New Girls for the New (Twentieth) Century

Between America’s Civil War and its entry into World War I, the social, cultural, political, and legal roles of adult women profoundly transformed, and their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters saw the changes coming and eventually became part of that vanguard. The history of American girlhood is not the same as that for adult women, though intimately linked, and each of the monographs I review here contributes to that rapidly developing field. In Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, Melissa R. Klapper explores how Jewish girls envisioned their goals and roles as expectations for all girls came into question at the of turn of the century. In A Vision for Girls, Andrea Hamilton investigates the early years of the groundbreaking educational institution that prepared young women to go on to such colleges as Bryn Mawr and strove to maintain a curriculum interchangeable with anything found in all-male preparatory schools. In Beyond the Gibson Girl, Martha Patterson explores the muddled discomfort with and celebration of young women’s widening options outside the home. Together these three texts assert the centrality of American girls as signifiers of social health and promise in U.S. culture, and suggest that in that moment, many looked to girls as evidence of how modernism and tradition could (and could not) be reconciled.

Klapper states that her book is “first and foremost a history of girls,” but since Jewish girls are “both keepers of tradition and agents of acculturation” to a degree somewhat more pronounced than most girls of other ethnic groups, their experiences ideally highlight the paradoxical role that girls of all ethnicities play in American culture (2). Anyone familiar with girl history and Jewish women’s history knows that Melissa Klapper is jumping across a void. On one side are a scant number of histories of girlhood—most notably the work of historians Jane Hunter, Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Hasia Diner—and on the other works by Riv-Ellen Prell, Susan Glenn, Karla Goldman, Sidney Stahl Weinberg, and Jonathan Sarna—all of whom Klapper notes as pathbreakers.¹ But Klapper makes the leap alone: her study is the only history of native-born and immigrant Jewish girls of the nineteenth century. Thankfully, Klapper is more than up to the task.

Basing her analysis on a formidable gathering of unpublished material, Klapper first constructs the context in which these girls lived before addressing the schools and community organizations that structured their lives. “With the goal of capturing both Jewish girls’ specific experiences and the broader adolescent worlds in which they lived,” Klapper lays out the histories of adolescence, American Jewry, and turn-of-the-century gender roles with analytical precision while still recognizing individual experience (5). Relying on public records and personal anecdote, she examines how the developing education system encouraged individual opportunity while emphasizing community and cultural continuity. She expands on the truism that Jewish families encouraged their children’s educational advancement to the point of great sacrifice and looks at how such practices intersected with traditional and modern gender divisions of labor. Jewish families on the whole placed a high premium on educating daughters as well as sons but some families could not survive without the daughter’s wages. Klapper examines the less conventional (but perhaps more common) route to education through community organizations, most famously the “settlement houses” that were sprouting up in urban immigrant areas.

Klapper, most importantly, pays close attention to the inner-lives of the young women she studies. She takes apart the standard narrative of the immigrant caught...