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158 Chapter 5 Homecraft Primitive Maidens and Domestic Pioneers  With a little knowledge of woodcraft, there is almost no wilderness into which a capable girl cannot go and make an attractive home. Jeannette Marks, Vacation Camping for Girls, 1913 A photograph from Our Little Men and Women: Modern Methods of Character Building shows a young girl standing atop a chair so she can reach her work. She is bent over a metal basin that rests on a rough wooden table, washing a cooking pot nearly half her size. It is not particularly surprising to find the image of a dutiful child doing her chores in a 1912 text purporting to teach “Many Valuable Lessons” about children’s “Future Usefulness.” Yet there is something incongruous about the photo. The child is not pictured at home in the midst of a bustling domestic scene; she is washing the dishes outside, in a clearing with a thick grove of trees just behind her. The photo’s caption reads: “Domestic work that may seem tiresome at home becomes fun in the woods.”1 This photo is a perfect representation of the solution posed by girls’ organizations to what many Americans saw as an intractable problem: adolescent girls’ inability, and worse, unwillingness, to perform their assigned household chores. How had even the most respectful daughters of the responsible middle classes become so derelict in their duties, and how could this situation be remedied? Scout and Camp Fire leadership were convinced they had the answer. The rival groups proposed the same rather peculiar solution to this domestic dilemma—send girls away to camp to learn skills they would need at home. And while Scout and Camp Fire leaders were adamant that they espoused very different visions of how, and why, girls should be taught homecraft skills, the fact remained that they shared a host of common assumptions. For all their bickering over the proper place of homecraft lessons in their overall program, leaders agreed Homecraft 159 that most of girls’ domestic troubles had started, ironically enough, in the home itself. Scholars suggest that the Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls who grew up in the first decades of the twentieth century did so amid a radical change in the very definition of childhood. Middle-class children, they argue, had become “useless” to a family’s economy, deprived by both law and social custom of employment outside the home. However, the same economic and social forces that rendered children useless also worked to make them “priceless,” as they assumed a pivotal position at the emotional heart of bourgeois culture.2 Parents catered to their whims, schools based curricula on their interests, and children were permitted, even encouraged, to develop distinct personalities. If childhood was becoming commercialized by the attention paid to children by the burgeoning consumer markets, they were also being “sacralized” by the sentimentality with which they were viewed by the adults who were immediately responsible for their welfare. Leaders of girls’ organizations, however, begged to differ. Camp Fire and Girl Scout leaders suggested that girls’ needs, especially in their relationship to the home, were not being taken into account. Both schools and parents still insisted that girls—priceless or not—help out at home, but refused to understand that while girls had changed, many domestic chores had not. Camp Fire and Scouting leadership believed that their homecraft programs could help bridge this divide. They would honor and value girls for their new status in the family while they found a way to redefine homecraft chores to match girls’ changed circumstances. Housework, previously scorned as sheer drudgery, would be turned into domestic chores that were “fun alive” and invested with a sense of romance and adventure. And this transformation would, of course, happen at camp—where tiresome chores could become fun if only they were performed in the woods. Home Economics outside the Home When girls’ organizations first appeared in the 1910s, the homes in which their members lived were in the midst of transformation. Industrialization , which had reached a frenzied pitch by the turn of the century, was in the process of turning the American home into a unit of consumption rather than production. Homemakers now supervised the purchase and final assembly of the foodstuffs, housewares, and clothing they had previously produced from scratch. The end of World War I accelerated these changes as manufacturers turned their attention from armaments to appliances. More [3.144.36.141] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01...

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