Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920

Notes

Notes abbreviati0ns American Jewish Archives (AJA) American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Library, University of Pennsylvania (CAJSL) Chicago Historical Society (CHS) Chicago Jewish Archives (CJA) Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM) Maryland Historical Society (MHS) New York Public Library (NYPL) Philadelphia Jewish Archives Center (PJAC) Rutgers University Manuscripts and Special Collections (RU) 92nd Street Young Men’s/Women’s Hebrew Association (YM/WHA) n0tes t0 the intr0ducti0n 1. Rachel Rosalie Phillips diary, unprocessed collection, AJA. Rachel Rosalie Phillips was the daughter of a distinguished Jewish family with colonial roots in New York and Philadelphia. She spent several months during the Civil War with her uncle Adolphus Solomons in Washington, D.C., who as liquor purveyor to the Union army moved in elite social circles. It is not clear from the diary how old she was in 1864. However, as she was proposed to during her extended visit, it can probably be assumed she was at least fifteen years old. She was not yet married in 1866, at the time she wrote one of the random entries for that year. 2. Brumberg, The Body Project, and Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls. 3. Prell, Fighting to Become American. 4. Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers, and Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl. 5. For an introduction to these issues, see Conway, When Memory Speaks. 6. For a discussion of Jewish girls and diaries in a slightly later time period, see Brumberg, “The ‘Me of Me,’” in Antler, ed., Talking Back. In this article and in The Body Project, the generally accepted idea that keeping a diary is a mark of literacy and leisure associated with class privilege leads Brumberg to surmise that few, if any, Jewish girls wrote diaries until the fortunes of American Jewry rose during the early twentieth century. This assumption overlooks the sizable population of middle-class Jews already living in America prior to 1900, whose class and cultural inclinations led Jewish girls to keeping diaries much as their non-Jewish counterparts did. 7. Jennie Franklin Purvin (1873–1958) was the daughter of Henry B. and Hannah Mayer Franklin. She was born and educated in Chicago. She married Moses L. Purvin in 1899 and had two daughters. She became active in a variety of Chicago civic causes, including a successful campaign to clean up the city’s beaches. She was also active in the National Council of Jewish Women and the early Jewish camping movement. 8. January 21, 1864, Rachel Rosalie Phillips diary, unprocessed collection, AJA; Emily Frankenstein diary, Emily Frankenstein Papers, CHS; Jennie Franklin diary, Jennie Franklin Purvin Papers, MS 502, AJA; Amelia Allen diary, ACC 1603, PJAC; Ann Green diary, Robison Family Papers, P-678, AJHS; Marie Syrkin diary, Marie Syrkin Papers, MS 615, AJA; Mathilde Kohn diary, SC-6391, AJA. Amelia Allen (b. 1856) was the daughter of Lewis Marks and Miriam Arnold Allen, both from Philadelphia Jewish families associated for decades with 241 congregation Mikveh Israel. She taught in the Philadelphia public schools and became active in the Hebrew Sunday School Association founded by Rebecca Gratz. She was among the founders of the Young Women’s Union and took charge of its kindergarten and Household School in 1886. Ann Eleanor Green Robison (1904–1995) was born in Russia but immigrated with her family to Maine as a young child. She graduated from the University of Maine and spent decades as a journalist, educator, and philanthropist. She married Adolph Robison in 1927. Marie Syrkin (1899–1989) was the daughter of Nachman and Bassya Ossnos Syrkin. She came to the United States with her family as a nine-year-old. Her father was a prominent Zionist and her mother was also an activist. She began to write at an early age and later became a well-known literary scholar and Zionist, becoming one of the first professors at Brandeis University. She married three times, finally settling down with poet Charles Reznikoff in 1930. Emily Louise Frankenstein (b. 1899) was the daughter of American-born Jews of German descent. Her father, Victor Frankenstein, was a doctor and prominent member of the established Jewish community in Chicago. She grew up in Chicago and graduated from the Kenwood Loring School in 1918. She took classes at the University of Chicago. Mathilde Kohn immigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1866 as an adolescent after her father’s death. She and her mother Antonie and her sister lived with several relatives in North and South Carolina. 9...