, folder, Camp Andree Clark Reports, 1922, GS-USA. 17. Guide Book for Senior High School Girl Reserves (New York: Woman’s Press, 1928), 73. 18. Sebago-Wohelo (New York: Camp Fire Girls), 20. 19. “Radio Program,” May 8, 1933, folder 4, Alice Gortner Johnson Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN (hereafter AGJP). 20. Ibid. 21. Lina Beard and Adelia Beard, Girl Pioneers of America: Official Manual (New York: National Americana Society, 1914), 175. 22. The Girl Scouts of the USA, Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts (New York: Girl Scouts, 1928), 21. 23. “Requirements for the Flower Finder Merit Badge,” box, Nature, GS-SEPA. 24. This advice mirrored that of the larger nature study movement. In Nature Study and the Child (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1902), 50, Charles Scott wrote that the special aim of studying bunnies was to help children “see some of the points of similarity between the homes and home life of the rabbits and of themselves.” 25. Jeannette Marks, Vacation Camping for Girls (New York: D. Appleton, 1913), 152–153. 26. The Scouts’ response to this unfortunate situation can be seen in the title of a nature guide for leaders published in 1942, How to Do Nature before She Does You! by Marie E. Gaudette (New York: Girl Scouts of the USA, 1942). 27. In comparison, the most popular category, “home-making,” accounted for 37 percent of the total badges awarded. Within the nature category, Tree Finder was the most popular badge, earned by almost 2,000 Scouts, while Insect Finder was awarded to only 192 girls. “National Organization of Girl Scouts, Report for 1933,” folder 96, Girl Scouts—Federation of Greater New York, box 13, Davison Fund II, series 2, appropriations, Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, NY. 28. “Get Acquainted” and “Who’s Coming Back,” folder, Camp Reports, 1932, Papers of the Germantown YWCA, Temple University, Urban Archives, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter TU-UA). 29. Philadelphia Evening Ledger, April 6, 1925, Scrapbook, box 1, inventory, GSSEPA. 30. “Radio Program,” May 15, 1933, folder 4, AGJP. 31. “Camp Tinicum Brochure,” TU-UA. 32. When You Hike (New York: Girl Scouts, 1930), 5. 33. “Developments in Girl Scout Camping,” July 30, 1926, folder, Camp and Camping—General, GS-USA. 34. “A Review of Girl Scout Camping,” November 14, 1934, folder, Camp and Camping—General, 5, GS-USA.

246

Notes to Pages 135–142

35. Rally 1 (July 1918): 8. 36. “Report on Camps during the Summer of 1923,” 4, folder, Camp and Camping— Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Reports, GS-USA. 37. Rally 1 (May 1918): 2. 38. Ibid., 8. 39. “Notebook from the Outdoors,” box, Program–Nature, GS-SEPA. 40. When You Hike, 27. 41. “Prospectus, Camp Odakota 1919, folder, Camp Odakota, GS-SEPA. 42. Beard and Beard, Girl Pioneers of America, 21. 43. Beard and Beard, Girl Pioneers of America, 21. Being turned into a “most comfortable stretcher” was not its only property: “it can be combined with others and used as an impromptu shelter; it can also be turned into a duffel bag.” The Girl Pioneers of America pamphlet, folder, Family Papers, Lina Beard, Biographical Papers, box 17, Daniel Carter Beard Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (Hereafter DCB-LC). 44. Beard and Beard, On the Trail, 246. 45. Beard and Beard, Girl Pioneer Manual, 101. 46. Nashville Banner, January 9, 1931, quoted in Elisabeth Israels Perry, “From Achievement to Happiness: Girl Scouting in Middle Tennessee, 1910s–1960s,” Journal of Women’s History 5 (Fall 1993): 75–94. 47. Things Girl Scouts Do and the Way They Do Them, 2. 48. Rally 1 (July 1918): 4. 49. Ernest Thompson Seton, The Woodcraft Manual for Girls (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1916), 177. 50. Seton, The Woodcraft Manual for Girls, 327. Despite this nod toward gender equality, the Woodcraft Manual displayed an interesting quirk. Different chores were assigned to different age groups trying to win the same honor. Boys progressed through the ranks as they aged. Girls, however, stayed forever in the “Lad class,” meant for ages sixteen to eighteen, but also to which men over age seventy returned. 51. Marks, Vacation Camping for Girls, 209. 52. Anna Mary Wells, Miss Marks and Miss Woolley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978). 53. Rally 1 (November 1917): 12. 54. “Captains of Their Souls,” Rally 1 (October 1917): 2. 55. Camp Craft Honor 323, in The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp Fire Girls, 1913), 35. 56. How Girls Can Help Their Country, adapted from Agnes Baden-Powell and Sir Robert Baden-Powells’s Handbook (Savannah, GA: M. S. and D. A. Byck [1916]), 68. 57. Scrapbook 1932, box 2, GS-SEPA. 58. “Knots for Girl Scouts,” Life (November 6, 1924), 6. 59. Beard and Beard, On the Trail, 263. 60. The Girl Scouts, Scouting for Girls: Official Handbook of the Girl Scout (New York: Girls Scouts of America, 1920), 526.

