Finding “Hidden Heroines”

This article explores girls’ participation in 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial celebrations through their national organizations. Members of the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls were deeply involved in the nation’s displays of civic pride. Girls’ organizations linked their ordinary service projects to the Bicentennial and created new projects as they caught the national bandwagon. To some extent, these efforts emphasized unquestioning patriotism, but each organization, propelled by second-wave feminism and social history, also absorbed and advanced efforts to recover multiple perspectives. Girls’ organizations became public history spaces and girls in them saw the understanding of and dissemination of history as an important part of female citizenship.

Liberalizing the Campground

This chapter looks at how the inexpensive automobile extended camping to the mass of middle-and working-class Americans. During the 1920s, some African Americans, like their white counterparts, had grown wealthier and embraced a variety of short and extended recreations, including such nature-based activities as relaxing at the beach, swimming, picnicking, fishing, hiking, participating in the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, enrolling at summer camps, and family camping. However, when several new national parks opened in southern states during the 1930s, the campgrounds were racially segregated. For one African American, William J. Trent, Jr., this was unacceptable, and he waged a long and often lonely campaign to officially desegregate all national park campgrounds.

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How did I come to be both an artist and a librarian? From the start, I never wanted to support myself with my art. Way back then my art was private. In order for the work to be true, it was best protected from the whims of the market. And since I had to work, I might as well contribute to the common weal, and do nothing that could harm the social fabric. After several years of experimenting with social work, sales, bookkeeping, cocktail waitressing, organizing Camp Fire Girls, census-taking, and other sundry occupations, it was finally librarianship that demanded the most of my top-notch liberal arts education and my desire to do good in a world so complex that it was often impossible to know what was good from what was not.