“Meeting the Needs of Today’s Girl”: Youth Organizations and the Making of a Modern Girlhood, 1945-1980 By Jessica L. Foley B.B.A., College of William and Mary, 2001 A.M., Brown University, 2005 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Jessica L. Foley This dissertation of Jessica L. Foley is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Mari Jo Buhle, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date Robert O. Self, Reader Date Richard A. Meckel, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Jessica L. Foley was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on October 31, 1979. She attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she earned a B.B.A. in Finance with a double concentration in History in 2001. In 2005, she received an A.M. in History from Brown University, where she specialized in women’s history and the social and cultural history of twentieth-century America. Her dissertation research was primarily funded by Brown University and by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women. She has taught at Brown University and Bristol Community College, and has served as a teaching assistant in courses on the history of the United States at Brown. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest gratitude goes to everyone who has helped to make this project a reality. I would first like to acknowledge and thank the primary funders of this dissertation. Brown University has been extremely generous in providing me with financial support that allowed me to work on my research and writing without excessive teaching responsibilities. Thank you also to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women, which supported me in the early stages of my dissertation and smoothed my transition from Providence to Boston. I would also like to extend my appreciation to the archivists who processed, and then helped me to navigate, the many hundreds of linear feet of records these organizations collected and preserved. Thank you to the Sophia Smith Collection staff at Smith College, and to Maida Goodwin in particular, for fielding numerous research requests and for answering frequent questions about the collections. Yevgeniya Gribov’s cheerful assistance at the Girl Scout National Historic Preservation Center in Manhattan made my frequent trips to New York efficient and productive. Ellen Shea, Lynda Leahy, Sarah Hutcheon, and the rest of the staff at the Schlesinger Library were always ready to lend a hand and made my days in Cambridge extremely pleasant. At Brown, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by a number of intelligent, talented and dedicated faculty members. Many thanks go to Mari Jo Buhle, who has seen this project through from start to finish. I am grateful to be a part of the long and illustrious list of scholars she has mentored, and I have benefitted tremendously from her incisive criticism, her intellectual acuity, and her ability to discern what is progress and v what is procrastination. Robert Self has been an important mentor to me over the years. His initial enthusiasm for this project came at a crucial moment, and his editorial deftness has made me a better thinker and a better writer. I can only hope to someday be half the reader he is. Richard Meckel contributed a wealth of knowledge about the history of childhood and youth that has enriched the final product. As every graduate student knows, writing a dissertation can be a lonely and isolating endeavor that often seems without end. For keeping those feelings at bay, my dissertation writing group deserves the greatest thanks. To Lara Couturier, Natalina Earls, Nicole Eaton, Chris Jones, Paige Meltzer, and Stacie Taranto – your company and good humor have helped me to keep it all in perspective, a difficult feat. I owe a special debt to Paige, who has been unfailingly generous with her intellect, her friendship, and her willingness to go first. The consummate scout, she has saved me from a hundred missteps by forging ahead and then reporting back, and I am grateful to her for her guidance. I received helpful comments from a number of others who deserve thanks for reading draft chapters of the dissertation, including Gabe Rosenberg and Mark Robbins. And finally, thank you to my friends and family, all of whom make me laugh every day. Thank you to my parents, George and Johanna, for their unwavering love and confidence in me and for raising me to believe in my choices. Thank you to Peter and Virginia for my second home in Rhode Island, for countless dinners on the back porch, and for untold hours of dogwatching. And finally, to Colin, who has been my constant friend – I don’t have the words to thank you for how you have supported me in every imaginable way. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One Introduction 1 Chapter Two “Never Has the Job Been More Strategic or Vital”: Democratic Education, 48 Citizenship, and the Promises of Postwar Girls’ Organizations Chapter Three “To Rid Teenagers of Prejudice”: Integrating the Y-Teens and the 100 Girl Scouts in the Era of Brown v. Board Chapter Four Interpreting the Home in Its Broadest Sense: The Contradictions 155 of Girlhood in Postwar America Chapter Five From Maternalism to Feminism: Girls’ Organizations in the 1970s 199 Chapter Six Conclusion 258 Bibliography 271 vii INTRODUCTION “We need to constantly remember that everyday life always intrudes on politics, always intermeshes with it, always constitutes the background for it. When we forget that, we lose the very substance of reality and politics.”1 This project began, in a sense, at the steps of the Cambridge, Massachusetts YWCA at 7 Temple Street, which, in keeping with the YWCA’s purpose, currently houses the feminist literary organization Center for New Words. The mission of the Center for New Words is, “To use the power and creativity of words to strengthen the voice of progressive women and women speaking from the margins of society.”2 In carrying out its mission, the Center sustains and supports female writers and performers by providing a physical and psychological space in the community where they can share their work and their ideas with a receptive audience and develop as expressive individuals. To that end, the Center sponsors weekly open mic nights, readings, lectures, social gatherings, poetry contests, conferences, writing workshops, and a monthly book group. The Center works to engage with the voices of women who come to feminism from a variety of perspectives and identities, including women of color, lesbian, 1 Levine, Larry, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 149. 2 Center for New Words, “About Us,” http://www.centerfornewwords.org/about_us/ (accessed November 29, 2009). 1 transgender, and bisexual women, those afflicted by poverty, and women representing a variety of religions and ethnic cultures. The Center for New Words grew out of “New Words, A Women’s Bookstore,” founded in Cambridge in 1974 a mere two blocks from the Boston Women’s Community Health Center and the women’s restaurant Bread & Roses. The bookstore was the brainchild of Rita Arditti, Gilda Bruckman, Mary Lowry, and Jean MacRae, a group of women engaged with the ideas and the politics of the women’s liberation movement who were inspired by the movement’s public celebration of women’s voices and women’s culture. New Words Bookstore was part of a broader cultural awakening in the 1970s brought on by the women’s liberation movement, when hundreds of feminist bookstores and feminist presses opened around the country by groups of women who wished to celebrate and disseminate the writings of women from all historical periods. The bookstore, out of which the Center for New Words evolved, cast itself as a “critical community focal point for political organizing, feminist discussion groups, self-help groups, and cultural programming,” all activities associated with the “personal is political” mantra of the women’s liberation movement.3 Throughout the years, the bookstore merged its literary function with education, hosting readings by numerous notable women who bridged the boundaries between activism, creative writing, journalism, and academe, including Gloria Steinem, Audre Lord, Adrienne Rich, Robin Morgan, Lillian Faderman, Wendy Wasserstein, Blanche Wiesen Cooke, Grace Paley, and Julia Alvarez. 3 Center for New Words, “Our History,” http://www.centerfornewwords.org/about_us/history.php (accessed November 29, 2009). 2 I arrived at the Center for New Words to interview the Executive Director, Janet Kniffin, about her experiences as a young Girl Scout, and, later in life, as the special projects director with the Connecticut Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, the president of the Hartford YWCA Board of Directors, and a communications and development officer with the Connecticut Valley Girl Scout Council. One of the first stories she relayed to me was the tale of an event held at the New Words Bookstore in its early years. The event had been inspired by Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party art installation, which premiered in San Francisco in 1979. Chicago’s exhibit (now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum) featured a triangular table set as if for a banquet, with 39 place settings reserved to commemorate significant women, both real and mythical, in the canon of Western history. On each woman’s place setting sat an arrangement of images and symbols related to the woman’s life, work, or historical memory.