July 9, 2012 • 16 mins
Did you know that summer camp started to toughen up "weakly boys" before it became popular with kids across the nation? In this episode, Caroline and Cristen recount the history of U.S. summer camps, from the early days to modern specialty summer camps.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From housetop works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and you're in today for
(00:20):
another episode of Summer Shorts, and we are talking about
summer camp, which I was really looking forward to because
I loved camp. As kid, you and I are so different,
really well, a girl trying to kill me at a
y m C a day camp, So I never went
back to any camp man. I was totally the opposite.
(00:43):
I mostly went to church camps. I would not have
gone to one of your secular wife what Young Men's
Christian Association, No, I'm I'm kidding. I mean like more
like church sponsored camps. I would go by myself for
a week or so, and then my whole family for
a few summers went to family camp, which was also
a lot of fun. And then for a few years
(01:07):
in late middle school and early high school, I was
a day camp counselor. That's fun. Yeah, I bet you
didn't let any girls strangle any of your campers. Her
name was Morgan any Patch, I'm just gonna throw that out.
She thought I was talking smack about her, but I wasn't,
and she turned around and started choking with an eyepatch
(01:29):
reminded the She turned her one intense eye on me,
was like, are you talking about me? No? Sounds fright.
If I had been her camp counselor Caroline, I would
have I would have stopped that fight. But let's not
get sidetrack. Uh. With a quick rundown, eleven million American
kids are probably gonna be shipped off to camp this year.
(01:51):
According to the American Camp Association. They're around twelve thousand
traditional camps all around the United States. The weekly average
cost of sleepaway camp is anywhere from three to seven
d and eighty bucks, which I'm sure it's bargained for parents.
That's true during the summer. But the start of camps,
(02:14):
which is really quite an American phenomenon, uh, got its
start in the early twentieth century because there was a
fear of kids essentially being cooped up in school too long. Yeah. Well,
and there was also the whole reaction to industrialization in
(02:34):
the late nineteenth century. Right, people were like, oh my god,
people are all in the cities and they're outside and
they're loafing around the streets. Well, like we mentioned in
our episode on the p T A and the by
the eighties and eighteen nineties, you had those first compulsory
school laws to get kids out of the factories and
off the streets and into school. But then during the summer,
(02:57):
what is a child to do exactly? And you can't. Yeah,
you can't just let them roam free. So you had
to get them out of the city's back connecting with nature.
And according to camp director Henry W. Gibson, back during
this time, you know, he was very concerned about this
new fangled idea of a summer break, like, what is
this You're just letting them roam around? And he said
(03:18):
that it's a period of moral deterioration with most boys
who have heretofore, wasted the glorious summertime loafing on the
city streets or as disastrously, at summer hotels or amusement places. Yeah,
summer camps started off initially, even though girls quickly jumped
into the game, but it started off as a thing
(03:39):
for boys. It was focused on getting the boy making
sure that they were cultivating masculine skills, making sure that
they were self sufficient, not being too coddled by the
luxuries of urban life. Because it was also more focused,
as you can imagine, toward middle and upper class families
who could afford to send their kids out into the wilderness. Yes,
(04:01):
such as the Gunnery Camp, which in eighteen sixty one
was started by headmasters of a private school in Connecticut,
Frederick and Abigail gun And it's considered the first organized
American camp. And they basically took some of their private
school students out into the woods for two weeks. And yeah,
that's considered the first organized camp. Yeah. And then in
(04:22):
eighteen seventy four, the Philadelphia chapter of the y w
c A, the Young Woman's Christian Association, founded the organization's
first summer camp, or vacation project as it was called.
And I need a vacation project. Yeah. The the approach,
initial approach for boys camps versus girls camps quite different. Yeah.
(04:45):
Boys were out outside, they were fishing, they were canoeing.
As Dr Winthrop Tisdale Talbot said in nineteen o five,
it was a chance to let the sunshine pour upon
every portion of their bared bodies, which is kind of
weird out of context. But for girls at this why
w c a camp, they had a summer boarding and
vacation house for quote tired young women wearing out their
(05:06):
lives in an almost endless drudgery for wages that admit
no thought of rest or recreation. So girls rested while
boys went out and climb trees and stuff. But then
things started to pick up for girls in summer camps,
as we would start to think of them now in
nineteen o two with a lady named Laura Matun who
(05:27):
founded Camp Kihonka for girls in New Hampshire. And Camp
Kihonka was pretty revolutionary because it kind of brought the
same wilderness, roughnit approach for girls camps like they have
for boys camps. And she was so intent on girls
having uh enriching outdoor experiences that she created And this
(05:49):
is a two, so keep in mind that this was
would have created quite a stir. She created bifurcated skirts
for girls so they could move freely in the outdoors.
