Who was the internationalist girl citizen? According to Jennifer Helgren, in the early Cold War, she was a teenage Girl Scout or Camp Fire Girl with a pen pal in Poland or England or China. Her bookshelf contained a worn copy of Anne Frank's diary and was lined with a collection of dolls from around the world and a photo of the Korean War orphan she sponsored. When she grew anxious that New York or San Francisco could become the next Hiroshima, she joined her school's United Nations club or wrote a letter to the editor of Seventeen expressing her fears. In short, the internationalist girl citizen was informed and concerned, and willing to do her part to cultivate global peace and security through self-improvement and outreach. Helgren demonstrates how young women, conceived primarily as teenage friendship ambassadors, were recruited to perform acts of internationalism that would bolster America's reputation as a responsible world leader best situated to navigate postwar global reconstruction and the growing Cold War threat. Relying on a rich array of primary sources, Helgren makes visible the voluntary labour and commitment of teenage girls, often perceived as shallow and frivolous, to demonstrate how integral an international citizenship mindset was in postwar youth culture.

In her study, Helgren pays careful attention to generation, noting that her focus on girls aged ten to seventeen, born between 1928 and 1942, is not a neat and tidy cohort. Age matters, as does ethnicity, region, class, and religion; therefore perceptions of nationalism and internationalism were shaped by fluctuating definitions of childhood, not to mention whether someone grew up only knowing the United States as an economic and military superpower. Of course, gender is central to her analysis, and Helgren unpacks the gendered meanings and paradoxes of girlhood and citizenship. “Girls’ new relation to the world rested on essentialized feminine characteristics” (14), Helgren argues. For adult women, internationalism often took a maternalistic form, while the “global girl citizen tapped into notions of female friendship” (15).

Moving from clubs to classrooms to consumer culture, Helgren tracks the multitude of ways girls engaged in global citizenship. Some of this, she acknowledges, was superficial, especially when based on the consumption of multicultural products and fashions or in the simplistic makeover of Japan and Germany from wartime enemies to ordinary people in history textbooks. In other cases, particularly in the complicated, if waning, relationships forged among pen pals, things went deeper. Recounted in oral histories and in archived letters, Helgren discovers deep intimacies, empathy, humour, and a plethora of cross-cultural misunderstandings, the last of which were often the product of language barriers or myopia from both parties. Even though exchanges of these types were usually given strict perimeters by adult overseers – one group was told, “Not you alone but your troop, all Girl Scouts, and your country will be judged by the things you write, and the neatness of your letter” (69) – they could still defy expectations. Such was the case for the six-year correspondence between Liz, an American Jewish girl, and her “perfect friend” (72) Lore, a slightly older Austrian Catholic girl, whom she “can tell everything” (73), a statement that was not hyperbolic. Liz's letters, kept by Lore, showcase serious discussion about Nazism, anti-Semitism, current events, and fears of a future war, plus romance, school and parental woes. Liz championed world peace and was quite generous in her perceptions of the Soviet Union, and even took to studying Russian. “Through their new relation to the world,” via dialogues with foreign friends, Helgren states, “girls challenged official Cold War narratives” (74). At other points, Liz could be bossy, presuming to know better than her older friend and showering her with cheerful advice, a recurring lopsided dynamic among the American correspondents who frequently assumed their pen pals were less well off in all senses.

In Helgren's capable hands, the narrative is not only an exploration of teenage girls’ agency. While it certainly contains a multitude of examples of girls taking action and voicing opinions, American Girls and Global Responsibility places their global encounters within the United States’ broader postwar domestic and foreign policy. Notably, it confronts the hypocrisy – sometimes acknowledged by the girls themselves – of the United States exporting democracy under the shadow of Jim Crow, the Internment of Japanese Americans, and strict quotas on refugees. Recognizing this, many educators overseeing global engagement programs sought to combat prejudice at home by encouraging tolerance and integration within their own predominantly white, middle-class clubs and schools, something Helgren notes was accomplished within “distinct limits” (47). At the same time, too much tolerance was problematic. Anticommunism campaigns were at odds with the message of peace and goodwill central to the global-citizenship mantra. As a result, the YWCA came under scrutiny for its liberal Christian mission and the organization's refusal to purge its membership of known or suspected communists. Meanwhile, as the United Nations came to be viewed by some Americans as an arm of communist propaganda, the Girl Scouts were encouraged to cease any promotion of the international body. The organization resisted much flak; however, the 1953 edition of the Girl Scout handbook dropped some of its internationalist text in favour of a more nationalist perspective.

American Girls and Global Responsibility is part of a growing body of literature that explores how the constructions of childhood and the actions of young people intersect with histories of war, peace work, and international relations. Much like the youth who collected scrap metal and weeded family victory gardens did their bit during the world wars, a shared spirit of youth was inspired (and required) to do their part, this time in the battle for winning hearts and minds.