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Life without Conventionality: American Social Reformers as Summer Campers on Lake Memphremagog, Quebec, 1878–19051

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

J. I. Little
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University

Extract

Historians have interpreted the rise of the wilderness holiday movement in the late nineteenth century as a middle-class response to the belief that modern urban life was leading to social degeneracy. The increasingly popular boys' camps, in particular, are said to represent a conservative reaction against the feminization of society. But the summer camp established by the Barrows family on the Canadian shores of Lake Memphremagog does not fit this mold. Rather, it was a semi-utopian environment in which prominent American social reformers felt free to apply their progressive ideals, with increased gender equality being at the forefront.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2010

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References

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3 Barrows, Samuel J. and Barrows, Isabel C., The Shaybacks in Camp: Ten Summers Under Canvas (Boston, 1888), 56.Google Scholar This book was part of the Out-Door Books series published by Hough-ton, Mifflin and Company, which included the works of authors such as Thoreau and Emerson. See Lupfer, Eric, “Before Nature Writing: Houghton, Mifflin and Company and the Invention of the Outdoor Book, 1800–1900,” Book History 4 (2001): 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lupfer argues that for this series the editors placed a particularly high priority on literary quality, targeting a genteel market above all. Shaybacks in Camp had gone out of print by 1898. Isabel Barrows to June Barrows, June 26, 1898, Barrows Family Papers (hereafter BFP), ser. 1:32, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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38 Among the many people who lived for a time in the Barrows home were Isabel's “invalid” sister, who was in charge of the household duties; a German nurse who had cared for the children and remained with the family even after they had grown up; and a woman who moved in to take charge of daughter Mabel's violin lessons; see Barrows, I., “Chopped Straw,” 254–55Google Scholar, 258, 268–69.

39 Isabel's reminiscence is less critical of her lack of a salary than of the fact that her female successor at the newspaper accepted one even though she was from a wealthy family. Barrows, I., “Chopped Straw,” 188Google Scholar, 265.

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43 Isabel Barrows was Breshkovsky's chief supporter when she traveled to the United States in 1904 and after to publicize her country's oppressive policies. See Blackwell, Alice Stone, ed., The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution: Reminiscences and Letters of Catherine Breshkovsky (Boston, 1919), 125–29Google Scholar, 134–35, 142, 143–44, 151–52, 172, 188, 190, 212, 223–26, 242–48, 261.

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49 The copy in the GHS provides no source information, but this story, dated Sept. 11, 1890, is one of a series titled “The Shaybacks in Camp.” Judging from the point size and font, this article could have been published either in the Christian Register or the Woman's Journal, but the former is more likely given Barrowses' past association with the newspaper.

50 Hayes, Elinor Rice, Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone, 1818–1893 (New York, 1961), 298300Google Scholar; DuBois, Ellen Carol, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, 1978), 163.Google Scholar In her biography of her mother, Alice Stone Blackwell wrote that Lucy Stone had secretly asked Isabel Barrows “to try to draw me out into wider and more varied interests” because “she did not want my life to be so completely absorbed in [the suffrage cause] as hers had been.” Blackwell, Alice Stone, Lucy Stone, Pioneer of Woman's Rights (Boston, 1930), 272.Google Scholar

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61 Aron, , Working at Play, 174–75.Google Scholar

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63 Barrows, and Barrows, , Shaybacks in Camp, 157.Google Scholar Feminism is one Barrows cause that Smith's Three in a Camp does not openly promote, though the girls do swim, row boats, and hike. In an interesting commentary on women's costume, the boys level the playing field, so to speak, by wearing skirts and playing with only one arm in a baseball game against the girls. Three in a Camp, 243–57.

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65 Blackwell, “Women in Camp.”