And i'm them essentially as very large billowing coo lots. Yeah,
they were kind of shorter than I I saw a picture.
They were kind of shorter than I actually expected they
were yeah, but they were billowy Yeah. Yeah. And then
(06:13):
in nineteen twelve, the first Girl Scout camp is held
very close to where we are right now, Caroline and
Savannah Georgia. I had no idea. Two years later the
first Campfire Girls camps held, and according to The Daily
it was actually founded in nineteen ten by Luther Glick
with a curriculum design to make housekeeping duties seemed like
an adventure and I feel like I need someone to
(06:35):
come do that for me. You want to go to
housekeeping camp? Yeah, sweeping is not an adventure at all
in my mind. But sweeping builds your moral character. At
least that's what they probably would have said. Because one
thing that hasn't changed so much about camp over the
twentie century and now into the twenty first century is
that there has always been this emphasis on building character
(06:59):
in it's teaching them these kind of practical skills like
team building, conflict resolution. Uh. I don't know, latch key making, friendship,
bracelet corporation. But yeah, I mean it's all these Uh.
There is this notion that we I don't think that
we were that comfortable with the idea of kids just
running around willy nilly during the summer, and that they
(07:21):
need um this special outside place away from the hustle
and bustle of city life and modern life to teach
them um traditional kinds of skills. And after World War Two,
summer camp reached its zenith because of the middle class
that emerged out of those postwar years, and in this
(07:45):
idea of wanting to send kids out to experience nature
and to really build up their patriotic and civic characters
as well, it became less of a worry about their
moral character, like what were they doing on the streets
in the summertime out of school and war on? Like
your American camp as American as apple pie, like go
be proud of your country at camp. And that's why
(08:07):
you might see themes at summer camp like color wars,
Like you go to camp a lot of times you'll
immediately be assigned to some kind of cabin and the
cabin might have a color or you might just have
a color and U. Color Wars, though are not they
were not invented after World War Two. They actually go
back to the mid nineteen tins and they were built
(08:30):
off the game Capsule Flag and became popular in Northeastern
boys camps, but the colors were often blue and gray
for the Union and Confederate armies of the American Civil War.
So that's where color wars came from. Interesting kids playing
Civil War. Okay, color wars. I only went to day
(08:51):
camp once ever, so I kind of know what you're
talking about. Wait, and it was that and that was
where I patch almost killed. Yeah, exactly, I patch trauma using.
But UM camp started shifting after this whole baby boomer
going to camp thing, because eventually the baby boomers grow up.
Camp started to get more organized and professional UM and
(09:13):
by the nineteen eighties and nineties there was a definite
decline in new residential camps. Also, a lot of this
beautiful landscape by lakes and rivers and stuff ended up
getting picked up by developers, so there were condos and
vacation homes on the shores instead of camps. UM and
we've also in the meantime seen the surge of day
(09:33):
camps especially and then also these specialty camps like just
going to sleepaway camp to make popsicle sick crafts and
paddle boat around on a lake for eight weeks. It's
really not it's really not the norm anymore. Yeah, parents
are really concerned now with either having their kids learned
(09:54):
skills or having their kids learned something that looks good
on a college resume, and also to keep them busy
there where. There are two articles, one in Time magazine
one from the Christian Science Monitor that we're talking about
how summer camp has changed to be driven by UM
I guess they need to entertain kids constantly because they're
(10:14):
concerned that if there's nothing for them to do, then
they're just going to be bored and not do anything. Yes,
that stuff on fire, things like that. And at the
same time, they these specialty camps have emerged to really
tap into that um so science camps in particular have
become extremely popular. But there are camps out there for
(10:37):
anything from like kids who want to be chefs to
uh stunt people to filmmakers, acting camps, all sorts of camps,
and there might even be a podcast camp out there,
like I don't know, it would be awesome. Well, the
Christian Science Monitor article does kind of take issue with
this whole attitude of like keep them busy all the time,
send them to a super specific camp, because there are
(10:59):
a lot of there are camp advocates, real like quote
unquote real camp advocates who say that we're we're taking
something away from our kids by making them be hyper focused,
and that summer camp is being elbowed out by the
viral pace of childhood, where the school year starts earlier
and earlier earlier, where high school sports and their very
(11:19):
specific skill sets now dangle the promise of a free
read to college. So there's a lot of pressure that
we're putting on our children even at camp, right. Um.