Notes to Pages 142–154

247

61. Gladys Snyder and C. Frances Loomis, The Outdoor Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp Fire Outfitting, 1934), 117. 62. “Mid-winter Camp Preparations for the Girl’s Summer Camp,” box 8, folder, Family Papers, Adelia Beard—miscellany, DCB-LC. 63. Beard and Beard, On the Trail, 28 64. “Program Building for the Permanent Camp,” 3, folder, Camp and Camping— General, GS-USA. 65. American Girl, May 1924. 66. Camp Tinicum, report 1934, TU-UA. 67. See Colleen J. Sheehy, “American Angling: The Rise of Urbanism and the Romance of the Rod and Reel,” in Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 68. “Mid-winter Camp Preparations.” 69. Marks, Vacation Camping for Girls, 7. 70. Rally 1 (October 1917): 11. 71. Rally 1 (August 1918): 16. 72. The Girl Scouts of America, Scouting for Girls, frontispiece. 73. Minutes of the Camping Committee, March 8, 1927, box, Meeting/Conferences, GS-USA. 74. There is no biography of Grace Seton. See Keller’s Black Wolf for the most extensive biographical information on her. 75. New York Times, March 20, 1959, 31. 76. Grace Gallatin Seton, A Woman Tenderfoot (New York: Doubleday Page, 1900), 44. This book is sometimes called A Woman Tenderfoot in the Rockies to distinguish it from A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt. 77. Seton, A Woman Tenderfoot, 163. 78. For a discussion of the power of guns, and cameras, to define masculinity, see Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989). 79. See Madelyn Moeller, “Ladies of Leisure: Domestic Photography in the Nineteenth Century,” in Aron, Hard at Play. 80. Beard and Beard, Girl Pioneers of America, 196. 81. Marks, Vacation Camping for Girls, 218. 82. Minutes, July 31, 1923, folder, Camping Committee, GS-SEPA. 83. Campward Ho! 124. 84. The Girl Scouts, Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, 23. 85. “Program Building for the Permanent Camp,” 3, folder, Camp and Camping— General, GS-USA. 86. When You Hike, 26. 87. Girl Reserve Movement Manual for Advisors (New York: Women’s Press, 1921), 568. 88. Beard and Beard, On the Trail, 85. 89. The Girl Scouts, Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, 29, 39. 90. Rally 1 (July 1918): 5. 91. Radio Program, March 17, 1933, folder 4, AGJP.

248

Notes to Pages 155–165

92. The Girl Scouts, Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, 10. 93. Laura Lee Hope, The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1913), 68. Hope (a pseudonym for a team of writers) was also author of the best-selling Bobbsey Twins series. 94. Odakota prospectus, GS-SEPA. “Spirit of romance and the unexpected” was a category on “Camp Inspection Report” folder, Camp and Camping, Camp Andree Clark—Reports, 1921–1933, GS-USA. 95. Scrapbook, “Mariner Scout Trip,” GS-SEPA.

Chapter 5

Homecraft: Primitive Maidens and Domestic Pioneers

1. Thomas H. Russell, ed., Our Little Men and Women: Modern Methods of Character Building (Chicago: L. H. Walter, 1912), 151. 2. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 3. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Christina Hardyment, From Mangle to Microwave: The Mechanization of Household Work (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 4. Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti, eds., Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 5. Janice Williams Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003). 6. “American Home Economics Association—Child Development,” folder 271, box 26, Series III, subseries 10, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, New York (hereafter LSRM-RAC). 7. “Trends,” June 1933, folder 272, American Home Economics Association, box 26, Series III, subseries 10, LSRM-RAC. 8. Although their rhetoric was very different, the percentage of badges earned was often similar. Girl Scout national data from 1927 lists 40 percent for homemaking and 8 percent for nature work. “Girl Scouts Continue to Win New Members,” New York Times, September 30, 1928, folder, Camping and Camping—General, National Historic Preservation Center, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, New York (hereafter GS-USA). The St. Paul, Minnesota, Camp Fire council from its inception to 1931 awarded 3,783 homecraft honors, 634 in nature work, and a mere 453 in campcraft. Fire Fly, June 1931, Alice Gortner Johnson Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN (hereafter AGJP). 9. Luther Gulick, Wapa I: Camp Fire Girls and the New Relation of Women to the World (New York: Camp Fire, 1912), 16. 10. Luther Gulick, Wapa II: The Desires of American Girls (New York: Camp Fire Publishing, 1914), 7. 11. L. Gulick, Wapa I, 21. 12. Ibid., 8. 13. Ibid., 9. 14. See obituary of Charlotte Vetter Gulick, New York Times, July 29, 1928, 25.