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69 Hains, D.D., “Greek Plays in America,” The Classical Journal 6 (Oct. 1910): 2627Google Scholar, 34–35; “The Presentation of Classical Plays,” part 2, The Classical Journal 9 (Mar. 1914): 258. Mabel also wrote a five-act pantomime of Greek life to be staged by a group of “society women” in Elizabeth, New Jersey. “People With Ideas.” Her only work with a contemporary theme appears to have been the songs and music she wrote for her father's play, “The Beacon Street Tramp,” presented in Boston in 1894 by the Shayback Campers for the Massachusetts Prison Association. Barrows, Samuel June, The Beacon Street Tramp (n.p., 1894)Google Scholar, manuscript copy in BFP, ser. 10:18. The Georgeville Historical Society has a playbill for the May 12, 1894 performance of “The Beacon Steet Tramp” in Copley Hall, Grundmann Studios, Boston, as well as playbills for a number of Isabel's Greek drama productions.

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79 The Barrowses adopted William Burnet Hayes as an infant after his mother died of cholera in Kansas in 1886.

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88 Putney, , Muscular Christianity, 109Google Scholar; Smith, , “Camp by the Cliff,” ch. 2, pp. 68.Google Scholar The Bar-rowses had built the Birchbay camp when they and two other families purchased and divided a lakeside farm in 1890, after they had been asked to leave their original campsite. They returned to that campsite in 1898 when Isabel purchased the farm on which Cedar Lodge was located. Smith, , “Camp by the Cliff,” ch. 4, p. 10Google Scholar; Barrows, I., Sunny Life, 131.Google Scholar

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95 Mussey, Mabel Hay Barrows, Social Hymns of Brotherhood and Aspiration (New York, 1914).Google Scholar According to George Cotkin, American thinkers of this era believed that “between the precipice of modernity and the certitude of Victorian ideals lay a comforting middle ground.” Cotkin, , Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (New York, 1992), 153.Google Scholar

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97 While at the Barrows-Mussey wedding, Stokes became informally engaged to the former “factory girl,” Rose Pastor of the Jewish Daily News, though their marriage would end when she became an outspoken opponent of World War I and a member of the Communist Party. On Stokes and Pastor, see “I Belong to the Working Class”: The Unfinished Autobiography of Rose Pastor Stokes, ed. Herbert Shapiro and David L. Sterling (Athens, GA, 1992); and Zipser, Arthur and Zipser, Pearl, Fire and Grace: The Life of Rose Pastor Stokes (Athens, GA, 1990).Google Scholar

98 This study established a model for sociological investigation, stimulating national movements for housing reform, worker's compensation, and the elimination of the twelve-hour day in the steel industry. See the entry on Kellogg by Chambers, Clarke A. in the Dictionary of American Biography, suppl. 6, 1956–60.Google Scholar For a recent, critical assessment, see Stromquist, , Reinventing “The People,” 46Google Scholar, 88–90, 98–101, 163, 178–82.

99 On Davis, see Pumphrey, Ralph E., “Michael M. Davis and the Development of the Health Care Movement, 1900–1928,” Societas-A Review of Social History 2 (Winter 1972): 2741.Google Scholar

100 Smith, , “Camp by the Cliff,” ch. 3, p. 16.Google Scholar

101 See Little, “Scenic Tourism.”

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103 Isabel Barrows was still at the camp, but failing in health in 1912. Smith, , “Camp by the Cliff,” ch. 4, pp. 1112Google Scholar; ch. 5, pp. 1, 6; ch. 6, p. 5.

104 Lupfer, , “Before Nature Writing,” 178–79Google Scholar, 195–96.

105 Barrows, and Barrows, , Shaybacks in Camp, 45.Google Scholar

106 Barrows, I., Sunny Life, 126–27.Google Scholar In 1898, Isabel wrote that there had been “about three hundred persons” at the camp. Barrows, I., “Summer Camping in the Woodland,” 738.Google Scholar

107 Blackwell, Alice Stone, “A Sunday in Camp,” Woman's Journal, Sept. 6, 1902.Google Scholar

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109 Kimmel, , “Consuming Manhood,” 52.Google Scholar

110 “A Summer School of Languages,” Christian Register, Sept. 18, 1890.

111 Barrows, I., “Summer Camping in the Woodland,” 732.Google Scholar On neurasthenia, see Jasen, , Wild Things, 107–11.Google Scholar

112 On progressivism as a middle-class utopian movement, see McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York, 2003).Google Scholar

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