And I will say, though, one thing that they did mention,
these articles did mention about the camps today is that
even though they might be more activity driven than they
were in the past, kids typically, though we can breathe
(11:42):
a cyberleaf, are not allowed to bring their cell phones
to camps. Some allow email access for parents. Um. And
the one strange thing that I read about this is
coming from a spokesperson from the American Camp Association, was
talking about the newest trend of parents wanting to see
a photo of their child at camp online. Helicopter parents. Yeah,
(12:05):
pretty soon after they dropped them off. To make sure
they're there, to analyze their body language. Yeah, make sure
that they're doing okay, um, rather than fending for themselves. Um.
Actually ran across a pretty recent study that was trying
to evaluate predictors for homesickness in female campers. I guess
(12:27):
it left for sleepaway camp for longer periods of time,
and uh. They ruled out the maternal relationship as being
a correlative factor for extreme homesickness and more. How to
do with um, the female campers relationships social relationships outside
(12:48):
of school and day to day lives. So yeah, so
some moms aren't just you know, holding you back. Yeah,
what's what? What you know? What's the camp song? Hello mother?
Hello father? Here I am a camp? What is it?
I don't know? Something that rhymes with muta and fata. Well,
I think that's all we got to stay about. Camps
they started off in in response to urbanization, really get
(13:10):
kids back to nature. Which is funny because there was
all this movement away from the farms and the rural
areas of America to cities for job opportunities and whatnot.
And then they're like, oh, shoot, yeah, our kids don't
know how to build a fire. They didn't want to.
They were worried that we were making kids kids too soft. Um.
But now there there's a plethora of summer camps to
(13:31):
choose from, and I would like to hear about people's
experiences at camp, whether they were good or nightmarish like mine.
So really was it because of that instance that vision
I was like a camp as a very small child.
I had the attitude of, uh, don't try try again. Um,
a girl tried to kill me. So I think I'm
just gonna be cool with going to the pool every
day instead of going to camp. Yeah, that doesn't sound
(13:52):
at that too. Yeah, my parents were like whatever, as
long as you're out of the house. I wanted to
be a lifeguard. So I mean you were still straddling
my too summer dreams as a child. So that's all
we gotta say about camp. We would love to hear
your camp stories, mom. Stuff at Discovery dot com is
where you can send them. And in the meantime, I've
got an email here from a listener about our episode
(14:16):
on gypsies, and just for a head that this is
coming from uh Eliza, who's an American living in the
Czech Republic, and she says, before moving here, I had
never really heard of gypsies outside fiction. I was surprised
to see the open and accepted racism against them. Here,
(14:37):
politicians often run on political platforms that include their removal.
An overwhelming percentage of Roman children are sent to special
needs school and even friends of ours have warned us
that our daughters will probably grow up to be criminals.
In fact, the reason we were able to adopt our
daughters so quickly is because there are many biracial children
given up for adoption by Check mothers who worry about
(14:58):
the social stigma of a dark her skin child, and
there are very few checks willing to adopt Roma children.
I hesitate to support a television show and she's referencing
My Big Fat Gypsy wedding that showcases the cultures differences
for the sake of mainstream voyeurism. But there certainly needs
to be more publicity for the oppression and discrimination that
the Roma have experienced and continue to experience in Europe.
(15:21):
In fact, it was not until visiting a memorial here
that I learned that during the Holocaust of all checkborn
Roma were killed, the Roman populations of Croatia, the Netherlands,
and Estonia were also all but wiped out. I didn't
learn this when I visited the Holocaust museums in Washington,
d c. And in Jerusalem, towards several concentration camps in
Central Europe, or took two university courses that covered the Holocaust.
(15:44):
We are letting the story of the Roma fall through
the cracks in history as well as modern social and
political justice movements. So thank you Eliza straight from the
Czech Republic. Were sharing your thoughts and opinions with us,
as well as everybody else who has written in mom
Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can write
us and you can find us on Facebook. Give us
(16:06):
a like, We're so close to ten thousand likes, so close,
so close. I do check it frequently. I do yeah,
like citing so so help us, help push us over.
Be a pal, Yeah, be a pen pal. And you
can also follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff podcast.
