Wilderness Wives and Dishwashing Husbands: Comfort and the Domestic Arts of Camping in America, 1880–1910

In the late nineteenth century, many well-off white Americans turned the practice of camping out into a leisure activity. Where camping had existed as a mode of ordinary travel, a staging ground for labor, a necessary skill of foot soldiers, and an activity associated with transients, for some it arose as an appealing vacation alternative to the resort hotel. These campers narrated their travels in the wilderness as prompted by a desire to escape the bonds of modern city life and get back to nature. And yet much of their time and recollections focused on chores: raising tents, making beds, organizing living spaces, building fires, cooking meals. In outdoor magazines, popular guidebooks, and private diaries, campers elevated the domestic arts of camping out. The concept of comfort—and who produced it—emerged as meaningful in the shifting notions of class, gender, and the body in turn-of the-century America. The campers’ wilderness sat, not outside of civilization, but offered a kind of stage for it, a space to audition modern social relationships. Leisure camping offers new frameworks for asking how Americans understood the role of nature in modern culture and accommodated the social changes they attributed to modernity.