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“Such a World of Pleasure” Adolescent Jewish Girls and American Youth Culture On a typical day in New Orleans during the Civil War, sixteen -year-old Clara Solomon rose early to go to the Louisiana Normal School. She dawdled over breakfast and left the house reluctantly, complaining of poor health. She would have much preferred to stay home with her mother. At school, she noticed the dwindling number of students who continued to attend classes in the midst of occupied New Orleans. After a school day spent in lessons on deportment as well as geography, arithmetic, elocution, and literature, Clara walked slowly home with friends, their usual after-school gatherings curtailed by the exigencies of war. When she got home, she discussed her day with her mother, sewed, played the piano, and waited to see if her father would be able to return from his business travels that evening. She accompanied her mother to pay a call on their Jewish neighbors and went home in time for a supper meager by prewar standards. After supper, she settled down to read and do some schoolwork, waiting impatiently for her sister to come upstairs to their room and companionably “book it” with her in their diaries. As she wrote her diary entry for the day, she privately cursed the war and all despicable Yankees. She and her sister washed up, returned to their diaries for a few more lines scribbled before bed, blew out the candles, and went to sleep.1 Half a continent and half a century away, eighteen-year-old Emily Frankenstein hopped out of bed early to get started on her day in Chicago during World War I. She joined her father for breakfast and helped pack him up for the day at his medical office. After getting dressed and briefly practicing her piano exercises, she walked to the Kenwood-Loring School, where she and her friends enjoyed a cozy mix of the classes and 5 185 school activities taken for granted by healthy high school girls. After school, she took the tram downtown with several of her Jewish neighborhood friends who did not attend her exclusive private school. A little while later, she made an excuse to her friends and left to meet her beau Jerry, home on leave from his post as a quartermaster in the American army. When they returned to Emily’s house, they stayed outside and spooned on the porch swing until her father came out and suggested that it was time for Jerry to leave. With his departure went all thoughts of the war. Emily had not been home all day and stayed up for a while to read, do homework, and update her diary. Moving quietly around the room she shared with her sister, she prepared for bed in silence and fell asleep almost immediately.2 The girlhood experiences of Clara and Emily appeared to differ in many respects. The Civil War affected Clara much more directly than World War I did Emily, especially in terms of the dislocations and straitened financial circumstances of the Solomon family. Clara spent much of her day at home with her family, while Emily spent most of her time with friends outside her house. The schooling Clara received at the Louisiana Normal School in 1861 was considerably less rigorous than the education offered to Emily at her private girls’ school in 1918. Clara sewed daily as part of the household economy, whereas if Emily found time to sew at all, she was most likely to knit something as a present for her father or her suitor. Girls in New Orleans during the early 1860s spent a minimum of time walking around by themselves because of both social convention and physical danger in the tightly guarded city. Girls in Chicago during the late 1910s enjoyed more freedom to travel about the city. Despite the significant gaps between Clara and Emily’s experiences, they also shared a great deal. They both kept diaries as a matter of course. Both played the piano and read for pleasure on a daily basis. They both shared bedrooms with their sisters. Though they spent their time with friends differently, both held their friends in great esteem and enjoyed the activities that took place in peer environments. They both had close relationships with their families. Most important, both identified with other girls they knew, and they viewed their various peer activities as means of coming to terms with their...

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