And if you want to have some summer fun during
(16:27):
the summer, what better place to do it than over
at our homesite. How stuff works dot com for moral
this and thousands of other topics. Does it? How stuff
works dot Com brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve Camray. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From housetop works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and you're in today for
(00:20):
another episode of Summer Shorts, and we are talking about
summer camp, which I was really looking forward to because
I loved camp. As kid, you and I are so different,
really well, a girl trying to kill me at a
y m C a day camp, So I never went
back to any camp man. I was totally the opposite.
(00:43):
I mostly went to church camps. I would not have
gone to one of your secular wife what Young Men's
Christian Association, No, I'm I'm kidding. I mean like more
like church sponsored camps. I would go by myself for
a week or so, and then my whole family for
a few summers went to family camp, which was also
a lot of fun. And then for a few years
(01:07):
in late middle school and early high school, I was
a day camp counselor. That's fun. Yeah, I bet you
didn't let any girls strangle any of your campers. Her
name was Morgan any Patch, I'm just gonna throw that out.
She thought I was talking smack about her, but I wasn't,
and she turned around and started choking with an eyepatch
(01:29):
reminded the She turned her one intense eye on me,
was like, are you talking about me? No? Sounds fright.
If I had been her camp counselor Caroline, I would
have I would have stopped that fight. But let's not
get sidetrack. Uh. With a quick rundown, eleven million American
kids are probably gonna be shipped off to camp this year.
(01:51):
According to the American Camp Association. They're around twelve thousand
traditional camps all around the United States. The weekly average
cost of sleepaway camp is anywhere from three to seven
d and eighty bucks, which I'm sure it's bargained for parents.
That's true during the summer. But the start of camps,
(02:14):
which is really quite an American phenomenon, uh, got its
start in the early twentieth century because there was a
fear of kids essentially being cooped up in school too long. Yeah. Well,
and there was also the whole reaction to industrialization in
(02:34):
the late nineteenth century. Right, people were like, oh my god,
people are all in the cities and they're outside and
they're loafing around the streets. Well, like we mentioned in
our episode on the p T A and the by
the eighties and eighteen nineties, you had those first compulsory
school laws to get kids out of the factories and
off the streets and into school. But then during the summer,
(02:57):
what is a child to do exactly? And you can't. Yeah,
you can't just let them roam free. So you had
to get them out of the city's back connecting with nature.
And according to camp director Henry W. Gibson, back during
this time, you know, he was very concerned about this
new fangled idea of a summer break, like, what is
this You're just letting them roam around? And he said
(03:18):
that it's a period of moral deterioration with most boys
who have heretofore, wasted the glorious summertime loafing on the
city streets or as disastrously, at summer hotels or amusement places. Yeah,
summer camps started off initially, even though girls quickly jumped
into the game, but it started off as a thing
(03:39):
for boys. It was focused on getting the boy making
sure that they were cultivating masculine skills, making sure that
they were self sufficient, not being too coddled by the
luxuries of urban life. Because it was also more focused,
as you can imagine, toward middle and upper class families
who could afford to send their kids out into the wilderness. Yes,
(04:01):
such as the Gunnery Camp, which in eighteen sixty one
was started by headmasters of a private school in Connecticut,
Frederick and Abigail gun And it's considered the first organized
American camp. And they basically took some of their private
school students out into the woods for two weeks. And yeah,
that's considered the first organized camp. Yeah. And then in
(04:22):
eighteen seventy four, the Philadelphia chapter of the y w
c A, the Young Woman's Christian Association, founded the organization's
first summer camp, or vacation project as it was called.
And I need a vacation project. Yeah. The the approach,
initial approach for boys camps versus girls camps quite different. Yeah.
(04:45):
Boys were out outside, they were fishing, they were canoeing.
As Dr Winthrop Tisdale Talbot said in nineteen o five,
it was a chance to let the sunshine pour upon
every portion of their bared bodies, which is kind of
weird out of context. But for girls at this why
w c a camp, they had a summer boarding and
vacation house for quote tired young women wearing out their
(05:06):
lives in an almost endless drudgery for wages that admit
no thought of rest or recreation. So girls rested while
boys went out and climb trees and stuff. But then
things started to pick up for girls in summer camps,
as we would start to think of them now in
nineteen o two with a lady named Laura Matun who
(05:27):
founded Camp Kihonka for girls in New Hampshire. And Camp
Kihonka was pretty revolutionary because it kind of brought the
same wilderness, roughnit approach for girls camps like they have
for boys camps. And she was so intent on girls
having uh enriching outdoor experiences that she created And this
(05:49):
is a two, so keep in mind that this was
would have created quite a stir. She created bifurcated skirts
for girls so they could move freely in the outdoors.
