Native American and White Camp Fire Girls Enact Modern Girlhood, 1910–39

In 1910 leaders of a national US girls’ organization, the Camp Fire Girls, used feminine American Indian imagery to enhance the nation’s racial health through a gender-specific adolescent development theory. Focusing on the Native American and white girls who joined the organization, this study shows that girls used American Indian imagery in generationally and racially unique ways to articulate their own concepts of serious, capable modern femininity. Native American Camp Fire Girls laid claim to inclusion in a national girls’ culture even as they used the organization’s Indian lore to investigate their heritage and explore hybrid identities. Through mimicry white Camp Fire Girls explored racial and sexual identities that were carefully bounded within symbolic spaces. Camp Fire Girls history reflects the development of the racialized nation, and girls shaped that history in complex ways.