There was a Camp Fire Girls novel at my grandparents' when I was small, and I don't know how many times I read it -- it was a perfect story for a young girl, with a lot of the plot devoted to practicing skills and courage, and a little bit of improbable events and grown-up social obligations. I'm sure it has formed my whole understanding of women and modernity; Alcott's Little Women had many of the same rhetorical ideals that the Camp Fire girls did (Work, Health and Love) but even Jo didn't achieve the independence that the Camp Fire novels were describing a generation later.
For those of you who haven't read any: the Camp Fire Girls coalesced from 1910 to the 1920s, hot on the heels of the Boy Scouts; there are relations by siblinghood or marriage between the YMCA and the American Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls (and the authors of The American Boy's Handy Book and The American Girls Handy Book). The CFG practiced artistic, academic and domestic skills, but the books -- and the imagery -- concentrate on actual time camping, just girls in the woods, with their Guardians. I don't know what earlier group managed as much freedom for women. (Some camps clearly had a male manager; often they were run by a married couple.) Entire novels (How Ethel Hollister Became a Camp Fire Girl) concentrate on how a girl persuades her family to let her do something so shocking and newfangled. One of the common arguments is that a girl as competent as a Camp Fire girl will be a better wife and mother, but in the Fire they definitely value independence for itself.
A lot of the stories have girls escaping, or rescuing each other, from True Crime dangers. Camp Fire girls can outsmart dangers that innocent or flirting girls run into.
For instance, Bessie is pursued by someone who is going to 'adopt' her and keep her imprisoned as a farmhouse-laborer, if only he can get her across a state line. The innocent must have felt this as an exaggeration of the fear of doing nothing but housework, with no respect; the less innocent, as fear of kidnapping for sexual purposes ('across state lines'); I kept reading it as a memory of the slave/free states, when state lines meant that much for many.
That plot was in the middle of a continuum from realistic troubles to plots that would do Mary Pickford proud. I liked the plot in The Torch Bearer of a very, very timid girl, never praised or helped at home, earning her first health honor by walking to the nearest hamlet and back; but she has to walk past a settlement of the poor, who jeer at her as she cringes past them on the way; but, arriving at her goal, she gains courage, and on the way back they shout something friendly. Was it jaded tastes that eventually required 'heiress kidnapped and held in a lakeside tower' (The Camp Fire Girls at SchoolM) or 'gypsies kidnap good girls for ransom' (The Camp Fire Girls at Long Lake). Eventually Camp Fire Girls serve in the Red Cross, and build wireless stations, and fly planes; I haven't read The Banner Campfire Girls as Federal Investigators, but there is explicit overlap with the Nancy Drew series. The Campfire Girls of Roselawn doesn't seem to have any organized Camp Fire girls in it, which might be why it doesn't occur to the girl chums to rescue a girl being forced into a car until it is professionally important to a lawyer.
The most annoying trope is how much racism gets built in to balance, I think, the radical feminism. The first infuriating thing is that the Camp Fires were very explicitly using Native American -- they say Indian -- imagery, costume, even language, with a lot of cod-Longfellow poetry; but it could not be more clear that there aren't any actual Native Americans there. One of the better novels opens with a canoer saying to herself "It sounds like an Indian call, but I'm sure those were not Indian voices." There are references in the more egalitarian novels to 'girls of every shade of complexion', but I'm pretty sure those are shades of European. Of course, in the 1910s, it was liberal to accept working immigrant girls from Eastern Europe or Italy or even Ireland into the same social circles as Anglo-Protestants. Like , these novels are pushing to extend sisterhood across class lines, and a little across cultural lines, but they aren't risking race lines.
There is at least one academic treatment of this; and a defense of the Camp Fire Girls on the grounds that one of their founders was a Sioux of impeccable credentials in two cultures.
I also love the details of what life was like over the several decades they cover. When Bessie and her friends are escaping from a kidnapper and his rural Fagin, they cross what seems like half the state on the trolleys; the lines obviously run well into the food-producing countryside, as well as connecting the cities, and many people make their regular market or shopping or school trips on them. The domestic beauty the Camp Fire girls make is so obviously the 'Craftsman', naturalist style, rather than the delicate Victorian style, that I wonder how much the Camp movements fueled the change in aesthetic styles, even styles of dress. Also, the careful enumeration of color-coded doo-dahs to be made or earned or purchased is awfully familiar; the Elks and Masons and Oddfellows bought even better ones.
There is an excellent bibliography of Camp Fire Girls novels at the Memory Book of Alice Beard. Many of them are available online, and she has linked to them.
I still haven't found the story I read so often as a child. I think the girl I loved most was called George, and she longed to be as brave as a heroine, and eventually was; exhausted herself to unconsciousness rescuing someone else.
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).