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Abstract
Drawing primarily on discourses and events from the period surrounding World War I, this essay examines the methods deployed by Camp Fire Girls and Girls Scouts to recruit the daughters of immigrants and, upon joining, acculturate these new members to the American way of life. The argument begins by analyzing those discourses describing the so-called “new immigrant” from southern and eastern Europe as a threat to national unity. Turning to the ways in which the new immigrant problem was gendered through the rhetorical construction of a “girl problem,” this author argues that the advocates describing the girl problem leveraged the presumed cultural rift between foreign-born parents and their new-world children in order to induce the daughters of the foreign-born to perform as American. The essay closely analyzes the discourses of two groups committed to the project of Americanizing the daughters of immigrants: the Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts. The article contends that these groups, the two most popular of the period, Americanized the daughter of the foreign-born by using recruitment tactics that invited her to dissociate from an old-world ethnicity, deploying legendary heroines re-figuring the girl's American belonging, and engineering patriotic regimens habituating her to American customs. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates how these groups rhetorically refigured the cultural and social belonging of their members in order to assuage public concerns about national unity.
Notes
1. Helen Josephine Ferris, Girls’ Clubs, Their Organization and Management (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918), 50.
2. Ferris, Girls’ Clubs, 51.
3. Many period authorities on recreation and clubs supported a philosophy similar to Ferris on girls’ clubs. See, for example, Royal Dixon, Americanization (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 96–99; Luther Halsey Gulick, A Philosophy of Play (New York: Scribner, 1920); Mary Eliza Moxcey, Physical Health and Recreation for Girls (New York: The Methodist Book Concern, 1920).
4. US Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 1: 781.
5. US Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1: 783.
6. US Bureau of the Census, Report on the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 1: 607–8.
7. US Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1: 607–8.
8. US Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1: 961–62.
9. US Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1: 962.
10. US Immigration Commission, Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, 61st Cong., 3d sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 1: 14, 24, 38.
11. Contemporary historians note that this Commission's recommendations often contradicted their data; see Keith A. Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and National Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 139.
12. Carol Aronovici, “Americanization: Its Meaning and Function,” The American Journal of Sociology 25 (1920): 705–6.
13. US Immigration Commission, Abstracts, 1: 42.
14. US Immigration Commission, Abstracts, 1: 41–42.
15. W. Jett Lauck, “The Real Significance of Recent Immigration,” The North American Review 195 (1912): 205.
16. Cole, Handbook on Americanization, quoted in Howard C. Hill, “The Americanization Movement,” The American Journal of Sociology 24 (1919): 630.
17. Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963); Desmond S. King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
18. John F. McClymer, “Gender and the ‘American Way of Life’: Women in the Americanization Movement,” Journal of American Ethnic History 10 (1991): 3.
19. Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings (New York: Routledge, 1996), 68.
20. Gregory Mason, “An Americanization Factory,” Outlook, 23 February 1916, 439.
21. John E. Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 190–92.
22. US Immigration Commission, Abstracts, 1: 42.
23. Mason, “An Americanization Factory,” 442.
24. Mason, “An Americanization Factory,” 442.
25. Reform authorities often berated the new immigrant for her unsanitary housekeeping methods as the root cause of spreading disease. See Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 113–16; Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
26. Joseph Mayper, “Americanizing Barren Island,” in Americanization: Principles of Americanism, Essentials of Americanization, Technic of Race-Assimilation, Annotated Bibliography, ed. Winthrop Talbot, 281–90 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1920), 288.
27. Mayper, “Americanizing Barren Island,” 288.
28. North American Civic League for Immigrants, “Domestic Education among Immigrants,” in Americanization: Principles of Americanism, Essentials of Americanization, Technic of Race-Assimilation, Annotated Bibliography, ed. Winthrop Talbot, 256–58 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1920), 257.
29. North American Civic League for Immigrants, “Domestic Education,” 257–58.
30. Several authors mention the Americanization work of Girl Scouts and to a minimal extent the Camp Fire Girls, in passing. See Rima D. Apple and Joanne Passet, “Learning to Be a Woman: Lessons from Girl Scouting and Home Economics, 1920–1970,” in Defining Print Culture for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children's Literature, ed. Anne Lundin and Wayne Wiegand, 139–54 (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003), 140; Sherrie A. Inness, “Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and Woodcraft Girls: The Ideology of Girls’ Scouting Novels, 1910–1935,” in Continuities in Popular Culture: The Present in the Past and the Past in the Present and Future, ed. Ray B. Browne and Ronald J. Ambrosetti, 229–40 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), 235–36; Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900–1995 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 85–89, 128–31; Mary Jane McCallum, “‘The Fundamental Things’: Camp Fire Girls and Authenticity, 1910–20,” Canadian Journal of History 40 (2005): 45–66; David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 50–51; Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 158–60; Laureen Tedesco, “Making a Girl into a Scout: Americanizing Scouting for Girls,” in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 19–39.
