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Conclusion Nothing demonstrates so clearly the complicated route adolescent Jewish girls took toward adulthood and individuality than the ways in which they embraced American youth culture yet balanced their participation with a measure of traditionalism. Playing the piano, reading Shakespeare, and joining the school glee club offered only indirect threats of acculturation to the Jewish values of most girls, especially those exposed to religious education that explicitly encouraged a melding of Jewish and American identity. Girls adhered to no narrow ideological line, nor did they march along a one-way street, moving ever closer to modernity and further from tradition. Their complex, individual identities were far more likely to evolve from a series of intersections in a spiral course where tradition and modernity merged and diverged. The continuing importance of religious identity in their lives, however observed, both inhibited and encouraged their uneven progress toward a destination never final, as Americanness and Jewishness challenged and changed each other. The later lives of adolescent diarists Fannie Allen of Philadelphia and Bella Weretnikow of Seattle illustrate the complexity of coming of age on the twisting paths traveled by Jewish girls in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. As she grew older, Fannie found her youthful ambitions to do something extraordinary with her life fade. She confessed to her diary in 1875, “Strange to say, notwithstanding all my former ambition to be something great, I would now be contented to be a wife and mother, which, now that I am wiser, seem to be what I was intended for.”1 Fannie’s ambitions may have faded, but they never disappeared entirely. After spending well over a decade frustrated and unhappy as a consequence of her persistently single state, in 1887, she finally married Moses de Ford at the age of thirty-two. With the encouragement of her husband, a student at Jefferson Medical College, she entered the Women’s Medical 235 College of Pennsylvania. After they completed their training, they opened a practice together and campaigned for better hygiene conditions while raising three children. Fannie also became a supporter of woman suffrage . In some ways Fannie’s commitment to service resembled that of her grandmother Anna Marks Allen, who with her husband Lewis had brought up seven children while she was heavily involved with the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society and the Philadelphia Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum. In other ways Fannie’s combination of domestic and professional life inspired a generation of suffragists, including her own daughter, Miriam Allen de Ford. Though her secular career modernized the call to service that her grandmother had heeded within the Jewish community, her role as wife and mother and her devotion to Judaism maintained important elements of traditionalism in her life as well. Fannie indeed became “something great”: an accomplished woman whose adolescent wavering between tradition and modernity was ultimately resolved , not by a choice of one over the other, but by a sustained commitment to both.2 Just as the context of women’s educational, professional, and family options had changed over the decades between Fannie Allen de Ford and her grandmother, they also changed within individual’s lives. Bella Weretnikow spent most of her adolescence furiously studying, determined to pursue the education she was sure would make her life as an American girl and woman nothing like her illiterate immigrant mother’s life. Her mother supported her in this ambition, even at the risk of alienating Bella’s father and stepfather, both of whom preferred a more traditional future for their daughter. Though she decided early on to study law, Bella had some reservations about going into a field so unusual for women at the dawn of the twentieth century. She decided not to go into prosecution, “as that [was] too masculine” and therefore too unconventional even for her own comfort.3 After graduating from the University of Washington, Bella did attend law school, passing the bar in 1901. To celebrate , she and her classmates dined out on the local delicacy of oysters, a meal flagrantly transgressive of the Jewish laws of kashrut. One of the first women and first Jews to become an attorney in the far West, Bella certainly seemed to have achieved her goal of utterly rejecting her mother’s traditional identity for her own modern one. Bella began a successful practice in Seattle and was featured in an American Israelite story that elicited a congratulatory message from an236 | Conclusion [18.220.160.216] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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