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192 Chapter 6 Healthcraft Measuring the Modern Girl  Camp days, camp days. Good old happy camp days. Swimming and hiking for health craft beads, Striving to follow where health rules lead, With nine hours sleep for every soul, And three square meals to complete the dole. With hours of play the live-long day, oh that is the life for me! —Camp Fire radio program, 1933, St. Paul, Minnesota By the time the St. Paul, Minnesota, Camp Fire Girls sang this little ditty on their radio show, its truths, which had once been self-evident to girls’ organizations, had begun to unravel. The easy assumption that girls were naturally healthy and enjoyed, even reveled in, a healthy lifestyle had been called into question. The song’s other assumption , that a perfectly healthy lifestyle could best be acquired at camp, had also been challenged. Within the course of just two decades, the definition of a healthy girl—and the nature of the healthy landscape in which she purportedly thrived—had changed radically. Although the evidence for these changes is clear, their trajectory is quite convoluted. The changing definition of a healthy girl interacted in complicated ways with an altered camp environment. The trail to good health had never been quite as smooth and carefree as the Camp Fire Girls made it sound, but by the mid-1930s, girls who followed where health rules led found a path that ventured into a very different terrain than where it had formerly taken them. “Plenty of good food, twenty-four-hour day in the open air, an intimate acquaintanceship with the fields and the woods, and a practical lesson in cleanliness and hygiene.” This description could have come from any brochure advertising Camp Fire, Girl Scout, or YWCA summer camps. Time and again, leaders insisted that the inherent attributes of a camp’s environment —its land, water, and air—combined with the wholesome simplicity of Healthcraft 193 its program improved girls’ health. The description did not, however, come from a camp’s advertisement. It is a historian’s description of the first tuberculosis “preventorium,” opened in 1909 in Farmington, New Jersey, by founder Alfred Hess.1 Hess believed that the best way to fight this childhood scourge was by inoculating healthy children against its ravages; in other words, he would prevent TB in children by taking them to a place that, for all intents and purposes, looked exactly like summer camp. If preventoria looked like summer camps, it was also true that summer camps often looked like preventoria. Jane Deeter Rippin, the Girl Scouts’ national director, made the following remarks at an international conference in 1926: “We have the problem not only of helping growing girls, but of bringing to maturity a generation of women who shall not be nervous wreaks. We must counteract the speed and hustle and nervous strain of present day civilization.” She concluded that one of the ways the Scouting movement could accomplish this was by meeting with “other health organizations .”2 Rippin clearly cast the Girl Scouts’ lot with health organizations and identified camp as the place girls could acquire good health. By 1931, everything had changed. In a dissertation commissioned by the National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters, J. Edward Sanders made a startling argument: “The data indicated that the longer children remained in camp the more likely they were to become ill.”3 Numerous diseases, great and small—from rare, but devastating, typhoid and polio outbreaks, to colds and summer flu, afflicted children at camp. They suffered heat stroke and constipation, sprained their ankles, and got terrible cases of poison ivy. But, Sanders argued, illness and injuries were not the worst of it. The greatest liability of camp was less tangible and more worrying because the harm it did children was not something easily treated. “It is not possible to estimate with any accuracy the amount of worry and nervous strain that accumulates in the modern, highly organized summer camp but in the opinion of the writer it is very great indeed for many campers.”4 The health problems that beset “modern” camps were not incidental accidents that could be prevented by better management; the danger was now embedded in camp’s fundamental nature. Camps had gone from preventing diseases associated with a hectic and unhealthy city lifestyle to acting as a vector for those very ills. Camps’ relationship to healthcraft grew even more complex when the changing definition of the...

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