31. Laureen Tedesco, “Progressive Era Girl Scouts and the Immigrant: Scouting for Girls (1920) as a Handbook for American Girlhood,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 31 (2006): 350.
32. Tedesco, “Progressive Era Girl Scouts,” 347.
33. Leslie Paris, “The Adventures of Peanut and Bo: Summer Camps and Early-Twentieth-Century American Girlhood,” Journal of Women's History 12 (2001): 49; Rebekah E. Revzin, “American Girlhood in the Early Twentieth Century: The Ideology of Girl Scout Literature, 1913–1930,” The Library Quarterly 68 (1998): 261–75. There is one exception to this scholarship with Elisabeth Israels Perry who details the happenings of an African American troop in Tennessee. See Elisabeth Israels Perry, “From Achievement to Happiness: Girl Scouting in Middle Tennessee, 1910s–1960s,” Journal of Women's History 5 (1993): 75–94; Elisabeth Israels Perry, “‘The Very Best Influence’; Josephine Holloway and Girl Scouting African-American Community,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 52 (1993): 78–85.
34. Ruth M. Alexander, The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
35. June Purcell-Guild, “A Study of One-Hundred and Thirty-One Delinquent Girls Held at the Juvenile Detention Home in Chicago, 1917,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 10 (1919): 474.
36. Joseph Moreau, “Rise of the (Catholic) American Nation: United States History and Parochial Schools, 1878–1925,” American Studies 38 (1997): 67–90.
37. “Americanization Work,” The Independent, 7 September 1918, 312.
38. Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home (1912; New York: Arno, 1970), 55–56.
39. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 5.
40. Breckinridge and Abbott, Delinquent Child, 76–77.
41. Breckinridge and Abbott, Delinquent Child, 76–77.
42. Robert Archey Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls; A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 34–36.
43. Mrs. Martha P. Falconer, “Causes of Delinquency among Girls,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 36 (1910): 79.
44. H. W. Lytle and John Dillon, From Dance Hall to White Slavery (Chicago: Charles C. Thompson, 1910), 48. Reformers during this period launched a major campaign against the dance hall, nickel theatre, and amusement park as establishments that allowed for white slavery. See David J. Pivar, Purity and Hygiene: Women, Prostitution, and the “American Plan,” 1900–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002).
45. Lytle and Dillon, From Dance Hall, 48.
46. Lytle and Dillon, From Dance Hall, 50.
47. Lytle and Dillon, From Dance Hall, 48.
48. Harriet McDoual Daniels and the Association of Neighborhood Workers, The Girl and Her Chance (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914), 9, 25.
49. Daniels, The Girl and Her Chance, 25.
50. Olivia Howard Dunbar, “Teaching the Immigrant Woman,” in Americanization: Principles of Americanism, Essentials of Americanization, Technic of Race-Assimilation, Annotated Bibliography, ed. Winthrop Talbot, 252–56 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1920), 256.
51. Dunbar, “Teaching the Immigrant Woman,” 256.
52. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.
53. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 18.
54. Woods and Kennedy, Young Working Girls, 136.
55. Ferris, Girls’ Clubs, 277.
56. Ferris, Girls’ Clubs, 277.
57. Luther Halsey Gulick, “Recreation and Youth,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in New York City 2 (1912): 119–20.
58. Daniels, The Girl and Her Chance, 78.
59. US Bureau of Education, Americanization Division, Proceedings Americanization Conference: Held Under the Auspices of the Americanization Division (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 85.
60. Ferris, Girls’ Clubs, 121.
61. Ferris, Girls’ Clubs, 121.
62. The growth of the early Camp Fire Girls astounded its founders with over 4,700 local groups by December 1913. Girl Scouts membership rivaled the Camp Fire Girls by the end of WWI. See Helen Buckler, Mary F. Fiedler, and Martha F. Allen, Wo-He-Lo: The Story of Camp Fire Girls, 1910–1960 (New York: Holt, 1961), 83; Juliette Low, “Girl Scouts as an Educational Force,” Bulletin (US Bureau of Education) 33 (1919), 3; Tedesco, “Making,” 25.
63. Frances C. Jeffrey, “The New Fourth of July,” Wohelo, May 1915, 2. For more evidence, see Tedesco, “Progressive Era Girl Scouts,” 363; Lillian S. Williams, A Bridge to the Future: The History of Diversity in Girl Scouting (New York: Girl Scouts of the USA, 1996), 11.
64. Low, “Girl Scouts,” 8.
65. Mrs. Frank H. Bliss, “Scout for ‘America First,’” The Rally, January 1918, 3.
66. Rowe Wright, “The Makers of Americans,” Wohelo, February 1919, 212.
67. Tedesco, “Progressive,” 348–49. Americanization work virtually disappears from the magazines of both groups after the early 1920s. Tedesco notes that the Girl Scouts diminished their Americanization activities in the early 1920s, while the guidebooks revised in 1927 and 1933 on the 1920 model retain some of the Americanization tone. While internal documentation from the Camp Fire Girls was destroyed in a fire, virtually the last original Camp Fire Girls handbook to list Americanization honors was published in 1924.