Notes to Pages 165–176

249

15. Charlotte V. Gulick, introduction to Mary L. Read, The Mothercraft Manual (Boston: Little, Brown, 1916), vii. 16. The Gulicks’ second daughter, Charlotte, died in 1909 at age seventeen. The couple also had two sons, one of whom died in infancy; the other, John Halsey, stayed informally connected to Camp Fire and worked professionally in public policy. 17. C. Gulick, introduction to Ethel Rogers, Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp Fire Girls Publishing, 1915), 17. 18. Ibid. 19. “The Adventure of Homemaking,” Outlook May 25, 1912, 158. 20. “Discussion Outline of the Elements of Camp Fire Girl Leadership, 1927,” folder 135, box 12, Series III, LSRM-RAC. 21. Hartley Davis, in collaboration with Mrs. Luther Halsey Gulick, “The Camp-Fire Girls,” Outlook, May 25, 1912, 181–189. 22. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian. See chap. 4, “Natural Indians and Identities of Modernity.” 23. C. Gulick, introduction to Sebago-Wohelo, 14. 24. Mrs. Luther Gulick, “The Camp Fire Girls and Camp Wohelo,” in The Camper’s Own Book (New York: Log Cabin Press, 1913), 123. 25. C. Gulick, introduction to Sebago-Wohelo, 17. 26. Wo-He-Lo 1 (April 1914): 8. 27. Ibid. 28. Fire Fly, June 1929, file, Camp Fire Girls, AGJP. 29. Camp Fire Girls Radio Program, March 1933, folder 4, AGJP. 30. The Wohelo Bird, 1921, box 508, Camp Fire Girls Papers, Special Collections, University of Maine–Orono. 31. Davis and C. Gulick, “The Camp-Fire Girls,” 185. 32. Gulick, “The Camp Fire Girls and Camp Wohelo,” 118. 33. Lina Beard and Adelia Beard, Girl Pioneers of America: Official Manual (New York: National Americana Society, 1914), 35. 34. Ibid., 35–36. 35. Ibid., 35. 36. “The Girl Scout Number,” special issue, Life, November 6, 1924, 9. 37. For mothers and daughters in popular culture in the 1930s, see Suzanna Danuta Walters, Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). 38. “Central File, New York Girl Scout Office, 1932,” binder, History 1914, Archives of the Capital Area Council, Girl Scouts of the USA, Washington, DC (hereafter GS-CAC). 39. Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 9. 40. Gladys Denny Shultz and Beulah Schenk, The House That Runs Itself (New York: John Day, 1929). 41. Ibid., 4. 42. “Central File, New York Girl Scout Office, 1932,” GS-CAC.

250

Notes to Pages 176–186

43. Scouts Home Service Award, box, Diaries, Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council, Conshohocken, PA (hereafter GS-SEPA). 44. “Radio Address by Local Director, Evelina Gleaves,” October 29, 1926, file, History of Girl Scouts in DC Area, GS-CAC. 45. Alice Mary Kimball, “A Camp Where Girls Boss,” Outlook, June 11, 1924, 233– 236. 46. Lillian E. Roy, Girl Scouts at Dandelion Camp (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1921), 122. 47. Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986). 48. Abbie Graham, The Girls’ Camp (New York: Woman’s Press, 1933). 49. “The Unit Plan of Camping,” February, 1946, folder, Architectural Plans—Cabins, Part 1, GS-USA. 50. “Suggested Programs for Girl Scout Meetings,” 6, Outline of Lectures Given at First Session of Camp Andree Clark Training School, June 10–16, 1922, folder, Camp Andree Clark Reports, 1922, GS-USA. 51. The Girl Scouts of the USA, Kettles and Campfires (New York: Girl Scouts, 1928). 52. Ibid., 5. 53. Camp Fire Girls Radio Program, May 15, 1933, folder 4, AGJP. 54. When You Hike (New York: Girl Scouts, 1930), 10. 55. The Girl Scouts of the USA, Kettles and Campfires, 30–31. 56. The Girl Scouts of the USA, Scouting for Girls: Official Handbook of the Girl Scout (New York: Girl Scouts, 1920), 526. 57. “Camp Indian Run—1936,” folder, Camp Brochures, GS-SEPA. 58. “Report—Camp Andree, 1921,” folder, Camp and Camping—C. A. Clark—Reports, 1921–33, GS-USA. 59. “Camp Tinicum Reports,” 1929 and 1931, Germantown YWCA Papers, Temple University Urban Archives, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter TU-UA). 60. The Girl Scouts of the USA, Kettles and Campfires, 21–22. 61. Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 43. 62. The Girl Scouts of the USA, Kettles and Campfires, 6. 63. “Visitor Report of Girl Scout Camp, April, 1931,” 8, folder, Camp and Camping—Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Report, GS-USA. 64. Lina Beard and Adelia Beard, On the Trail: An Outdoor Book for Girls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 108. 65. David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 236. 66. Camp Fire Girls were given this message about dining room manners: “Eating isn’t very pretty, so you have to try to make it seem as nice as you can; . . . it is consideration for others which is at the root of all manners.” Camp Fire Radio Program, April 17, 1933, folder 4, AGJP. 67. Rally 1 (July 1918): 12. 68. The Girl Scouts of the USA, Kettles and Campfires, 24 69. “Report on Camps during the Summer of 1923,” 21, folder, Camp and Camping—Advisory Staff—Visits to Camps Reports, GS-USA.

Notes to Pages 188–198 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

251

Beard and Beard, Girl Pioneers of America, 109. Ibid., 8. Scrapbook, Outdoor School in Colorado Springs, 1928, GS-SEPA. Jeannette Marks, Vacation Camping for Girls (New York: D. Appleton, 1913), 31. Ibid., 155. Minutes of the Camping Committee, January 23, 1923, GS-SEPA.

