Join Jennifer Helgren, Professor of History at University of the Pacific, and Kristine Alexander, Associate Professor of History at University of Lethbridge and author of Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, as they discuss on Zoom Dr. Helgren’s new book: The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, And American Girlhood, 1910–1980. 

Summary: In the 1910s, progressive reformers created a national girls’ organization–the Camp Fire Girls–to combat what they believed to be a crisis in girls’ education. Jennifer Helgren traces the changing meanings of girls’ citizenship in the shifting social and cultural contexts of the twentieth century, using the organization’s history to explore critical intersections of gender, race, class, nation and disability. Although the organization was nominally open to all girls, its history illuminates the barrier to belonging as much as it does the reality of inclusion.