A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960

by Abigail A. Van Slyck

Since they were first established in the 1880s, children’s summer camps have touched the lives of millions of people. Although the camping experience has a special place in the popular imagination, few scholars have given serious thought to this peculiarly American phenomenon. Why were summer camps created? What concerns and ideals motivated their founders? Whom did they serve? How did they change over time? What factors influenced their design?

To answer these and many other questions, Abigail A. Van Slyck trains an informed eye on the most visible and evocative aspect of camp life: its landscape and architecture. She argues that summer camps delivered much more than a simple encounter with the natural world. Instead, she suggests, camps provided a man-made version of wilderness, shaped by middle-class anxieties about gender roles, class tensions, race relations, and modernity and its impact on the lives of children.

Following a fascinating history of summer camps and a wide-ranging overview of the factors that led to their creation, Van Slyck examines the intersections of the natural landscape with human-built forms and social activities. In particular, she addresses changing attitudes toward such subjects as children’s health, sanitation, play, relationships between the sexes, Native American culture, and evolving ideas about childhood.

Generously illustrated with period photographs, maps, plans, and promotional images of camps throughout North America, A Manufactured Wilderness is the first book to offer a thorough consideration of the summer camp environment.

Genres: History, Architecture, Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting history or summer camps in America. I think it would have been good for the book to continue its review of summer camps to current times because I would be curious to know how much has changed or stayed the same and why. But it gives a good account of why summer camps were founded and the inherent social stratification, sexism, and racism of the camps.

[Mary Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really outstanding book about the history of summer camps. I only wish it had lasted longer.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abigail Van Slyck’s Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960 argues that the landscape and architecture of seasonal summer camp spaces reinforced gender norms, racial hierarchies, and cultural values of the dominant white Protestant American middle-class (224). Although summer camp promotional literature seemed to tie into other contemporary progressive calls for the virtues of a return to nature, the environments themselves reveal a trend toward a suburban rather than a rural setting. The title makes it clear that the “wilderness” is not in fact wild, but rather, it is “manufactured” like urban environments but in the guise of a rural setting. In this sense, as well as the Native American themes it appropriates from and obfuscates, Van Slyck’s interpretation of summer camp landscapes seems to echo the American response to Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis: by recreating the intersection between the savage and civilization, American values such as individuality, citizenship (at least within racially homogenous circles), and patriotism might be passed onto the future generation.

Thus, as summer camps were not just about returning to nature for nature’s sake, summer camps also formally structured American values of cultural assimilation. For male immigrants, summer camps gave boys a chance to engage in unstructured physical exercise away from their mothers—less they become “sissies” (xxii). For females, the first few decades of summer camps had unique gendered emphasis on domestic values like craftsmanship and tidy house management. Although a first look might leave one seeing lots of similarities between male and female summer camps—for example both had forms of crafts—the packaging and presentation of the �respective gendered camp activities reveal more nuanced agendas—“woodworking” to encourage male vocational skill development and “home crafts” to push women towards domestic beautification pursuits. While summer camp activities seemed to converge and close the gender gap more and more as time progressed, certain landscape features, like bathrooms and dining halls revealed continued differences. Whereas male bathrooms had communal, gang style sinks suggesting that they only needed to wash their faces and upper bodies, female bathrooms had individual shower stalls that not only promoted privacy and modesty but also suggested cultural attitudes toward menstrual periods (160, 166). Coupled with a close analysis of coded language to reveal the inclusion of incinerators in female bathrooms for sanitation napkins, Van Slyck does good detective work to reveal this taboo subject during the Victorian era and beyond. These subtle nuances between male and female landscapes reveal cultural values that otherwise go unspoken and thus unnoticed by historians.

With respect to race, Van Slyck addresses how Native American culture was used by camp planners and designers to reinforce white middle-class beliefs “that European Americans were the rightful inheritors of the North American continent or to bolted racial hierarchies that favored whites” (213). Similar to how Richard Stein discussed the normative dimension of the racialized landscapes in St. Louis and Kentucky, Van Slyck explains how “playing Indian” at summer camps around manufactured campfire circles, council rings, and tipis “helped support such racial hierarchies, even if they did so at something other than a conscious level” (213). Thus, despite the evidence expressing explicit, incriminating proof that these racial aims were deliberate on behalf of the summer camp organizers and manufacturers, Van Slyck successfully uses landscape analysis of summer camp plans and photographs to support her argument that could not be made in alternative methods and sources of constructing historical arguments.