Chapter 6

Healthcraft: Measuring the Modern Girl

1. Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 273–278. 2. Christian Science Monitor, undated clipping, Note Book of the International Conference, Box 1, Inventory, Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council, Conshohocken, PA (hereafter GS-SEPA). 3. J. Edward Sanders, Safety and Health in Organized Camps (New York: Casualty and Surety Underwriters, 1931). This text was Sanders’s PhD dissertation for Teacher’s College, Columbia University. 4. Ibid., 81. 5. Augusta Rucker, Ten Talks to Girls on Health (New York: National Board of the YWCA, 1921). 6. The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale, The Moving Picture Girls, and the Bobbsey Twins were series written by Laura Lee Hope, a pseudonym shared by writers working for the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate. The Girl Scouts of the Round Table was a title in the Girl Scout Series by Margaret Vandercook. 7. J. Halsey Gulick, “Do the People of Maine Know What Their Summer Camps Are Doing?” Sun Up (August 1930), 5, 25. 8. How Girls Can Help Their Country, adapted from Agnes Baden-Powell and Sir Robert Baden-Powells’s Handbook (Savannah, GA: M. S. and D. A. Byck [1916]), 98. 9. Charlotte Vetter Gulick, Radio Talk, March 1926, Box 508, Special Collections, University of Maine at Orono (hereafter UM-O). 10. There is a scholarly debate about when and how widely these specific terms were used. Moreover, although manifestations of positive and negative eugenics are easily recognizable in the extreme, there was a large gray middle ground that did not readily lend itself to classification. See Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985). 11. Camp Andree Clarke Reports, 1922, folder, Camp Andree Clark—General, National Historic Preservation Center, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, New York (hereafter GS-USA). 12. Mary L. Read, “Mothercraft,” Journal of Heredity 7 (February 1916): 339–342. 13. A. E. Hamilton, “Putting Over Eugenics,” Journal of Heredity 6 (June 1915): 281–288. 14. Ibid. 15. Charlotte Gulick, quoted in Hamilton, “Putting Over Eugenics,” 286. Hamilton married the Gulicks’ second daughter, Katharine, in 1916. 16. Wo-he-lo 1 (no. 11): 7.

252 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

Notes to Pages 198–208

Radio Talk, March 27, 1925 box 508, UM-O. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton, 1904): 604. Hamilton, “Putting Over Eugenics,” 283. Camp Fire Girls. The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp Fire Girls, 1914). Wohelo Bird, 1921, Special Collections, UM-O. Charlotte Vetter Gulick, Radio Talk, March 27, 1925, Box 508, Special Collections, UM-O. Wohelo Bird, 1922. Special Collections, UM-O. Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Midnineteenth Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). Susan Cahn, Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century Women’s Sport (New York: Free Press, 1994); J. A. Mangan and Roberta Park, eds., From Fair Sex to Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women (London: Frank Cass, 1987). Sherrie Inness, in Intimate Communities: Representations and Social Transformation in Women’s College Fiction, 1895–1910 (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995), suggests that some college officials also feared team sports because girls would develop loyalties to their team at the expense of their school. Most often, the literature affirms that the primary fear of team sports was its encouragement of competitiveness. How Girls Can Help Their Country, 27. Susan K. Cahn, Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sports (New York: Free Press, 1994) and Mary Jo Festle, Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women’s Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Wohelo Bird, 1921, Special Collections, UM-O. Camping Magazine, March 1936, 28. “Director’s Report 1928,” Germantown YWCA Papers, Temple University Urban Archives, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter TU-UA). Memo from Miss Leahy to Miss Schain, March 26, 1931, folder, Property: Camp Andree Clark—General, GS-USA. Camp Andree Report, 1922, folder, Camp Andree Reports, 1922–1926, GSUSA. Camp Report, 1923, folder, Camp Andree Reports, 1922–1926, GS-USA. Annette Kellerman, How to Swim (New York: George H. Doran, 1918). Until Johnny Weismueller’s sweep of sprinting events at the 1928 Olympics, the most famous American champions were all long-distance specialists. At virtually the same time that Gibson was writing, another swimmer, Florence Chadwick, was enjoying her first success, winning a six-mile rough-water swim off the California coast—she was eleven years old. H. W. Gibson, Camp Management: A Manual on Organized Camping (New York: Greenberg, 1939), 178. Jane L. Stewart, A Campfire Girl in Summer Camp (Akron, OH: Saalfield, 1914). Folder, Staff Meeting Minutes 1938, 24 July, 1938, Box 25, Germantown YWCA, TU-UA.

