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Introduction Susan Armitage y ou are about to meet two engaging young nineteenth-century women and share important experiences with them. Adeline and Julia Graham, daughters of a prosperous Michigan farm family, kept diaries during key moments in their young lives. Addie, the younger sibling , consciously kept a very personal and literary record of her adolescence (ages 15-19) during the years 1880-84. The next year, older sister Julia penned a less personal but equally interesting account of her great "adventure" homesteading in western Kansas. Taken together, these two diaries tell us many things about the opportunities and challenges facing white, middle-class women in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Adeline Graham's diary affords us a fascinating glimpse into the difficulties young girls of the middle class experienced as they confronted nineteenth-century notions of appropriate gender roles. Addie, (or Adam, as her family and best friends called her) was a "tomboy." In part the term described a joy in physical activity such as the riding and ice skating that Addie and many other young girls so enjoyed but that they were expected to give up as they became "young ladies." Young girls on farms and ranches like Addie who enjoyed the freedom and physicality of horseback riding may have most regretted the changes of adolescence. Agnes Morley Cleaveland, growing up on a New Mexico ranch during the same time period, saw a sharp divide between the free horsebackriding life of her childhood and her expected female adult role: ranching was, she said, "no life for a lady."l In Addie's account, the moment of truth occurs when her new sidesaddle arrives, without the leaping hom that would have allowed her to continue to jump fences. Bicycles, which 1 Agnes Morley Cleaveland, No Life for a Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941; reprinted Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977). 1 2 ADELINE AND JULIA were to allow the next generation of women some opportunity for physical activity, were not widely available until the 1890s, by which time Addie was irrevocably mature. "Tomboy" had another, less openly acknowledged meaning: it denoted a young girl who resisted expected notions of heterosexuality. Perhaps the best-known western tomboy was Willa Cather, who was growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, at about the same time Addie was in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Cather frequently dressed in boys' clothes and was known as Will to her friends. Like Addie, she aspired to be a doctor. As is now widely acknowledged by literary scholars, Cather maintained a lesbian preference throughout her life. Addie Graham married in her midtwenties , but her diary makes clear that in adolescence she had great difficulty figuring out how to deal with the opposite sex. At times, she wanted to be "one of the boys" while at others, especially in her temperance efforts with Jule Brown, she tried on the role of womanly reformer and at other times allowed herself to be mildly courted. Working out a satisfactory attitude toward young men is a major theme of Addie's diary. After her early rebellious outburst ("wish I was [a boy] ... but since I can't be a boy the next best thing is to act as much like one as possible."[vol. 1 p. 35]), she makes a slow but steady accommodation to contemporary norms of heterosexual behavior. In this accommodation, Addie was greatly aided by the novels of Louisa May Alcott, and especially by Little Women, published in 1868-69. Alcott's heroine Jo aspired to be an independent woman and was deeply suspicious of what literary scholars have termed "the romance plot." In creating the character of Jo, Alcott gave voice to the hesitations and worries that many young women on the verge of adulthood felt, and by voicing them made them acceptable. Addie clearly modeled herself on Jo, and felt authorized by this fictional creation to express her own very similar ambivalent thoughts about men and marriage. Addie followed Alcott's model in another sense as well: the diary is a literary creation to which Addie (an aspiring writer as well as a wishful doctor) devoted considerable time and effort. One reason why it is such delightful reading is that it is so consciously self-revelatory and descriptive . Addie wrote it with readers, and the Alcott novels, clearly in mind. This writerly urge makes the diary no less honest, but it is true that Addie's selfconsciousness makes it more accessible and understandable than many...

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