American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War by Jennifer Helgren (review)

Despite a theme of naïveté in the pervading post–Second World War cultural image of girlhood, Jennifer Helgren’s American Girls and Global Responsibility takes the role of girls “seriously” in the fight for global peace during the early Cold War period (1). In this exceptional study of mid-twentieth-century youth culture, Helgren provides an insightful and engaging perspective of postwar girlhood and the literature that influenced it. Explaining that a “new internationalist citizenship role for girls took root in the United States in the years following World War II” (1), Helgren expertly shows how themes of friendship, global sisterhood, tolerance, and international peace accompanied a new political space for girls outside their traditionally domestic sphere. The practical outcome of this development, she tells her readers, was an advancement of “U.S. moral authority,” subsequently contributing to “U.S. cultural, economic, and even military power in the Cold War era” (17). Helgren’s exploration of the societal role of the twentieth-century American girl provides an unusual political perspective on the popular publications for girls produced during this period, making this book an important read for scholars of contemporary children’s literature.

The book explores the ways in which youth organizations and popular literature targeted girls aged ten to seventeen in order to create a generation of globally aware and politically relevant young women. Helgren provides a comprehensive and useful overview of the Atomic Age, setting the stage for her examination of girls’ international advocacy during the early Cold War. She also skillfully unearths the impact of international pen pal and relief package projects facilitated by youth organizations, highlights the media consumed by young people and these texts’ reconceptualization of Japan and Germany as allies instead of enemies, connects global compassion with consumerism in popular publications for girls, and helps explain the pushback against girls’ organizations in the 1950s from anticommunists and radical conservatives. The most interesting and relevant aspects of Helgren’s book for children’s literature scholars are her perspectives on personal correspondence between girls and the evolution of Seventeen and American Girl magazines. These investigations point toward the important implications that these arguments possess for the study of twentieth-century children’s literature.

Indeed, in a brilliantly nuanced look at the pen pal relationships between girls in the United States and foreign countries such as Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Japan, Helgren shows how letter correspondence reinforced the perception of the US as the divine rescuer of its communist and war-torn inferiors. Focusing on the Campfire Girls’ letter-writing and relief package campaign “Hello World, Let’s Get Together,” Helgren proves through analysis of personal correspondence that young women served an important purpose in advancing US aims abroad, “supporting international alliances and creating respect for the United States” (58). Girls often wrote about their daily activities in these letters, giving a glowing review of life in the US; Helgren explains, however, that they also used these international friendships to tell secrets, complain, and even criticize their own government. She gives the reader a glimpse into the “intimate and lengthy correspondence of Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Frank, the Jewish American daughter of a Hollywood producer . . . and Lore Petzka, a Catholic Viennese girl whose father suffered psychological wounds as a Nazi soldier on the Eastern front” (68). The unlikely friendship between these two caused Liz to explore “her anger about the war and [to clarify] . . . in her own mind the difference between civilians and leaders,” eventually resulting in Liz sending Lore honest letters about their varying political atmospheres (73).

Although Liz’s letters “referred to fascism and communism together as systems that hurt people,” she also “did not accept the rigid position that Americans were ‘better dead than red,’” writing in a letter to Lore in 1961 that “I would much rather live under communism than be dead” (74). The power of these letters, Helgren shows her...