And i'm them essentially as very large billowing coo lots. Yeah,
they were kind of shorter than I I saw a picture.
They were kind of shorter than I actually expected they
were yeah, but they were billowy Yeah. Yeah. And then
(06:13):
in nineteen twelve, the first Girl Scout camp is held
very close to where we are right now, Caroline and
Savannah Georgia. I had no idea. Two years later the
first Campfire Girls camps held, and according to The Daily
it was actually founded in nineteen ten by Luther Glick
with a curriculum design to make housekeeping duties seemed like
an adventure and I feel like I need someone to
(06:35):
come do that for me. You want to go to
housekeeping camp? Yeah, sweeping is not an adventure at all
in my mind. But sweeping builds your moral character. At
least that's what they probably would have said. Because one
thing that hasn't changed so much about camp over the
twentie century and now into the twenty first century is
that there has always been this emphasis on building character
(06:59):
in it's teaching them these kind of practical skills like
team building, conflict resolution. Uh. I don't know, latch key making, friendship,
bracelet corporation. But yeah, I mean it's all these Uh.
There is this notion that we I don't think that
we were that comfortable with the idea of kids just
running around willy nilly during the summer, and that they
(07:21):
need um this special outside place away from the hustle
and bustle of city life and modern life to teach
them um traditional kinds of skills. And after World War Two,
summer camp reached its zenith because of the middle class
that emerged out of those postwar years, and in this
(07:45):
idea of wanting to send kids out to experience nature
and to really build up their patriotic and civic characters
as well, it became less of a worry about their
moral character, like what were they doing on the streets
in the summertime out of school and war on? Like
your American camp as American as apple pie, like go
be proud of your country at camp. And that's why
(08:07):
you might see themes at summer camp like color wars,
Like you go to camp a lot of times you'll
immediately be assigned to some kind of cabin and the
cabin might have a color or you might just have
a color and U. Color Wars, though are not they
were not invented after World War Two. They actually go
back to the mid nineteen tins and they were built
(08:30):
off the game Capsule Flag and became popular in Northeastern
boys camps, but the colors were often blue and gray
for the Union and Confederate armies of the American Civil War.
So that's where color wars came from. Interesting kids playing
Civil War. Okay, color wars. I only went to day
(08:51):
camp once ever, so I kind of know what you're
talking about. Wait, and it was that and that was
where I patch almost killed. Yeah, exactly, I patch trauma using.
But UM camp started shifting after this whole baby boomer
going to camp thing, because eventually the baby boomers grow up.
Camp started to get more organized and professional UM and
(09:13):
by the nineteen eighties and nineties there was a definite
decline in new residential camps. Also, a lot of this
beautiful landscape by lakes and rivers and stuff ended up
getting picked up by developers, so there were condos and
vacation homes on the shores instead of camps. UM and
we've also in the meantime seen the surge of day
(09:33):
camps especially and then also these specialty camps like just
going to sleepaway camp to make popsicle sick crafts and
paddle boat around on a lake for eight weeks. It's
really not it's really not the norm anymore. Yeah, parents
are really concerned now with either having their kids learned
(09:54):
skills or having their kids learned something that looks good
on a college resume, and also to keep them busy
there where. There are two articles, one in Time magazine
one from the Christian Science Monitor that we're talking about
how summer camp has changed to be driven by UM
I guess they need to entertain kids constantly because they're
(10:14):
concerned that if there's nothing for them to do, then
they're just going to be bored and not do anything. Yes,
that stuff on fire, things like that. And at the
same time, they these specialty camps have emerged to really
tap into that um so science camps in particular have
become extremely popular. But there are camps out there for
(10:37):
anything from like kids who want to be chefs to
uh stunt people to filmmakers, acting camps, all sorts of camps,
and there might even be a podcast camp out there,
like I don't know, it would be awesome. Well, the
Christian Science Monitor article does kind of take issue with
this whole attitude of like keep them busy all the time,
send them to a super specific camp, because there are
(10:59):
a lot of there are camp advocates, real like quote
unquote real camp advocates who say that we're we're taking
something away from our kids by making them be hyper focused,
and that summer camp is being elbowed out by the
viral pace of childhood, where the school year starts earlier
and earlier earlier, where high school sports and their very
(11:19):
specific skill sets now dangle the promise of a free
read to college. So there's a lot of pressure that
we're putting on our children even at camp, right. Um.