68. On the groups inability to consolidate, see Report of the Director to the Executive Committee of Girl Scouts, 12 June 1919, Girl Scouts of the United States of America National Historic Preservation Center (hereafter GSNHPC), New York City, 26; Report of the Director to the Executive Committee of Girl Scouts, 11 September 1919, GSNHPC, New York City, 36; Luther Halsey Gulick to General Baden-Powell, 17 January 1913, GSNHPC, New York City; Stephanie Wallach, “Luther Halsey Gulick and the Salvation of the American Adolescent” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1989), 352–79.
69. Rowe, “Makers of Americans,” 211.
70. Rowe Wright, “Scouting for Girls is Making Americans,” The Rally, January 1918, 8. This article might point to an instance in which immigrants could take up Girl Scouting without abandoning their ethnicity. However, the focus on American cooking and American freedoms seems to belie the possibility.
71. Wright, “Scouting for Girls,” 8.
72. Caroline E. Lewis, “Camping with Girl Scouts,” The Rally, July 1918, 2.
73. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 21.
74. Wright, “Makers of Americans,” 212.
75. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3.
76. The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: George H. Doran, 1913), 20.
77. The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1913; New York: Press of Thos. B. Brooks, 1922), 13–14. For another analysis of this, see Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 111–21.
78. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1922), 13.
79. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1913), 21.
80. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1922), 13.
81. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1913), 20.
82. Luther Gulick, “Camp Fire is an Army Not a Hospital,” Wohelo, March 1915, 14.
83. W. J. Hoxie, How Girls Can Help Their Country: The 1913 Handbook for Girl Scouts (1913; Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2001), 6.
84. Hoxie, How Girls, 6.
85. Hoxie, How Girls, 6.
86. Hoxie, How Girls, 6.
87. Girl Scouts of the United States of America (hereafter GSUSA), Scouting for Girls; Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts (New York: Girl Scouts, 1920), 20.
88. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 21.
89. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 20.
90. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 20.
91. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 21.
92. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 22.
93. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 22.
94. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 22.
95. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 22.
96. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 23.
97. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 23.
98. Probyn, Outside Belongings, 68.
99. GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 23.
100. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1913), 63.
101. Juliette Gordon Low, How Girls Can Help Their Country (Savannah, GA: Press of M.S. & D.A. Byck, 1917), 131–41.
102. Low, How Girls, 25.
103. Hoxie, How Girls, 130–35; Low, How Girls, 35–47; GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 504–24.
104. Low, How Girls, 112; GSUSA, Scouting for Girls, 519.
105. “A Democratic Camp,” The Rally, October 1917, 9.
106. “A Democratic Camp,” 9.
107. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1922), 41–42.
108. Lawrence J. Prelli, “Introduction,” in Rhetorics of Display, ed. Lawrence J. Prelli, 1–40 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 2.
109. Juliette Low, Leaders’ Manual for Girl Scouts (New York: Girl Scouts, 1915), 25.
110. The Book of the Camp Fire Girls with War Program and Illustrations (New York: National Headquarters, 1917), vi-vii; The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (New York: Camp Fire Girls, 1921), 10; Wallach, “Luther Halsey Gulick,” 281.
111. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1917), xi.
112. Buckler, Fiedler, and Allen, Wo-He-Lo, 15; Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1917), 137.
113. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1921), 13.
114. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1921), 137.
115. Book of the Camp Fire Girls (1913), 24.
116. “A Democratic Camp,” 9; Buckler, Fiedler, and Allen, Wo-He-Lo, 83; Wallach, “Luther Halsey Gulick,” 288, 342–43.
117. “Scouting for All Girls—Not a Few,” The Rally, May 1918, 4.
118. “Scouting for All Girls,” 1.
119. Jeffrey, “New Fourth of July,” 1–2.
120. Juliette Low, Anna Hyde Choate, and Abby Porter Leland, “Girl Scout War Service Award,” The Rally, March 1918, 11.
121. “News of the Troops,” The Rally, May 1918, 11.
122. “Americanizing America: A Play in Three Scenes,” Wohelo, October 1918, 111.
123. “Americanizing America,” 111.
124. Inness, “Girl Scouts,” 234.
125. Michel Foucault, “The Subject & Power” in Michel Foucault: Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994), 326.
126. Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 341.
127. Anita Harris, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.
128. Bill Ainsworth, “Prop. 85 Has Abortion Debate Back in Spotlight,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 2 October 2006, A1; Roger Dobson and Martin Hodgson, “The Truth about Tweens,” Independent, 27 August 2006, Features sec., 6; Sean Patrick Sullivan, “Girls Tricked into Porn on Net,” London Free Press, 29 July 2006, A1.