Photo Record
Images
Metadata
Title: |
Untitled - Dakotah Camp Fire Girls, Deadwood, South Dakota |
Date: |
1924 |
Description: |
(1) 5.0 x 7.0" photographic print of ten girls, some dressed in Native American dresses and beads. They are sitting and standing on the back of a vehicle with pine borrows attached to the deck. A sign that reads "DAKOTAH CAMP FIRE GIRLS" is attached to the side of the vehicle. This was a float during the 1924 Days of 76 celebration. In the background one can see Brown Rocks. Excerpt from The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980 by Jennifer Helgren. As the twentieth century dawned, progressive educators established a national organization for adolescent girls to combat what they believed to be a crisis of girls education. A corollary to the Boy Scouts of America, founded just a few years earlier, the Camp Fire Girls became America’s first and, for two decades, most popular girls’ organization. Based on Protestant middle-class ideals—a regulatory model that reinforced hygiene, habit formation, hard work, and the idea that women related to the nation through service—the Camp Fire Girls invented new concepts of American girlhood by inviting disabled girls, Black girls, immigrants, and Native Americans to join. Though this often meant a false sense of cultural universality, in the girls’ own hands membership was often profoundly empowering and provided marginalized girls spaces to explore the meaning of their own cultures in relation to changes taking place in twentieth-century America. |
Collection: |
2023.04 Crouch Family Collection |
Object Name: |
Print, Photographic |
Catalog Number: |
PHO.2023.04.19.1 |
Print size: |
5" x 7" |
Photographer: |
unknown |
Place |
Deadwood, South Dakota |