The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century

Although summer camps profoundly impact children, they have received little attention from scholars. The well-known Farm & Wilderness (F&W) camps, founded in 1939 by Ken and Susan Webb, resembled most other private camps of the same period in many ways, but F&W also had some distinctive features. Campers and staff took pride in the special ruggedness of the surrounding environment, and delighted in the exceptional rigor of the camping trips and the work projects. Importantly, the Farm & Wilderness camps were some of the first private camps to become racially integrated.The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century traces these camps, both unique and emblematic of American youth culture of the twentieth century, from their establishment in the late 1930s to the end of the twentieth century. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson explore how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured by the camps to respond to shifts in culture and society as well as to new understandings of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual identity. To illustrate this change, the authors draw on over forty interviews with former campers, archival materials, and their own memories. This book tells a story of progressive ideals, crises of leadership, childhood challenges, and social adaptation in the quintessential American summer camp.

Author: Emily K. Abel, Margaret K. Nelson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 12/15/2023
Pages: 172
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.63lbs
ISBN: 9781978836631

About the Author
EMILY K. ABEL is professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health. She is the author of many books including Prelude to Hospice: Florence Wald, Dying People, and their Families (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Elder Care in Crisis: How the Social Safety Net Fails Families.

MARGARET K. NELSON is A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emerita of Sociology at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. Most recently she is the author of Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s.

Together, they have also authored Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children's Nurse in a Northern White Household.