American girls and global responsibility: a new relation to the world during the early Cold War

234 Pages·2017·1.855 MB·English

by  Helgren, Jennifer

American Girls and Global Responsibility

American Girls and
Global Responsibility
A New Relation to the World
during the Early Cold War
JENNIFER HELGREN
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Helgren, Jennifer, 1972– author.
Title: American girls and global responsibility : a new relation to
the world during the early Cold War / Jennifer Helgren.
Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press,
[2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016025800| ISBN 9780813575797 (cloth) | ISBN
9780813575810 (ePub) | ISBN 9780813575827 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Teenage girls—P olitical activity— United States— History— 20th
century. | Youth— Political activity— United States— History— 20th century. | Girls—
United States— Societies and clubs— History— 20th century. | Sex role— Political
aspects— United States— History— 20th century. | Responsibility— Political aspects—
United States— History— 20th century. | Citizenship— United States— History—
20th century. | Internationalism— Social aspects— United States— History— 20th
century. | Cold War— Social aspects— United States— History. | United States— Foreign
relations— 1945– 1953. | United States— Foreign relations— 1953– 1961. | BISAC: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Women’s Studies. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | POLITICAL
SCIENCE / Public Policy / Cultural Policy. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Children’s Studies.
Classification: LCC HQ798 .H437 2017 | DDC 320.40835—d c23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025800
A British Cataloging- in- Publication record for this
book is available from the British Library.
Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Helgren
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers
University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only
exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1 992.
www .rutgersuniversitypress .org
Manufactured in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Introduction: “Encouraging Friendships
between the Girls of All Nations” 1
1 “What Kind of World Do You Want?”: Preparing
Girls for Peace and Tolerance in the Atomic Age 20
2 “Hello, World, Let’s Get Together”: Building Global
Conversations through Pen Pals and Aid Packages 57
3 “Famous for Its Cherry Blossoms”: Reimagining
Japan and Germany in the Postwar Period 82
4 “Playing Foreign Shopper”: Consuming Internationalism 101
5 “We Hand the Communists Powerful Propaganda
Weapons to Use against Us”: Defending Global
Citizenship during the Post– World War II Red Scare 125
Epilogue: The “Watchers of the Skies” 157
Acknowledgments 165
Notes 167
Index 213
v

American Girls and Global Responsibility

Introduction
“Encouraging Friendships between the Girls of All Nations”
T
eenagers, especially teenage girls, have often been regarded as frivolous.
Few have considered them worthy of weighty issues such as citizenship and
international diplomacy. Teenage girls have begged to differ. In 1947, a Mis-
souri girl offended by the way the popular girls’ magazine Seventeen depicted
her peers wrote to the editors to complain: “You say your stories depict typi-
cal teen- agers. If so, heaven help us! You make us sound like heathenish
creatures with no thought beyond boys and clothes. Actually, we’re interested
in the world crisis, international relations, labor situations, racial and reli-
gious tolerance and political affairs, and many of our hen parties are spent
in discussing these very things.”1 American Girls and Global Responsibility takes
the Missouri teen seriously and argues that a new internationalist citizenship
role for girls took root in the United States in the years following World War II
in girls’ organizations such as the Camp Fire Girls, the Girl Scouts, and the
Y-Teens of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA); in schools; and
in magazines like Seventeen.
This book examines the post–W orld War II lessons about world friendship
and peace that appeared in mainstream girls’ organizations as educators and
youth leaders sought to reduce conflict in the atomic age and contribute to
an image of the United States as a benevolent global leader. Despite the asso-
ciation with frivolity, adults did identify girls with the work of building inter-
national friendships. President Harry S. Truman congratulated the Camp Fire
Girls on their fortieth anniversary in 1950, calling on girls to play a broader role
in advancing world friendship. “The task of stimulating international goodwill
does not fall to adults alone,” he declared. “The vigor and inspiration of young
people who will face tomorrow’s problems are also required.”2
1
2 INTRODUCTION
Youth organizations, schools, and media had already initiated the foreign
aid, pen pal exchanges, and education about the United Nations that Truman
invited. The 1945 Camp Fire project, “Make Democracy Mine,” emphasized
intercultural and international understanding. The Girl Scouts of the USA dedi-
cated their first anniversary celebration after the war to “world citizenship” and
asked girls and leaders to “build world friendship and peace” through specific
projects to rehabilitate war-t orn areas.3 Schoolchildren and youth organization
members wrote to pen pals, participated in “sister- school” and “sister- club”
affiliations, and read about the United Nations and girls in other parts of the
world in Seventeen and youth organization periodicals. As one historian writes,
no mainstream “school or club program was complete without at least one
United Nations or world- affairs event.”4
Adults urged young people to learn about and actively shape the postwar
world they were inheriting, and many young people in the 1940s and 1950s took
this charge seriously. As Truman’s words show, youth internationalism—t he
awareness of the interconnectedness of people globally, knowledge of dif-
ferent cultures, duty to those beyond national borders, and international
cooperation— carried broad adult support, from the president of the United
States to youth organizers and many in between. As part of the nation’s new-
found global leadership, adults taught girls and boys about U.S. strength and
privilege and the duty of the country’s young people to foster world friendship.
Internationalist youth culture, mainstream U.S. educational goals, and the U.S.
government converged to create and market the internationalist girl citizen.
Part of the growing exploration of the ways that Cold War politics and
American culture were intertwined in the 1940s and 1950s, this book sheds new
light on how age and gender work together to form categories of citizenship
and their intersection with foreign diplomacy. Girls’ studies has examined the
gender contradictions of the postwar period, illuminating how girls were pulled
between traditional claims of the family and eventual marriage as embodied in
the feminine mystique and the lure of careers, consumer culture, and their peer
culture’s claims to teen independence.5 Scholars, however, are just beginning
to explore the ways that foreign relations have been the province of children
and youth.6 In peace studies, research acknowledges youth involvement in non-
violent action and peace education programs and extends the field’s simplistic
model in which boys figure as perpetrators of violence and girls appear as its
victims.7 Important studies by historians Naoko Shibusawa and Sara Fieldston
focus on familial metaphors as well as children’s images of dependence to
show how “pre existing ideologies about gender and maturity” play a role in
foreign relations. Such images “made it easier [for Americans] to humanize
the Japanese” after World War II and offer benevolent aid to a dependent in