Notes to Pages 208–216

253

41. Grace Bruner Daviess, Swimming: Its Teaching, Management, and Program Organization (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1932). 42. The Girl Scouts, Scouting for Girls (New York: Girls Scouts, 1920). 43. Vacation Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp Fire, 1914), 41. 44. This was not a quirk of the Girl Scouts. H. W. Gibson felt that “the importance of regular bowel action, even to the extent of keeping a record, cannot be overestimated.” Camp Management, 105. 45. Heather Munro Prescott, A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 46. How Girls Can Help Their Country, 100–101. 47. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997). See the introduction and chap. 1, and especially 16–18 for a discussion of the “protective umbrella” provided by girls’ organizations. 48. Camp Fire Girl Guardian Handbook, 170. 49. Camp Fire Girl Broadcast, May 1, 1933, folder 4, Alice Gortner Johnson Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN (hereafter AGJP). 50. Camp Fire Girls Guardian Handbook, 118. 51. Campward Ho! (New York: Girl Scouts, 1920), 149. 52. Camp Fire Guardian Handbook, 169. 53. Gibson, Camp Management, 100. 54. Campward Ho! 52. 55. Ibid., 150. 56. Camp Fire Girl Radio Program, June 5, 1933, folder 4, AGJP. 57. Porter Sargent, Summer Camps: A Handbook, 3rd ed. (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1926). 58. Gibson, Camp Management. 59. Margaret A. Lowe, Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 60. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Penguin, 1989). 61. “Camp Tinicum—Behavior Frequency Rating Scale,” Camp Reports, 1932, TUUA. 62. Girls Scouts, Kettles and Campfires (New York: Girl Scouts, 1928), 25–26. 63. See folder, Tinicum Camp Brochures, 1932–1945, TU-UA. 64. Conference Report, April 25–27, 1933, folder, Regions—Region IV (Kenowva) Conferences, 1925–1934, box, Region IV, 7, GS-USA. 65. Campward Ho! 150. 66. Camp Report 1931—Athletic Counselor, TU-UA. 67. Sargent, Summer Camps, 129. 68. “A Weighty Discussion,” Wohelo Bird, 1922, UM-O. 69. The Girl Scouts were not completely immune to such behavior. An article in the Girl Scout Leader Magazine, April 1927, 2, “Make ‘Girl Scout’ Mean Health! Strength! Joy!” recommended that scales be installed in meeting rooms. This made girls interested in good health habits: “Friendly rivalry among the girls who especially need to gain adds zest to the game.”

254

Notes to Pages 217–229

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Radio Broadcast, undated (Spring 1933), folder 4, AGJP. Camp Fire Guardian Handbook, 171. “The Health Winner Badge,” Girl Scout Leader, May 1935, 57. “Building Human Beings,” Girl Scout Leader, February 1939, 17. Camp Fire agreed: “‘Keeping Fit’ . . . is one of the principals of existence. . . . Exercise—and you are an improved person, physically, mentally—and even morally!” Everygirl, May 1931, 3. 75. “The Health Winner Badge,” 57. 76. “To Live Most and Serve Best,” Girl Scout Leader, February 1939, 19. 77. Lester Scott, “Catching Health,” 1933 file, HK—Lester Scott, National Executive, Camp Fire Archives, Kansas City, MO.

Epilogue: A Tale of Two Girls 1. Diary/Scrapbook of Auto Trip, file, St. Paul Camp Fire Girls, Alice Gortner Johnson Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. 2. Shirley Vincent Scrapbook, “Camp Indian Run,” Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council Archive Center, Conshohocken, PA. 3. “Program Building for the Permanent Camp” 4, folder, Camp and Camping— General, National Historic Preservation Center, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, New York. 4. Wo-He-Lo 1 (June 1914): 7. 5. Angelo Patri, The Girl Scout (New York: Girl Scouts, n.d.). 6. The Camp Fire Girls reinvented themselves as Camp Fire USA in the mid1970s. Today the organization serves three-quarters of a million boys and girls annually. 7. Ohio Vindicator, August 16, 1933, file, Lina Beard—biographical papers, Box 8, Family Papers, Daniel Carter Beard Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Manuscript Collections Althea Ballentine, Wolfeboro, NH Private Collection, Camp Kehonka Archives, Girl Scouts of the Nation’s Capital, Washington, DC Archives, National Board of the YWCA, New York Archives of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scout Council, Conshohocken, PA Library of Congress, Washington, DC Daniel Carter Beard Papers Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN Alice Gortner Johnson Papers National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD Record Group 53, Liberty Loan Campaigns National Historic Preservation Center, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, New York Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, NY The Mark M. Jones Papers Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Rockefeller Family Archives Russell Sage Foundation Collection Temple University, Philadelphia Urban Archives Germantown YWCA University of Maine—Orono, Special Collections, Orono, ME Camp Fire Girls Papers Summer Camps

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Activities in Girl Scout Camps, 111–112 Addams, Jane, 57 Adolescence (Hall), 3, 13, 200 adolescence, discovery of, 2–5, 9–10, 13 adolescents. See boys; girls Albright, Horace, 85 Amateur Athletic Union, 203 American Breeders Magazine, 197 American Girl, The (Girl Scouts), 72, 143, 144, 224 American Girls’ Handy Book (Beard), 15, 188 American Home Economics Association, 160–161 American Museum of Natural History, 128 American Social Hygiene Association, 62 animal study, 130–133 “Any Girl,” 21, 116–117, 171 Appalachian Mountain Club, 85, 165 Apple Butter Days, 111 architecture: and children’s needs, 175–176; indigenous style, 97–105; natural style, 91–97, 242n43 auto tourism, 9, 84, 114, 221–223 Bacon, Josephine Daskam, 7, 235n49 Baden-Powell, Agnes, 23

