Rewriting The Token of Love: Sentimentalists, Sophisticates, and the Transformation of American Girlhood, 1862–1940

In 1862, a young woman from Oneida County, New York, was given a "friendship album" (an ornately-bound blank book designed to be filled with autographs, verses, and affectionate notes from relatives and friends) entitled The Token of Love. Over the next two years, dozens of the teenager's acquaintances, especially fellow students at the Utica Female Seminary, duly inscribed their signatures and sentiments onto the album's pages. After that initial flurry, however, no further entries were made until about 1936, when the volume somehow fell into the hands of the original owner's great-grandniece. Showing no reverence for the old artifact, the youngster and her friends defaced many of the original inscriptions and filled previously vacant pages with a hodge-podge of writings and drawings relating to personal health, fashion, and popular culture. Thus, a single volume came to juxtapose entries by two cohorts of girls from the same rural county in upstate New York, separated by more than seventy years. Those two groups—"sentimentalists" and "sophisticates," respectively—expressed dramatically different cultural experiences, attitudes, and values, inadvertently illuminating what historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has described as a gradual, multi-generational transition from "good works" to "good looks" as the central priority in the lives of American girls.