In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Lessons from Camp.

Joy

It seems as though everything I encounter this week is a reminder than summer is coming to an end (well, except the weather. It’s 90 degrees outside. In Maine).

Whenever I think about summer, I think about camp. I was a camp person (I could write you a novel about camp and the difference between camp people and non-camp people, but This American Life did it so much better). It started when I was young, at sleep-away camp and continued into my teenage years with writing camp and French camp (read: nerd camp). In college I even served as a camp counselor.

Some of my fondest memories happened at sleep-away camp. I had my first kiss at camp, from a visiting Canadian boy (which potentially started my life-long fascination with Canada and the Canadian people). It was also one of my first memorable introductions to gender roles and expectations.

Sometimes people ask me if attending an all girls camp meant that we spent our time playing hopscotch instead of doing, “normal camp things.” My reply? Oh hell no.

Every few weeks we’d host our brother camps for series of intense camp competition. Sadly for the boys, they rarely won. As The Boston Globe recently noted, our camp’s record is nearly flawless. When those boys pull up to the gates of our camp, they’re prepared to lose. As young girls we expected to outperform the boys; a mentality many of us carried into adulthood.

For many it may be hard to pin-point the moment we start thinking about gender equality. For me, it started at camp. I spent my summers in a bubble with women who believed any of us could do whatever we wanted. Yes we learned wilderness skills and how to tie sailors knots, but we also learned about our own potential. I firmly believe that I entered camp as a little girl and left it as a young feminist.

I was lucky for my summer camp feminist awakening. It came to me at a young age and in a supportive environment. I’d like to hear about your awakening. When did you first start thinking about roles and your own feminism?

15 thoughts on Lessons from Camp.

  1. my awakening came at an early age and has followed me throughout life.

    i’m from the girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice while boys are made of snakes and snails and puppy dog tails era.

    folks tried hard back then to make sure women knew their place as well as men. our high school offered home economics for girls and wood/mechanic shop for boys.

    little things like this can set the wheels in motion for a lifetime of gender bias related to societal assertion that men do one thing and women do another.

  2. My most vivid memories of a childhood spent in various ‘sleep-away’ camps are the merciless bullying of anyone who was in the slightest way different.

  3. For the first link on camp, did you mean this one? http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/109/notes-on-camp

    As for awakenings, they have continued in waves throughout my life. My mom was good about exposing me to some feminist ideas at an early age and was probably the only person in my social network to do this. However, she doesn’t totally practice what she preaches, and seems more bent out of shape than anyone that I didn’t take my husband’s name. My grandmother was a good example of a strong independent woman with her own career, though I never knew her well.

    A lot of my public school teachers throughout the years (including grad school) were quite good–good enough to balance the bad ones.

    I never participated in sports or clubs/activities, as a kid or as an adult.

    In recent years, the internet and blogs like this one have been the instigator of many awakenings.

  4. For me, camp was a queer awakening. I went to CTY (a nerd camp) at the age of 13 with no exposure to queer people outside of a few caricatures on the Internet and TV. At camp, I met people of all different sexual and gender identities and met queer role models. My roommate identified as genderqueer, which kicked off my lifelong dedication to helping the trans community. All these experiences were invaluable to me when I came out a couple years later. My camp was a place where all expressions of gender and sexuality were possible.

  6. I learned there were rich kids with a lot more privilege than I had, who were sent by their parents every summer to stay at places behind gates where they wouldn’t meet kids from rural poverty.

    I was one of those people that city kids called hicks or hill billies. In the summer I worked on farms picking fruit and driving tractors. In the winter we ate deer my father shot, made meals from Surplus Food they handed out in the days before food stamps.

    Camps… Once or twice the our family and a couple of aunts and uncles rented a cabin for a couple of weeks.

    It is real privilege not to recognize the privilege money buys and how many do not have that privilege.

    Class War, not just for the rich anymore…

  7. errrrr —- who got to go to camp?

    What’s camp? Is that what the rich kids did? Did they actually get to go away to “the country”?

    Gee-golly, how neat that must have been.

    Does anyone understand how much privilege they had?

    I’m not saying you didn’t learn. I’m not saying it was not an important event, or series of events, in your life — I just want you to understand that many of us do not relate, cannot relate, and, I think, many of you do not understand it.

    Camp? Ohhh, camp! Trees and stuff — how neat that must have been for you.

    I was lucky after I was about 13 — my family was doing quite well, so they bought a little cottage out on Long Island — north of Riverhead. I got to go swimming every day and learned how to fish — a lifelong passion.

    Winning a New York State Regents Scholarship made it much easier to go to college — especially when Syracuse was giving full tuition to the winners (needless to say, I went to Syracuse U.)

    So, I’m not saying it was all hard, all a tough slog — but, I am aware of the PRIVILEGE I did have — and rarely forget it.

    I think we must all do the same — it does help understanding.

  8. @tinagrrl @Suzan Thanks for your comments. I’m the first to admit that I was privileged to have the experiences I had and that I certainly recognize that not everyone was sent away to camp for their summers.

    My point in the post was not to make camp a discussion topic, but more as a vehicle to convey when I started thinking about my own feminism. I’d love to hear about when you started discovering your own sense of feminism and what that meant to you.

    Erin, Roschelle and Jennifer — thanks so much for sharing your stories!

  9. Joy,
    I know that camp was only significant in your recognition of when you started thinking about feminism. I would just like to add that I attended camp several times during my childhood and every experience made me realize just how “capable” I was of doing things unheard of for women back in the late 70s, early 80s.

    We fished, cooked over camp fires that we made, went on scavenger hunts, learned to use compasses, hiked, kayaked. All of this was empowering for a young pre-teen girl, to say the least.