And I will say, though, one thing that they did mention,
these articles did mention about the camps today is that
even though they might be more activity driven than they
were in the past, kids typically, though we can breathe
(11:42):
a cyberleaf, are not allowed to bring their cell phones
to camps. Some allow email access for parents. Um. And
the one strange thing that I read about this is
coming from a spokesperson from the American Camp Association, was
talking about the newest trend of parents wanting to see
a photo of their child at camp online. Helicopter parents. Yeah,
(12:05):
pretty soon after they dropped them off. To make sure
they're there, to analyze their body language. Yeah, make sure
that they're doing okay, um, rather than fending for themselves. Um.
Actually ran across a pretty recent study that was trying
to evaluate predictors for homesickness in female campers. I guess
(12:27):
it left for sleepaway camp for longer periods of time,
and uh. They ruled out the maternal relationship as being
a correlative factor for extreme homesickness and more. How to
do with um, the female campers relationships social relationships outside
(12:48):
of school and day to day lives. So yeah, so
some moms aren't just you know, holding you back. Yeah,
what's what? What you know? What's the camp song? Hello mother?
Hello father? Here I am a camp? What is it?
I don't know? Something that rhymes with muta and fata. Well,
I think that's all we got to stay about. Camps
they started off in in response to urbanization, really get
(13:10):
kids back to nature. Which is funny because there was
all this movement away from the farms and the rural
areas of America to cities for job opportunities and whatnot.
And then they're like, oh, shoot, yeah, our kids don't
know how to build a fire. They didn't want to.
They were worried that we were making kids kids too soft. Um.
But now there there's a plethora of summer camps to
(13:31):
choose from, and I would like to hear about people's
experiences at camp, whether they were good or nightmarish like mine.
So really was it because of that instance that vision
I was like a camp as a very small child.
I had the attitude of, uh, don't try try again. Um,
a girl tried to kill me. So I think I'm
just gonna be cool with going to the pool every
day instead of going to camp. Yeah, that doesn't sound
(13:52):
at that too. Yeah, my parents were like whatever, as
long as you're out of the house. I wanted to
be a lifeguard. So I mean you were still straddling
my too summer dreams as a child. So that's all
we gotta say about camp. We would love to hear
your camp stories, mom. Stuff at Discovery dot com is
where you can send them. And in the meantime, I've
got an email here from a listener about our episode
(14:16):
on gypsies, and just for a head that this is
coming from uh Eliza, who's an American living in the
Czech Republic, and she says, before moving here, I had
never really heard of gypsies outside fiction. I was surprised
to see the open and accepted racism against them. Here,
(14:37):
politicians often run on political platforms that include their removal.
An overwhelming percentage of Roman children are sent to special
needs school and even friends of ours have warned us
that our daughters will probably grow up to be criminals.
In fact, the reason we were able to adopt our
daughters so quickly is because there are many biracial children
given up for adoption by Check mothers who worry about
(14:58):
the social stigma of a dark her skin child, and
there are very few checks willing to adopt Roma children.
I hesitate to support a television show and she's referencing
My Big Fat Gypsy wedding that showcases the cultures differences
for the sake of mainstream voyeurism. But there certainly needs
to be more publicity for the oppression and discrimination that
the Roma have experienced and continue to experience in Europe.
(15:21):
In fact, it was not until visiting a memorial here
that I learned that during the Holocaust of all checkborn
Roma were killed, the Roman populations of Croatia, the Netherlands,
and Estonia were also all but wiped out. I didn't
learn this when I visited the Holocaust museums in Washington,
d c. And in Jerusalem, towards several concentration camps in
Central Europe, or took two university courses that covered the Holocaust.
(15:44):
We are letting the story of the Roma fall through
the cracks in history as well as modern social and
political justice movements. So thank you Eliza straight from the
Czech Republic. Were sharing your thoughts and opinions with us,
as well as everybody else who has written in mom
Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can write
us and you can find us on Facebook. Give us
(16:06):
a like, We're so close to ten thousand likes, so close,
so close. I do check it frequently. I do yeah,
like citing so so help us, help push us over.
Be a pal, Yeah, be a pen pal. And you
can also follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff podcast.
And if you want to have some summer fun during
(16:27):
the summer, what better place to do it than over
at our homesite. How stuff works dot com for moral
this and thousands of other topics. Does it? How stuff
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