Hetch Hetchy, American Girls, and the Nature of Conservation

Using girls’ scrapbooks and the publications of girls’ organizations, this paper examines American girls’ encounters with conservation in the early twentieth century. In 1919, a group of Camp Fire Girls trekked into Hetch Hetchy Valley, where they studied nature and learned about the damming project that would soon flood the valley. Their accounts reflect the language of the emerging conservation movement and echo John Muir's reverence for wilderness cathedrals. But they also celebrate O’Shaughnessy Dam as an engineering marvel and eagerly anticipate the valley's flooding. Building on Susan Schrepfer’s work on women in the conservation movement and Susan Miller’s research on girls’ camping, I argue that three factors explain the contradiction. First, girls’ organizations drew upon familiar ideas about women as nurturing helpmates. Befriending flora and fauna was an easy extension but a sentimental one. Second, girls’ programs paired nature study with “Indian lore,” elevating mythic “Indians” while ignoring the removal of Indigenous people from national parks. Third, girls’ citizenship was depoliticized because they learned little about the actual controversy and costs of damming the Tuolumne. The resulting environmental education let girls hold contradictions such as reverence for wilderness and enthusiasm for its flooding.