The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980 by Jennifer Helgren (review)

Reviewed by: The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980 by Jennifer Helgren Luca Bertolani Azeredo The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980. By Jennifer Helgren. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. xvi + 356 pp. Hardcover 99, paperback 30, e-book 30. Jennifer Helgren's book is the result of two decades of studies that began during her master's degree in US women's history. It analyzes one of the most important youth bodies in the United States both in terms of participation and the cultural role it played. The Camp Fire Girls examines the birth and development of the girls' organization from its origins up to the 1980s, with an epilogue devoted to a brief analysis of developments over the last forty years and a comparison with other major associations and how they have tackled, or tried to solve, the same problems. While maintaining a chronological presentation, this book does not follow a consequential analysis of developments—which would have led to a focus mainly on the organizers or on a specific section—but deals with the association by following macroscopic themes, thus placing the Camp Fire Girls within the United States and international social and cultural developments. The book is composed of three main sections. Chapters 1 to 3 investigate the philosophy, symbolism, and pedagogical system that formed the basis of the association in the first three decades of its history. Chapters 4 to 7 deal with the development of the Camp Fire Girls between the Second World War and the Cold War, studying the relationship between the association and the End Page 315 minorities discriminated against for not belonging to the "normal" model that had constituted both the national conception and indeed the typical member of the association: middle-class, white, Protestant, and able-bodied girls. Chapters 8 and 9 and the epilogue explore the evolution of a new concept: young people's social role from the 1960s to the present day. This book not only tells us about the Camp Fire Girls but also analyzes cultural and social developments in the US during the last century. The birth of the movement is part of the perceived crisis of gender relations identified with modernity. In relation to the Boy Scouts, therefore, the Camp Fire Girls projected an imaginary of the female role by attempting to preserve its gender connotations while creating a social space in which young girls could become active citizens committed to the betterment of individuals and society. This reactionary feminist space thus showcased ideas of equality and democracy, which all girls of any background could take part in—clashing, however, with actual societal conditions. It is therefore extremely interesting to note how the first two sections of the book describe the move from a formal inclusion of Black, Indigenous, and disabled girls, with the assimilating aim of bringing them into conformity, to a new politics of justice following the new ideals of the 1960s. Of particular interest are the author's analyses of the iconography and symbolism around which the image of the Camp Fire Girls was first constituted. The instrumentalization of Native and gypsy cultures, described as "picturesque relics of the past" (57), is presented as an intermediary space between different concepts, but also as the reappropriation of a culture of which the young native girls had been deprived. This intersectional analysis makes it possible to study the evolution of the association and the women who were part of it within the discussion forum that came into being between the participating girls and the young officers. This was a hybrid space where the policies of adults and young people met and clashed in a synthesis that, by questioning the social role of women, also presented an alternative model. Helgren's book is an excellent piece of research on the Camp Fire Girls that follows more than half a century after the last major work on the topic. However, it fails to tell us the group's whole century-long history, as it ends in the 1980s, precisely when the author herself began to be a member as a young woman. She responded to the decision. . .