Baden-Powell, Robert, 8, 18, 25, 45; and Girl Guides, 23–25, 172; on girls’ athletics, 203; and khaki fever, 63–64, 67; relationship with Juliette Low, 25–30 basketball, 78, 201, 203 Beard, Adelia, 6, 173; on cameras, 148–149; camp attire, 73, 241n49; on nature study, 125–126; on woodcraft, 134, 142–145, 188 Beard, Daniel Carter, 18 Beard, Caroline (Lina), 229; on cameras, 148–149; and Camp Fire, 15, 17–18; and Girl Pioneers, 6, 141–142; on pioneering, 126, 134, 173 bicycling, 31, 225–226 Bloomer, Amelia, 31 Brown, Anna, 15 boys, 117, 186, 203; development, 3–5, 15–16, 167–169; and pioneering, 138–139. See also Boy Scouts Boy Scouts (American), 3; bond selling, 58–59; and Camp Fire, 8, 15–18; canning, 54; and Girl Pioneers, 141; and Girl Scouts, 29–31, 45–47, 127, 232n24; in girls’ fiction, 207–208; and uniforms, 24, 34–35 Boy Scouts (British), 23–24

265

266 Bryant, Louise Stevens, 196 Buck v. Bell, 196 Burroughs, John, 125 cabins, 101–104; and health, 96; and the indigenous, 97–105; and natural style, 94–97; popularity of, 92–94 Cadet Manual, The (U.S. Army), 77 Cady, Bertha Chapman, 128 cameras, 148–150 Camp Andree Clark (Girl Scouts), 68, 88, 205 Camper’s Own Book, The (Camp Fire), 169 Camp Fawn Brook (Girl Scouts), 88–89 Camp Fire Girl Outdoor Book, The, 153 Camp Fire Girls: and attitudes toward rural America, 116–117; early history, 5–6, 14–18; and khaki fever, 65–66; and home chores, 166–167; proposed merger with Girl Scouts, 26–28; and racial health, 197–201. See also ceremonial gown; Minute Girls Camp Gales Ferry (Girl Scouts), 89 Camp Hilldale (Girl Scouts), 78 Camp Indian Run (Girl Scouts), 223–225 Camping Magazine, 294 Camp Kehonka (private), 4, 129–130, 242n45, 243n71 Camp Low (Girl Scouts), 90 Camp Odakota (Girl Scouts), 73–74, 137 Camp Proctor (Girl Scouts), 89 camps, 68–69; and disease, 192–193, 213; and dress, 71, 72; early history, 3–5; military layout, 73–74; relationship to democracy, 69–71; schedule 74–76, 75 Camp Sebago-Wohelo (Camp Fire), 131, 171, 200, 216 Camp Tall Trees (Girl Scouts), 187 Camp Tinicum (YWCA), 118, 134, 145, 183–184, 204–205, 215

Index Campward Ho! (Girl Scouts), 75, 151, 171, 202, 213, 216 canning, 53–55 Canning Clubs, U.S. Agricultural Department, 55 ceremonial gown, 19, 19–22, 32, 132 character building, 16; and exercise, 208; and Girl Scouts, 26, 44–45, 48; and nature, 86, 126 chautauqua, 86, 94, 241n35 child psychology, 13, 15, 175, 219 Choate, Anne Hyde, 44 citizenship, training for, 9, 54, 59; and Girl Scouts, 44–45, 48–49, 80–81; and militarism, 67–69 Clark, William, 68–69 cleanliness: and camp, 184–185, 189. See also hygiene Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), 62–65, 237n29 Committee on Public Information, 56 Committee on Protective Work for Girls, 63 companionate marriage, 139, 141 competition, sports, 203 conservation (environment), 84–85 conservation (food), 49, 51–52 consumerism, and children, 32, 57, 81, 159 cooking, outdoor, 179–182 Council of National Defense, 62 Country Life movement, 87 Craig, H. M., 58 Darwin, Charles, 167 Davenport, Charles, 199 democracy of the wilderness, 69–73 Department for Safeguarding Moral and Spiritual Forces, 62 dieting, 214–218 division of labor, sexual, 6, 167–168 domestic science. See home economics Downing, Andrew Jackson, 94–95, 241n35 dress reform, 31 -32 Dummer, Ethel S., 65

Index Ederle, Gertrude, 207 eugenics, 195–200 Eugenics Record Office, 199 Fairbanks, Douglas, 56 Farmer’s Wife Magazine, 116 Farnsworth, Charlotte, 15, 16, 108–109, 243n63 Ferry, David, 17 field guides, 128–129 Fire Fly, The, 92, 170 fishing, 145–146 Fitter Family contests, 196 Fit to Fight (film), 62 flappers, 64 Flower Finder, 127, 129,130, 133. See also merit badges Flying Squads, 58 Food Administration, U.S., 9, 49–56 Fosdick, Raymond D., 62–63 Four Minute Men, 56 Frederick, Christine, 160 gang instinct, boys’, 1, 78 Gibson, Charles Dana, 202 Gibson, H. W., 207, 213 Gilbreth, Lillian, 191 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 163 Girl Guides (American), 18, 25–29 Girl Guides (British), 17; and khaki fever, 63–65, 67; origins of, 23–24 Girl Pioneer Manual (Beard), 148 Girl Pioneers of America, 6, 7; and cameras, 148, 149; and housework, 172–173, 188–189; and nature study, 128, 132–133; uniform drill, 137–138; and woodcraft, 141–143 Girl Reserve Manual, The, 98 Girl Reserve Movement Manual for Advisors, The, 152 Girl Reserves, 2, 5, 116, 131, 227. See also YWCA girls: anxiety about, 1–3, 6–7, 63, 65; and exercise, 198–202; and future motherhood, 80, 196–198; and imagination, 109–110; self-control, 57,

