Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920

Introduction

Introduction Monday, January 4, 1864 In the evening we sat up in the nursery. Aunt Rachel told us several things that happened to her when she was young. She showed us a Journal that she wrote when she was engaged to get married. . . . I made up my mind that night to write one of the next year. I wonder if I will have patience to continue writing it. It takes but a very few minutes every day. I am sure I waste twice as much time as it would take me to write. . . . A friend of mind says I will go on writing for a month or two and will then stop but this book will speak for itself . Monday, April 13, 1864 What an Idiot I was to write a Diary. When Rachel Rosalie Phillips began keeping a diary during her prolonged stay in Washington, D.C., with her uncle and aunt, she took her commitment seriously. She wrote about the dresses she wore to synagogue services, the books she read, the Hebrew she learned from her uncle, the sewing projects she completed with her cousins, and the letters she wrote to her family in New York. Despite the skepticism of her unnamed friend, she did in fact make regular entries in the diary for more than a month or two. Her pleasure in attending social functions, her distaste for working in her uncle’s store, and her dismissal of the proposal of marriage from a non-Jewish Union military officer all tell the story of one individual’s experiences as an American Jewish girl during the Civil War.1 And then the story ends. It ends not with marriage or death, two of the life cycle passages that most typically disrupted the keeping of a diary, but with a cryptic self-denunciation followed only by a few brief entries in 1 April 1864 and December 1866 and a list of books read in 1866 and 1867. The modern reader can only take Rachel Rosalie Phillips’s word for what prompted her to start keeping a diary and can never really know what led her to condemn herself as an idiot and stop writing shortly thereafter. Yet it is in flashes from the past such as these that history is preserved . This is true on a personal or individual level, as is evident from the fact that at some point in her later life Rachel apparently presided over a transcription of her girlhood diary and annotated it in her own handwriting. It is also true on a social or collective level, as the voices of the girls and boys, the young women and young men who lived through, were part of, and contributed to history live on through their own words and deeds. Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860–1920 is first and foremost a history of girls. This book places adolescent girls, broadly defined as girls between the ages of twelve and twenty, at the center and explores the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century development of adolescence from their perspective. Other historians have done similar work, and this book owes an intellectual debt to Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Jane Hunter, and others who have not neglected girls when writing about girlhood .2 My goal is to explore the multidimensional experiences of girls by focusing on a particular group: adolescent Jewish girls in America during the latter part of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century. This book therefore also makes a contribution by looking beyond the urban, middle-class, northeastern Protestant girls, who have most often been the subjects of the history of American girls and girlhood . The tripartite identities of adolescent Jewish girls in the United States—female, Jewish, American—all had to be learned within the context of a time period when each of those identities was in flux. Their education , social lives, and religious experiences formed the basis of adolescent lives that Jewish girls believed were of great significance. Standing at the intersection of age, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion, adolescent Jewish girls in America struggled with their identities and their place in history. As adolescents, girls, Jews, and Americans, they deserve a place in history because of the ways their lives contribute to the story of profoundly gendered encounters between tradition and modernity. While the choices rarely seemed so stark to them, Jewish girls had the delicate task of managing their affinities for both Jewish...