The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Anitmodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-1955 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Anitmodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-1955 Katharine Rollwagen Wall, Sharon — The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Anitmodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-1955. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010. Pp. 369. Sharon Wall's recent history of the summer camp movement in Ontario may leave the reader with difficulty remembering the correct title — is it The Nurture of Nature or The Nature of Nurture? After reading Wall's study the reader will learn that the title could, in fact, be either. The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, [End Page 486] Anitmodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-1955 examines both the ways in which being "in nature" was seen as beneficial to an increasingly urban population and the ways in which understandings of child development and the purpose of childhood changed during this period. The latter aspect is the focus of this review. Although Wall's study is published by the "Nature/History/ Society" series of the University of British Columbia Press, it has as much to offer to historians of childhood and youth as it does to environmental scholars. Wall's past research focuses mainly on young people's cultures and experiences; "nature" here provides a useful lens through which to examine an increasingly common and influential childhood experience during the middle decades of the twentieth century. In six chapters, Wall reveals the complex ties between nature and childhood manifest in Ontario's fledgling camping movement. Wall focuses most of her narrative on elite private camps and non-profit "Fresh Air" camps, but also includes church-run camps such as the Canadian Girls in Training (CGIT) programme. She limits her study to Ontario, where, she contends, Canada's camping movement was most active in the years between the First and Second World Wars. Her analysis is based on camp archives, the personal papers of camp directors, and published literature, as well as 32 interviews with former campers. The interviews corroborate Wall's arguments and provide colourful anecdotes, but this is not an oral history of campers' experiences. Wall is much more interested in camp directors' ideas and actions and, specifically, in the ways that camps reproduced a class-based social hierarchy. Ontario's camp movement, she insists, was "fundamentally class-segregated" (p. 64). Wall demonstrates clearly that the division between private and charity camps was more significant than one's ability to pay fees. Wealth shaped camps' locations, size, architecture, amenities, staff, programmes, and, ultimately, their impact. For example, Wall demonstrates convincingly that conceptions of nature were shaped by classist assumptions. Private camps, staffed and run mainly by the camp's alumni, were designed to give their clients a much more untamed view of nature than charity-based camps. Private campers learned that "wilderness" was waiting to be conquered; it was a commodity to be consumed. Their camps' locations, far from any centre of habitation, gave them elite status. Only wealthy children could pay to get there (usually by train, then bus, then boat), and they usually stayed at camp for the entire school holiday period. On the other hand, charity camps were run by middle-class do-gooders who saw their working-class clients as already sufficiently "wild" and perhaps in need of a little taming. Fresh air camps, as they were otherwise known, were by necessity located close to the city, but their rural, idyllic settings also promoted a more middle-class appreciation of cultivated nature than the isolated forests and lakes of private camps. The wealthier children in private camps were "roughing it," while the poorer children in charity camps often found better conditions at camp — indoor plumbing, for example — than they had at home. Wall provides sufficient evidence to suggest that class shaped campers' experiences as much as — or more than — gendered or racial ideologies. While camp [End Page 487] programming differed for girls and boys at all camps in the interwar years, the dichotomy between programming at private camps verses fresh air camps was greater. For example, camp directors sought to "make men" out of their male clients. At private camps, this meant exposing boys to activities that would make them physically tough and morally refined. In a...