Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 (review)

Analyzing firsthand accounts of girls negotiating the opposing forces of tradition and modernity in their lives, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America adds a new dimension to a central narrative of the American Jewish experience by presenting the conflicts of acculturation and cultural retention through the historical prism of Jewish female adolescence. Melissa R. Klapper's extensively researched study covers the sixty-year span from roughly the Civil War through World War I, describing how Jewish girls encountered and responded to shifting expectations for their roles in family and society. In great detail, Klapper weaves together the experiences of Jewish girls aged twelve to twenty from across class strata to create a collective story of adolescents relating to the evolving American girl culture and forging pathways to the future of American Jewish womanhood.

The strength of this study lies in its rich and varied source material. In addition to relying on the more accessible papers of well-known women, Klapper has unearthed a wide array of girls' diaries that would otherwise go unnoticed by historians. The book lends authentic voice to the realities of girls' lives, including everything from leisure activities and social pressures to work, family, education and religion. Unlike other gender histories or biographies that focus on the experiences of one young woman or a group of young women of similar background, Klapper has included an expansive assortment of girls' personal writings from both the famous and those not renowned. The breadth of source material forms a composite picture of American Jewish girlhood that lends itself to a meaningfully generalizable history.

The most compelling moments in the narrative occur when ample source material allows these young women to speak for themselves in their own words. Although the prescriptive sources, such as the media and the words of spokespeople for girls' institutions (which Klapper also presents), portray the popular messages about feminine ideals that were disseminated, the girls' own accounts better reveal how these messages were received, interpreted, and translated into girls' day-to-day lives and aspirations. Reflecting a sentiment typical of adolescent girls' writings across the spectrum of the study, Marie Syrkin complained in her diary, "I am becoming common place, ordinary, the very thought maddens me . . . To become sluggish, to let the soul stagnate, ah God, this is not life" (35). The desire to express individuality and achieve aspirations is a theme that the author found to be common among girls regardless of generational or social-class boundaries.

At the heart of the American Jewish girl's process of self-discovery and self-definition lay a delicate balance between tradition and modernity, religious values and changing American norms. Klapper points out that, ultimately, most girls did not feel the need to follow an all-or-nothing assimilative pattern of choosing an American path and rejecting a Jewish one. Rather, the subjects of this study tended to choose to live by "a sustained commitment to both" (236). Jewish girls, states Klapper, "participated in American youth culture with enthusiasm, but also with restraint" (27). They may have wanted to break from the confines of tradition, but they were not willing to abandon the values that shaped their identities, either.

The realm of education was a primary locus for identity development among girls. Klapper appropriately defines education quite broadly to include public and private schooling and religious education, as well as "alternative" forms of education such as community center and YWHA programs, club activities, night schools, and the Jewish press, each one serving as a powerful medium for socialization. In fact, many popular leisure activities were educational in nature, including taking piano lessons, reading literature, and attending school-sponsored clubs and social events. These activities were particularly important for girls because participation in such activities reflected well on a family's class status and even served as a key to social mobility for a girl's family.

The majority of the book focuses on...