    With that being said I can also say I was not privileged. My mother work as a maid in the homes of those who were privileged.

    She often speaks of how she had to park her car on the side of the road in front of their homes and not in their driveway (an indication to all that she was a servant and not a guest).

    There was no privilege for me, a young black kid growing up in poverty in the south.

    Where is the significance of how “privilege” impacts when one’s feminist awakening occurs.

  10. The first glimmers of feminism came when I was told by my mother that I had to “understand” my father. He was the “adult”, and the source of most of the terror in our home — yet, I had to understand him. Occasionally stuff rolled downhill — my mother took out on me some of the rage she felt toward my father.

    I always asked, “why?” — always. This was not allowed. He, who was all powerful, and the strongest, seemed to only want a family “for show”. Something to roll out when “company” came.

    Women were always second class citizens in our immigrant households. My mother usually managed to get what she wanted — sometimes it took years, but she managed to manipulate him until he gave up. Usually it wasn’t anything fancy, anything luxurious, usually it was something necessary — some of the manipulations were truly world class.

    I wondered why that was necessary. I wondered why my mom, who fed us, clothed us, and saved all the money, had to virtually beg for things she knew we could afford.

    I had aunts and cousins who were very smart, very talented — and I wondered why all they wanted was to get married.

    I was a troublesome child.

  11. French Camp. Any chance that was one of Concordia Language Villages’ Lac Du Bois camps? I went for 4 different summers, including one final high school session. Nimes 2000! (okay, now I really look like a dork) It was a seminal experience for me in terms of realizing my own autonomy away from my parents and, yes, boys.

  13. Question: Did you go to Concordia Language Villages, aka Lac du Bois, for French Camp? Because I did as well (along with many other camps — including the “real” nerd camp, aka science camp). Camp also made me a feminist — at Lac du Bois, many of my counselors were feminist college students from all-women’s colleges (Smith, Bryn Mawr, etc.) and taught me what being a strong, intelligent, unique woman could look like. Viva la Camp!

  14. blue was my favorite color when i was very young- it was my first favorite color. when i was 3 or 4 my bedspread was light blue. one sister had a room that was all yellow, the other had a pink room and mine was blue. i picked out the color- it wasn’t something chosen for me. a friend down the street was leaving my house one day after we’d spent hours playing our games and while i don’t remember how it came up or what the conversation was i do remember- over 25 years later- that we stood at the top of the stairs with our mothers and she said to me, “blue can’t be your favorite color. girls like pink and boys like blue,” and i can see the scene exactly as i did that day. and i remember feeling sort of rebellious after that (and probably was before as well) when noting that i liked doing some things that seemed to be outside the pink category. i remember thinking, “i’ll like what i like and i won’t just like it because i’m supposed to like it!” and i remember being sure that i never did something just because i was a girl and that it was what i was supposed to do/ feel/ say/ enjoy…

    but i had great role models in my grandparents and great-grandparents. my grandfather did the cooking and cleaning and my grandmother was postmaster of the small, small town (that only in the past few years got a yellow caution/ flashing light- maybe one day it will have a stop light) and really did quite run things at the house. her parents lived two doors down and they were always, in my eyes, equals to one another without falling into stereotypical gender norms that seemed to otherwise surround me.

    these grandparents and great-grandparents lived closer to me than my other set of grandparents and i saw them at least once a week. my grandparents halfway across the country lived a very different sort life- my grandmother was at home cooking and raising children not out of choice (initially) but because it was what she was supposed to do for most of her life- starting at 14! and after her divorce in her 40’s she married a much older man who embodied the idea of being, “the man of the house,” and other concepts that have always felt absurd. he’d been a cowboy for goodness sake! as though he were more important than her because he was he!! i remember always seeing them and how they were together and how they were to others and how they behaved around those who were male or those who were female and in mixed crowds. i never liked him. he seemed really ridiculous and almost like a caricature or something. he didn’t like that i challenged things- that i didn’t accept him as an authority simply because he was he. it made me behave more rebelliously and be kind of over the top- that part i recall feeling and sensing in myself but not knowing why.

    i also remember seeing a difference between the two sides of my family and knowing that one was more like what i felt was right- for me at least. i think i had an awakening and it was followed by some pretty good reinforcement. looking back i can see the importance of all these things but at the time i don’t know that i really, truly understood. looking back- i’m thankful.

  15. Loved this! I attended and then worked at an all-girls camp for years. By the time I graduated high school, I don’t think I would have called myself a “feminist”, but I had learned, more than anything, that I could stand on my own two feet and take whatever challenges came my way.

    I’m sure some of my friends who stayed home or went to co-ed camps learned the same thing. Camp allowed me to create a web of lifelong friendships with girls who had helped me face my challenges and loved me even when I hadn’t showered in several days. I’m closer with these women now than the vast majority of girls I went to school with.

    All-girls camp also set the stage for me to attend a single sex college. When I was packing my bags for a women’s college, my high school friends informed me that I would be a lesbian by Christmas break.

    Single sex college was where I truly became a feminist, though it didn’t feel as though I was “becoming” anything. Rather, it seemed to me that I stayed the course – my self esteem and view of other women stayed high while I interacted with other strong, intelligent, vibrant women, while my peers at co-ed schools seemed to veer away from me, down a path where they conformed to the wishes of parents, society, and the men around them.

    It wasn’t any individual decision that they made – I support a woman’s right to be whatever she chooses, be that doctor, housewife, lawyer, Playboy bunny, waitress, professor, stripper, farmer, artist, pilot, or whatever. Rather, my co-ed school friends seemed to dim their bulbs, become milder and blander, while my women’s college classmates stayed the opinionated, rambunctious, I-can-do-anything-so-just-watch-me girls I remembered from my summers at camp.

Comments are currently closed.