Hi there! If you’ve been following along on the blog, you’ve got a basic idea now of how I stumbled into this project. If not, go catch up! I’ll wait… Ok… so now you know that I want to find out more about the “She, She, She” camps of The Great Depression that were the women’s version of the CCC camps. To kick off Women’s History Month, let me share what I’ve figured out so far, in this, the first newsletter installment of She Camps History. Thanks for following along.
Let’s start with the name: the camps were founded in 1933-34 under the FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration), and called by the long title Federal Emergency Relief Association Resident Camps for Unemployed Women. Not very catchy, I know. One of the camp’s detractors mocked the camps with the “She, She, She” title in a news article, (a parody of the men’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) title), and the name stuck. It’s still a mouthful, so from now on if I refer to “The Camps” know this is what I mean. It’s also the reason I shortened it to just one SHE in my website title. She Camps (the She She She camps) or SHE camps (like me, that’s what I do: I camp, and I’m a she) moving on…
As part of FDR’s first 100 days in office, he appointed Harry Hopkins as director of the newly formed FERA, as Hopkins had successfully served under FDR when he was governor of NY, as the director of TERA (Temporary Emergency Relief Administration.) Hopkins, in turn, tasked journalist and close personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Lorena Hickok, to go out into the hardest hit communities across the country on a 10 week tour, and talk to Americans about how the Depression was affecting them, and to find out what the US government could do to help. What Hickok discovered was that while an estimated 16 million Americans were on “The Dole” by that time, overwhelmingly most people didn’t like accepting a handout, and preferred to do some kind of work to earn their money.1 This applied equally to both men and women existing on government aid.
Hopkins and Roosevelt quickly responded to these findings by establishing work programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS).Over the next decade, these programs would employ an enormous number of American men nationwide (3 million in the CCC alone.) In the meantime Eleanor Roosevelt and her friend Lorena Hickok kept up a steady stream of personal correspondence about what Hickok was seeing in her travels, resulting in what is now considered the best first hand account of the life circumstances of Americans during The Great Depression.2 Because of these letters, Eleanor went to FDR and pressed him to also “Remember the Ladies” very much the same way that Abigail Adams had urged John to do one hundred years earlier.
At Eleanor’s urging, FDR and Hopkins created the first FERA Resident Camp for Unemployed Women at Bear Mountain, NY at an employee camp belonging to the NY Life Insurance Company. Initially known as camp TERA (later renamed Camp Jane Addams), it would become the model upon which the other 90+ camps would be based. One of the challenges of the program would be that while it did have support at the federal level, there was very little money set aside for the program. Camps, therefore, were created in depression-shuttered hotels and camps, in existing schools, or at former CCC and WPA camps after those companies had moved on to other projects.3
Despite Hickok’s insistence that the women wanted to earn their keep, there were several inherent flaws to the program from the beginning. First, while director Hilda W. Smith was a skilled workers educator, her utopian ideals based on her earlier success at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers4 were not a good fit for the street hardened working class women who found themselves at the camps. “The girls” as they were repeatedly called came expecting to work, and to be trained in job skills that would better equip them to re-enter the workforce when their time at camp was finished. Instead they were enrolled in what amounted to a finishing school, with classes like reading, theater, arts, writing, and homemaking skills. There was no money to pay them during their stay, so camp organizers hoped to educate them into better citizens to be sure they knew that responsibility came with their newly minted right to vote. The second issue was the aforementioned lack of funding, and third, the program’s detractors pointed out that the women weren’t earning their keep, but in the program’s inception it was determined that they were unable to do the heavy work the men in the camps were doing, as it was unsuitable to ladies. Ultimately, the program was doomed to failure from this double standard.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that over the five years that the camps were operational, they assisted over 8000 women who were otherwise homeless, hungry, and desperate enough to turn to prostitution as a way to make money. Even if the program was flawed, it is still a valuable part of our story as Americans; that these women were out of work, and did provide services such as sewing clothes for the camps, making bandages for the red cross, provided local childcare, and some were actually trained in clerical and business skills that would be pressed into service in the 40s when the men of America left to fight in WWII.
Now, for me, the fun part begins. I am going to keep researching the camps and finding the names of the actual women from the camps; who they were, how they got there, and where they went when they left. I look forward to sharing their stories, and hope that you will enjoy reading about them as much as I am enjoying the journey of discovering them. I intend to find and visit as many of these sites as possible, and hope to work with local and federal historical societies and museums to get monuments or plaques placed at the sites so that we too can “remember the ladies.”
~Maybe I’ll see you out there~
Shari
Bibliography:
Golay, Michael. America 1933: the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of the New Deal. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2016.
Kornbluh, Joyce L. “The She- She- She Camps: An Experiment in Living and Learning, 1934-1937".” In Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers’ Education for Women, 1914-1984, edited by Kornbluh, Joyce L. and Frederickson Mary by Cobble Dorothy Sue, 253-84. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Accessed February 16, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv6mtdfq.14.
Golay, Michael. America 1933: the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of the New Deal'. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2016.
Ibid.
Kornbluh, Joyce L. “The She- She- She Camps: An Experiment in Living and Learning, 1934-1937".” In Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers’ Education for Women, 1914-1984, edited by Kornbluh, Joyce L. and Frederickson Mary by Cobble Dorothy Sue, 253-84. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Accessed February 16, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv6mtdfq.14.
Ibid.