Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920

3. “Education in the Broadest Sense”: Alternative Forms of Education for Working-Class Girls

“Education in the Broadest Sense” Alternative Forms of Education for Working-Class Girls In 1892, when Rose Gollup was twelve years old, she and her unmarried aunt left their Belarus village to travel to America and join her father in New York. Though she went to work right away, even as a child she recognized that her opportunities in her new country were likely to be limited by illiteracy and ignorance unless she took action. Once her mother and other siblings arrived a year later, Rose tried to use the time she had previously devoted to keeping house for her father to attending evening classes in English. She had to skip dinner and hurry from the shop to the school, as the doors were locked once class began. She had trouble staying awake long enough to learn anything. When I came into the class, the lights, the warmth to which I was not used, and the girls reading in a slow monotonous tone, one after another would soon put me to sleep. Before I dropped off the first night I learned one word, “Sometimes.” It was the longest word on the page and stood out among the rest. In her exhaustion, she soon dropped out of the class. A few years later, accompanied by her sister this time, Rose tried again. She could “not bear to stay away. I had a feeling that the world was going on and I was being left behind. This feeling drove me on and I went to the class and learned painfully a word or two at a time.” Steeling herself against the humiliation of learning more slowly and reading aloud more awkwardly than all 3 105 her classmates, including her younger sister, Rose stayed in the class until she achieved reasonable literacy.1 Rose’s determination not to be left behind and to go to night school despite the obstacles exemplified not only her own determination to adapt to her new country but also an attraction toward Americanization widespread throughout American Jewry. Although historians have increasingly denounced the turn-of-the-century Americanization movement aimed at immigrants as the worst kind of social control, the experiences of Jewish girls in America suggest a considerably more complex situation. It was undoubtedly the case that the established Jewish community expressed near panic at the prospect of hundreds of thousands of new Jewish immigrants pouring into the United States without much idea of how to live, let alone succeed, in their new country. The established Jewish community would have preferred the new immigrants to follow their own nineteenth-century paths of acculturation and was constantly frustrated by their apparent inability or refusal to do so.2 However, it was also true that few turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States expecting or desiring to preserve their ways of life intact.3 Mass migration of eastern European Jews may have been prompted in large part by persecution and intolerance, but the mythic allure of America as a land of opportunity exerted a powerful pull that was a force of Americanization in its own right. The new Jewish immigrants impressed even the wariest of their acculturated Jewish predecessors by the “avidity with which they seek betterment from every source.”4 That tension among various segments of the American Jewish community existed testified not necessarily to a difference in kind about attitudes toward becoming American but a difference in degree and pace. With very few exceptions, Jews in America wanted to live as Americans. To many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jews in America, education seemed to be the most obvious path toward acculturation. One did not have to be born with innate “Americanness.” Conceiving of Americanization as a set of learned values, ways of behaving, and modes of thinking reinforced the possibilities of education for both recently arrived immigrant groups, who could integrate into American society by learning how to be American, and more established ethnic groups, whose own lifestyles proved that such integration was possible. In a country that prided itself on free public education, a solution that would combine education and Americanization seemed obvious. The best way to achieve Americanization was to target youth. Children were assumed to be more 106 | “Education in the Broadest Sense” adaptable and presumably less attached to certain kinds of traditionalism . They represented the future success of any community. Since they attended...