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As the twentieth century dawned, progressive educators established a national organization for adolescent girls to combat what they believed to be a crisis of girls' education. A corollary to the Boy Scouts of America, founded just a few years earlier, the Camp Fire Girls became America's first and, for two decades, most popular girls' organization. Based on Protestant middle-class ideals-a regulatory model that reinforced hygiene, habit formation, hard work, and the idea that women related to the nation through service-the Camp Fire Girls invented new concepts of American girlhood by inviting disabled girls, Black girls, immigrants, and Native Americans to join. Though this often meant a false sense of cultural universality, in the girls' own hands membership was often profoundly empowering and provided marginalized girls spaces to explore the meaning of their own cultures in relation to changes taking place in twentieth-century America. Through the lens of the Camp Fire Girls, Jennifer Helgren traces the changing meanings of girls' citizenship in the cultural context of the twentieth century. Drawing on girls' scrapbooks, photographs, letters, and oral history interviews, in addition to adult voices in organization publications and speeches, The Camp Fire Girls explores critical intersections of gender, race, class, nation, and disability.

Girlhood, interdisciplinary and global in source, scope, and methodology, examines the centrality of girlhood in shaping women's lives. Scholars study how age and gender, along with a multitude of other identities, work together to influence the historical experience.Spanning a broad time frame from 1750 to the present, essays illuminate the various continuities and differences in girls' lives across culture and region--girls on all continents except Antarctica are represented. Case studies and essays are arranged thematically to encourage comparisons between girls' experiences in diverse locales, and to assess how girls were affected by historical developments such as colonialism, political repression, war, modernization, shifts in labor markets, migrations, and the rise of consumer culture.

This article explores girls’ participation in 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial celebrations through their national organizations. Members of the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls were deeply involved in the nation’s displays of civic pride. Girls’ organizations linked their ordinary service projects to the Bicentennial and created new projects as they caught the national bandwagon. To some extent, these efforts emphasized unquestioning patriotism, but each organization, propelled by second-wave feminism and social history, also absorbed and advanced efforts to recover multiple perspectives. Girls’organizations became public history spaces and girls in them saw the understanding of and dissemination of history as an important part of female citizenship.

This article explores girls’ participation in 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial celebrations through their national organizations. Members of the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls were deeply involved in the nation’s displays of civic pride. Girls’ organizations linked their ordinary service projects to the Bicentennial and created new projects as they caught the national bandwagon. To some extent, these efforts emphasized unquestioning patriotism, but each organization, propelled by second-wave feminism and social history, also absorbed and advanced efforts to recover multiple perspectives. Girls’ organizations became public history spaces and girls in them saw the understanding of and dissemination of history as an important part of female citizenship.

In 1910 leaders of a national US girls’ organization, the Camp Fire Girls, used feminine American Indian imagery to enhance the nation’s racial health through a gender-specific adolescent development theory. Focusing on the Native American and white girls who joined the organization, this study shows that girls used American Indian imagery in generationally and racially unique ways to articulate their own concepts of serious, capable modern femininity. Native American Camp Fire Girls laid claim to inclusion in a national girls’ culture even as they used the organization’s Indian lore to investigate their heritage and explore hybrid identities. Through mimicry white Camp Fire Girls explored racial and sexual identities that were carefully bounded within symbolic spaces. Camp Fire Girls history reflects the development of the racialized nation, and girls shaped that history in complex ways.

This article analyzes the oral histories of a multiracial group of women who grew up during the 1950s and 1960s when social concern about suburban and urban crime was rising. The women nostalgically remember growing up during an \"innocent time,\" but their memories of violence and vulnerability interrupt their idealized narratives. The article argues that nostalgia serves several purposes. It enables women to critique the present, especially the loss of protective institutions such as girls' organizations and tight-knit communities. Nostalgia also illuminates women's negotiation of gender identity with respect to safety and respectability and may anchor their identities in gendered and class-based descriptions of protected, sheltered girlhoods.

Camp Fire officials used appropriative dress and symbolism to construct a mythic concept of universal girlhood. Camp Fire’s ceremonial costume, council fires, and camping activities invoked American Indian and sometimes Gypsy imagery. At regional council fires and at weekly meetings, Camp Fire Girls adopted as their own what they thought of as American Indian names and symbols. For special occasions, such as when girls advanced in rank or earned honor beads, girls wore a brown, fringed dress decorated with symbolic designs and worn with a beaded headband depicting their personally chosen symbol. Wearing Indian-style gowns, the thinking went, girls from