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

From the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, American Jewish female adolescents served as both “keepers of tradition” and “agents of acculturation” (3), according to historian Melissa R. Klapper. When, during this time, a “girl culture” emerged in the United States, Jews eagerly participated. They did so, however, in ways that did not compromise their Jewishness.

Klapper’s argument stems from her extensive and intensive reading of the diaries, journals, and memoirs of young Jewish women, most not previously used by scholars and is supplemented by an examination of Jewish women’s periodicals, the papers of Jewish organizations, and high school records. As she notes, earlier studies analyzed the experiences of young female factory workers in New York City during the mass migration of East European Jews to the United States. By casting a wider chronological and regional “net” and focusing on middle class adolescents, Klapper is able to make broader generalizations about the encounter between America and Jewish Americans over a sixty-year period. Also persuasive and significant is her contention that assimilation and acculturation are shaped by gender as much as by religion, race, ethnicity, and social class.

As early as the 1860s, young Jewish women in the South, Cincinnati, Chicago, the West, Baltimore, and New York, wrote in diaries about their daily lives, education, clothing, and friends. Their families varied greatly in terms of Jewish observance: some kept kosher and celebrated a traditional Sabbath; others did little more than attend an annual Passover Seder with relatives. Virtually all the diary writers, however, seemed content, even proud, to be Jewish Americans. Unlike many European Jews of that era, they neither contemplated conversion as a means of greater integration into Gentile society nor harbored unfulfilled longings for a different kind of life. That they would socialize primarily (although not exclusively) with other Jews, and eventually marry Jewish men was accepted, and not cause for arguments or rebellion.

This “extraordinary group consciousness” (237) as Klapper calls it, even in the midst of the freedoms America offered, meant that young middle class Jewish women participated eagerly, and with the approval of their families, in such “American” activities for adolescents as secular education, organizational and extra-curricular life in their schools and towns, and unsupervised courtship. One caveat: as Klapper admits, evidence concerning young Jewish women’s views and behavior regarding changing sexual norms in the early twentieth century—a key factor in the historical emergence of adolescence—is rarely available, in the diaries or elsewhere.

A most interesting theme in this discussion is the growing significance of formal education, both secular and religious, in Jewish American girls’ lives. Klapper points out that European Jewish communities and families educated their sons, especially in Hebrew studies, to the fullest extent of their resources, but saw no need to do the same for girls, who had no obligation to study Torah or to pray regularly. In the United States, however, as Jewish American men drifted away from the synagogue as the center of their lives, Jewish women took on communal and educational obligations, in addition to their traditional role of keeping Jewish homes. Preservation of Judaism in an American setting, then, required girls’ education. Although the first bat mitzvot did not take place until the 1920s, Jewish girls attended “Sunday schools,” Hebrew schools, and confirmation classes.

In the United States, secular education through high school was free for both sexes. Girls’ high school attendance had always exceeded boys’, because the latter had greater economic opportunities, even without higher education. Girls who wished to enter the teaching profession—one of the few middle class occupations open to women—needed to complete high school or go to a normal school. More comfortable families sent their daughters to high school not for professional training, but for the cultural and social experiences it provided. Early in the twentieth century, high schools began to offer commercial and other vocational curricula, thereby enhancing their...