The Girls: Jewish Women of Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1940-1995 (review)

The Girls is a welcome addition to the literature on American Jewish women, especially the small number of works on the second and third generation born in the U.S. after the great wave of East European Jewish migration. The book constitutes an oral history study of 41 women who graduated high school in Brownsville, a close-knit working class and predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. The author, who grew up in Brownsville in the 1950s, makes herself part of the story. "A participant-observer, I mingle my voice with the voices of the women I write about. At the same time I try to provide the objective 'voice-over' of the historian. . . ."(p. x), she explains. She combines carefully selected quotations from interviews with her own analysis to explore the interaction of gender, social class, ethnicity, religious identity, and neighborhood in the changing lives of her subjects. Her thesis is that for young women the distinctive Brownsville neighborhood culture was, paradoxically, both limiting and nurturing.

Brownsville proved limiting because it offered young women few choices. "Who had choices? We had no choices!" (p. 63), said one. Brought up during the Depression, women who came of age in the 1940s were poor. None expected to go to college immediately after high school, and none did. Everyone expected to work until marriage or the birth of her first child and then to become a full-time wife and mother. Their choice of jobs remained limited- girls could be secretaries or bookkeepers. Even during World War II, Brownsville girls did not enter the factories their parents had struggled to leave. "None of these Rosies became riveters" (p. 23). They married soon after high school, usually leaving Brownsville for a "better" neighborhood with their upwardly mobile husbands and settling happily into the role of supportive wife and mother.

The women who came of age in the 1950s were slightly better off economically, and their parents were more Americanized. About a quarter of these attended local colleges after high school to prepare for the one approved profession, teaching. Jewish religious tradition, pressure from parents and peers, and the strong emphasis on domesticity in the national culture dictated that the 1950s women would follow their 1940s counterparts into full-time homemaking and motherhood.

What strikes the author, and the reader, are not the women's initial choices but what they later became. A chapter aptly titled "Unfinished Business: Becoming Your Own Person," states that by the late 1960s almost 85% of the "girls" of both cohorts had returned to paid employment. Many of the 1940s group returned to clerical work (the fastest growing area of women's employment), some becoming managers of large offices. Others launched careers based on suppressed earlier interests. For example, a woman who had wanted to be in a "helping profession" but who could not afford the requisite education after high school, went back to college and became the personal secretary to a high school principal, a position enabling her to perform many "helping" functions for students. Another woman, who had earlier thought of a career in fashion, conducted a successful custom- made clothing business out of her home. A third, unique for having begun college under the GI Bill (she served in the navy), returned to college in 1961, became a reading specialist, and received a doctorate in education in 1979. Over half of the 1950s cohort went back to school, earning college, graduate, and professional degrees, launching successful mid-life careers in education, law, psychology, and art.

Women in both age cohorts received public recognition for contributions not only in their areas of work but also for civic and charitable activities. Ford raises the issue of how much more they could have accomplished if they had started earlier. However, she emphasizes the fact that no one...