The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920–55 (review)

Sharon Wall sets an impressive standard of interdisciplinary inquiry, situating summer camp in twentieth-century rural Ontario in the larger context of modernist and anti-modernist thought influencing Canadians’ lives. Her study of summer camps enriches an already lively body of historical work on class, race, gender, and sexuality, and Indigenous-newcomer relations; nourishes emerging areas like childhood and youth, medicine and psychology, food, and the environment; and strengthens long-established fields such as education and sport, including the influence of camps on pedagogy, the connection of camps to K–12 schools and universities, and the history of professions, and religion, particularly spirituality in camp. The question Wall asks is put most eloquently on the back of the book: why have children “been packed off to camp?”

To explore summer camps, the temporary home of 150,000 or five to seven percent of Canadian children annually by 1950, she sets out to understand the effect of intellectual currents on camping and the outdoors. In the first chapter, Wall casts the rural Ontario summer camp against modern Toronto, made up of families residing on cramped, unhealthy, and frequently unsafe streets. There, people’s worth was determined by their wages. At the same time, though, the upper middle class of the city were concerned for these families and marshalled secular teachers, public health nurses, and social workers to name and investigate a problem: the health and wellness of families, particularly children. Nature began to be seen as a remedy to the perceived poor health of families. The summer camp was the practical solution and became the thread sewing the fabric of city and countryside together.

Chapters 2 and 3, case studies of three camps, show how the pedagogy of camps solidified class consciousness. In the three camps, Ahmek and Wapomeo for the upper middle and upper class, and the Bolton Fresh Air Camp for the working class of Toronto, the goal was to ensure campers understood the importance of proficiency in English literacy, numeracy, and citizenship to be workers. Nature was fertile ground to ensure that city life and a growing youth culture did not corrupt the minds of youngsters. Despite segregation of children and youth by class, there indeed was a connection among the working, middle, and upper classes. The Toronto Daily Star administered the Fresh Air Fund, founded by philanthropist Joseph Atkinson, to support attendance of deserving children and sometimes parents at camp. The newspaper relied on the middle and upper-middle class to donate, and depicted children attending Bolton as “[u]nder-nourished, underweight ... undersized ... unfortunate” and delinquent.” (111) Charity operated to remake the working class as needing intervention by social workers.

Wall returns to intellectual predicaments in chapter 4, comprehending the ideas shaping summer camps and their implications for pedagogy and practice. Camp became necessary for learning and thus evolved from being a place of fun only to a space where playing would nourish desirable qualities in modern girls and boys: “courage, perseverance and self-confidence.” (308–108) Childhood was anti-modern in that children were exempt from earning wages. Chapters 5 and 6, on gender and sexuality, and Indigenous “themes” at camp, suggest that being effeminate, “butch,” homosexual, and “Indian” were also anti-modern. However, these were acceptable behaviours, perhaps necessary for children to ensure a normal transition to adulthood.

Camp contributed to “a modern notion of childhood” and facilitated children’s smooth passage to adolescence and adulthood, following acceptable, classed behaviours. (252) To support this conclusion, Wall draws from records of private, fresh air, and agency camps (such as the Young Men’s Christian Association), newspapers, Ontario and Canadian camping associations, an oral history collection, and her own interviews with eighteen former campers and two former camp directors and owners. However, the philosophy and practice could have been conveyed better to readers by rearranging the chapters to set the entire intellectual history of modernity and camps (chapters 1 and 4) in one place. Then...