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“Unless I Got More Education” Jewish Girls and the Problem of Education in Turn-of-the-Century America During the spring of 1872, thirteen-year-old Jennie Rosenfeld ventured out with trepidation to take the entrance examination for the public high school in Chicago. Though her mother was afraid to let Jennie go downtown alone, she felt that the possibility of extending her daughter’s education outweighed other considerations. After the examination , Jennie waited while her tests were marked. She returned home that evening enrolled for the fall, one of a limited number of Chicago adolescents to become a high school student. She felt much less afraid of the long journey home than she had of the journey there. Before she even began classes, high school had already opened up a new geographic world to her. She looked forward to the new educational and social worlds awaiting her. Jennie’s widowed mother was as pleased as her daughter. Like other Jewish parents of the period, she was proud of her daughter’s educational opportunity and unworried about any possible effects on family relationships or ties to the community. She was also well aware that only her own hard work and extended family support made it financially possible for Jennie to enjoy secondary education of any kind.1 Jennie and other Jewish girls who aspired to be high school students were aided by the relationship of the American Jewish community to education . They benefited from both the greater likelihood of American parents to keep girls, rather than boys, in high school and the high value Jewish tradition placed on education. By the beginning of the twentieth century, all but the very poorest or most rural white children in the United States at least attended elementary school, no matter what their parents’ level of education had been. Formal secondary education remained a great wall over which only the few could climb, but the wall was lowered 2 59 every year.2 As a result, Jewish girls from middle-class families, and eventually working-class families as well, began to take secondary schooling for granted. They understood that education provided cultural capital for upward mobility and was a crucial marker of class. Working-class families used education as a means of increasing the return on work, while middle-class families relied on the profits of work to finance prolonged education. In both cases, gender was central to perceived success. Because work and education were such central parts of nearly all Jewish girls’ lives in one form or another, traditional values exerted a strong influence on their opportunities. American education’s theoretical emphasis on individual opportunity and personal identity had the potential to move adolescents away from their families and communities. In practice, however, institutionalized education was so closely tied to conventional ideas about class, gender, and race that high schools often preserved rather than disrupted traditional values. Though the expansion of secondary education did break down some barriers by offering growing numbers of students similarly structured high school experiences, it often conserved traditional social values at the expense of helping all students fulfill their individual potential.3 Because of this basic conservatism in what purported to be the most modern of institutions, Jewish high school students pursued educational opportunity , participated in the construction of American youth culture, and developed as individuals while still maintaining close ties to their families and communities. In the public schools most Jewish adolescents attended by the end of the 1800s, there was a diverse enough population that the students’ family traditions were not directly threatened by school experiences. Still, as they walked the same high school halls, girls and boys shared educational and social experiences that set them apart as a distinct and privileged group in American society. These shared experiences led many adolescents toward identifying more with each other than with their families or religious groups or ethnic communities.4 However, only on very rare occasions did Jewish girls’ peer identification outweigh family and community identification. As a result, college education, which tended to take girls away from home, was much more problematic than high school for Jewish girls. Their ties to traditional values might be more threatened if they left their family and communal settings to go to college. By attending secondary schools, whether public or private, academic or finishing, for two years or four, Jewish girls participated in the 60 | “Unless I Got More Education” [3.145.186.6...

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