267 64–65, 78, 140; self-denial, 51–52, 61; self-reliance, 6–7, 10, 69, 71, 175–176; self-sacrifice, 51, 70–71 Girls’ Camp, The (Graham), 99, 111, 179 Girl Scouts: and camping standards, 87–91; early history, 6–7, 25–31; and home chores, 190–191; and ideas about health, 218–220; and khaki fever, 66–67; proposed merger with Camp Fire Girls, 26–28; and rural girls, 114–116 Girls’ Protective Bureau, 65 Glamour, 101 Gortner, Alice, 221–223 Graham, Abbie, 99, 105, 111–114, 119–120 Grant, Madison, 198 Great War. See World War I Gulick, Charlotte Vetter (Lottie), 21, 131, 168, 216; on housework, 162, 165–166, 169–172; role in Camp Fire origins, 5–6, 17; thoughts on racial health, 195, 197–198, 201 Gulick, J. Halsey, 195 Gulick, Luther Halsey: attitudes toward girls’ civic duties, 53, 69–71, 78; Camp Fire dress, 20–21, 31–32, 38–42; conflict with Juliette Low, 26–28; criticism of, 22; opinions of housework, 162–165; role in Camp Fire origins, 13–16; thoughts on girls’ development, 5–6 guns, 146–148 gypsy trips, 157, 182–183, 221–224 Hall, G. Stanley, 2–3, 13, 45, 125–126, 167 Hamilton, A. E., 197–200 Hammond, Emily, 44 Harding, Warren G., 79 health charts, 209–214 heredity. See eugenics Hess, Alfred, 193 hiking: and girls, 151–156; and women, 85–86

268 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 196 home economics, 159–162 Hometown Weeks, 9, 87 hot biscuit festival, 110–112 Hoover, Herbert, 49–52 Hoover, Lou Henry, 52, 203 Hope, Laura Lee, 156, 251n6 Horace Mann School, 14, 165 House That Runs Itself, The (Shultz and Schenk), 175–176 housework, 11, 158–159 How Girls Can Help the Empire (Baden-Powell), 24 How Girls Can Help Their Country (Girl Scouts), 48, 76, 195 Hungry Jack Lake (MN), 90–91, 98 hunting. See guns hygiene: and camp, 118, 192; and girls, 52, 209

Index Liberty Loans, 9, 49, 56–61, 60 Lisetor-Lane, Clara, 17, 29 Life, 77, 81, 122, 123, 140–141, 173 Low, Juliette Gordon, 8, 13, 23, 25, 172, 210; conflict with Boy Scouts, 26–31

Kellerman, Annette, 206–207 Kettles and Campfires (Girl Scouts), 180–182 khaki: and Boy Scouts, 34–35; and Girl Guides, 23–24, and Girl Scouts, 32–38 khaki fever, 63–68 knots, 138–141

Macdonald, Nina, 49 MacLean, Dorothy J., 101 Marks, Jeannette, 133, 139, 145, 148–149, 189 Martin, E. Gwen, 128 Mattoon, Laura, 4, 242n45 McAdoo, William Gibbs, 56, 80 meal planning, 183–184 merit badges: Camp Fire honors, 20–21; healthcraft, 12, 52, 193–194, 208, 219; homecraft, 161, 245n27, 248n8; naturecraft, 129, 132, 134, 150–151 Messenger, The, 50 Meyer, Annie Nathan, 66 middle landscape, 3–4, 86 militarism, 9, 83, 89–90, 227–228 military drill, 77–79 military training camps, 61–63, 66–68 Miner, Maude E., 63 Minute Girls: and uniforms, 38–43, 41; and wilderness, 69–70 mobilization, 48–49, 79–80 modernity, effect on girls’ development, 2–3, 167–168 moral zones, 9, 66. See also military training camps Mothercraft Manual, The (Read), 165 mothers, relationships with girls, 174–179 Muir, John, 84 Muscular Christianity, 3

Ladies’ Home Journal, 114 landscape: and commercialism, 84–85; and militarism, 83; and patriotism, 90; and tourism, 86–87. See also conservation (environment); preservation (environment) Langdon, William Chauncey, 15, 108–110, 243n64

National Army camps. See military training camps National Association for Mothercraft Education, 196 National Guard cantonments. See military training camps national parks, 84–86 Nature Fakers controversy, 125–126

indigenous, 10; architecture, 97–105; critique of, 112–113; pageants, 108–112; program, 105–108; problems with, 113–115, 117–118 Jewish Welfare Board, 62 Johnston, Edith, 28–31 Jordan, David Starr, 196 Journal of Heredity, 196–200

