Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls' Organizations in America

Introduction: What Is the Matter with Jane?

1 Introduction What Is the Matter with Jane?
Why, asked the New York Times in November 1920, was the Girl Scout movement growing so rapidly that it was forced to turn away four thousand potential members each month because of shortages of staff and resources? The “reason for this is that the scout corps answers a question which is asked in every family where there is a growing girl: ‘What is the matter with Jane?’”1 As “childhood merges into young womanhood new ideas and new longings come, which are the most potent of all for good or evil,” the Times noted. Yet at this critical juncture in her development, when a girl most needed the camaraderie and council of loyal allies, she found herself alone, unable to depend on friends and family. Just as “she has abandoned her dolls Jane finds herself abandoned by her little-boy playfellows, who have attained the age of the loftiest scorn of the ever-feminine—the only true cave-man age of school and college sports and of the gang spirit.” Owing to the small size of the “modern family” and parents’ preoccupation with their own affairs, Jane became further isolated, “a child hermit of the spirit” left to her own devices. The matter with Jane was that she was adrift in a rapidly changing modern world, bereft of the guidance she needed to understand both it and the changes taking place in her adolescent body and soul. The girl faced a daunting array of challenges, some presented by her family, others, sadly, of her own making. “Solitary Jane takes to the romantic novel, to the theatre, to the movies. Her social presence and her clothes become matters of agonizing importance. Jane’s sensible mother finds she is lamentably self-conscious and vain; her even more sensible father that she spends too much time at the movies. And so Jane, who least of all knows what is the matter with her, gets her first feminine skill in concealment and evasion,” the Times warned. If parents were part of the problem, and the girl only made things worse for herself, then who was going to help her? 2 Growing Girls Luckily for Jane there were adults who understood that modern girlhood was in a state of crisis, and who had the time and inclination to intervene on her behalf. “The only real trouble with Jane is that she had been turned away from the Girl Scouts!” the Times exclaimed. “There her idleness would be filled, her solitude banished. Instead of the trumped-up adventure on the screen, witnessed in a stuffy theatre, Jane would herself go on hikes, learn camping, swimming, woodcraft. She learns that her young body is to be used instead of decorated.” Girl Scouting would act as Jane’s guide through the turbulence of adolescence—especially, one must conclude from the Times’ perspective, that portion of the Scouting program focused on camping and woodcraft. The problems Jane faced in the modern world would, oddly enough, be solved in the outdoors via a constellation of “natural” activities offered by girls’ organizations. It was time, the Times proclaimed, for Jane to go camping. This is a book about Jane and her peers, the adolescent girls who grew up in the first decades of the twentieth century and who constituted what anxious adults referred to as “the girl problem.” It is also about the organizations —Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, Girl Pioneers, and Girl Reserves, to name only the largest groups—that were founded to solve this problem. The book’s setting, summer camp, may seem a peculiar place to look for a solution to the girl problem, but as the New York Times had correctly observed, girls’ organizations were convinced that hiking, camping, and woodcraft could offer a potent cure for whatever it was that ailed Jane. At the end of the nineteenth century, sweeping changes in the social lives of middle-class Americans allowed their daughters to develop a new cultural identity—young Victorian ladies were becoming modern girls.2 Girls had not been girls for very long, however, before adults began to worry that there was something wrong with them. As the Times indicated, many fears were predicated on girls’ interaction with popular culture. On the surface , parents and teachers worried that girls were spending their time reading romance novels and going to the theater rather than doing homework and chores. But at a more profound level, adults started to wonder...