Index nature study, 10–11, 125–130, 134 Neal, Cora, 30 -31 Oh, Ranger! (Albright), 85 On the Trail (Beard), 134, 142, 143, 188, 241n40 Our Little Men and Women (Russell), 158 outdoor emergencies, 136–138 Over Hill and Dale and Far Away (Girl Scouts), 156–157 pageantry, 108–113 Palisades Interstate Park, 99, 128, 186 Pape, Nina Anderson, 26 patriotism, 8, 35, 79, 83, 87, 90–91 Personal Health Winner, 12, 52, 193–194, 209, 218–220. See also merit badges photography. See cameras physical fitness, 202 Pickford, Mary, 56 Pies for Soldiers, 237–238n44 pioneer heritage, 6–8, 87, 122–124; and camp architecture, 95–100; and domesticity, 172–174, 190; and rural America, 114–115; and woodcraft, 134–136, 138–139, 152 Plantation Days, 111–112 play days, 204 Playground Association of America, 15 Porter Sargent Company, 4, 213 postage stamps, 238n49 preservation (environment), 84–85 Price, Louise M., 87–91, 186, 196 primitivism: and Camp Fire Girls, 11–12, 18, 20; and children’s development, 3, 5, 7, 138; and evolution, 198; and housework, 167–170; and landscape, 86, 184–185 racial health, 195–201 Read, Mary L., 165, 196, 199 recapitulation, 227; and boys, 3; and girls, 5, 167–169 Richards, Ellen Swallow, 160

269 Rippin, Jane Deeter, 6, 193, 237n29 Rockefeller, John D., 43 Rockefeller Foundation, 14, 22, 43 Rockwell, Norman, 122–124, 123 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 190 Roosevelt, Theodore, 3, 43, 45, 46, 84, 125–126, 235n66 Rucker, Augusta, 195 Russell Sage Foundation, 14–15, 109 Sanders, J. Edward, 193 Scott, Lester, 220 Scouting for Girls (Girl Scouts), 7, 76, 140, 172, 196 Sea Rest (YWCA), 204 Sebago Wo-He-Lo (Rogers), 169 See America First, 87 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 15, 29, 125–126, 139 Seton, Grace Gallatin, 17, 146–147 sexuality, 9, 62–63, 198 Shultz, Gladys, 175–176 Shul-u-tam-na of the Camp Fire Girls (C. Gulick), 20 Sierra Club, 84–85 signaling, 76–77 Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (Addams), 57 sports, 203, 252n26 Stern, Sophie, 209 Stevens, Helen Ward, 78 Stickney-Jones, Polly, 115 swimming: and character building, 208; dangers of, 206; popularity of, 204–205; as racial exercise, 201; suited to girls, 206–207 table manners, 185–188 Tennessee Valley Authority, 100, 104 Ten Talks to Girls on Health (Rucker), 195 tents, 73, 92–93 Thetford, Vermont, 108–110 tools of woodcraft, 142–145 Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts, 110, 133, 151, 153, 155, 224

270 tuberculosis, 118, 193 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 84 Unadjusted Girl, The (Thomas), 65 uniforms: Boy Scouts, 24, 34–35, 43; Girl Guides, 31–32; Girl Pioneers, 137–138; Girl Scouts, 42–43; Minute Girls, 39–42 vacationing, 9, 85–87, 204 Vacation Camping for Girls (Marks), 139, 145, 149, 158, 189 Victorian culture, 2–4, 124–127, 145, 174, 202, 215 Victory Gardens, 53, 54, 64 Victory Loans. See Liberty Loans Vincent, Shirley, 221, 223–226 Wapa: Written Thoughts (L. Gulick), 162–163 War Call to the Girls of America (Camp Fire), 38, 48, 53 War Service Award, 59 water sports. See swimming West, James E., 15–16, 28, 45, 58 When You Hike (Girl Scouts), 83, 135–136, 152, 181

Index wigwag, 60, 77, 79. See also signaling Wilson, Woodrow, 38, 51 Wo-He-Lo (Buckler), 16 wo-he-lo, as Camp Fire watchword, 162, 194 Wohelo Bird, The, 200, 216 Woman Tenderfoot in the Rockies, A (G. Seton), 147 Women and Economics (Gilman), 163 woodcraft, 2, 11, 124, 134–137; and equality with boys, 139–141; and tools, 142–147 Woodcraft League, 125, 231n5 Woodcraft Manual for Girls (Seton), 139, 246n50 World War I, 159; girls’ mobilization for, 8–9, 42–43, 48–49; influence on camp design, 68–69, 79, 83 Wright, Katherine, 32–34, 80, 235n49 Youtz, Philip N., 95–97, 100, 105, 241n39 YWCA, 5; and army camps, 62; and camp management, 118, 183; and pageants, 110–111, 113; and nature study, 128, 131,134; and rural girls, 116. See also Girl Reserves

About the Author

Susan A. Miller is the undergraduate advisor for the history department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches in the history and sociology of science department and the women’s studies program. She has previously taught at Georgetown University and Rollins College.