"A long and broad education": Jewish girls and the problem of education in America, 1860-1920

Journal of American Ethnic History

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 3-31

  Klapper, Melissa ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84864553384     PISSN: 02785927     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (114)

1. Jennie Rosenfeld Gerstley, "Reminisces," 59, 1931-1934, Box 2072, American Jewish Archives (AJA hereafter). Like most of the other girls and women whose voices structure the narrative of this study, Jennie Rosenfeld Gerstley wrote a memoir for her family but might have been startled to learn that anyone else would ever be interested in her life story. Throughout the body of the essay, the subjects are identified by their ages and the places where they grew up. Whenever more information about what became of these girls after their adolescence is available, it appears in the notes. While some of these girls did become particularly prominent members of their communities, it is important not to read their later success backwards into their earlier selves and especially not into the diaries they kept as adolescents. Their educational opportunities and conflicts are fully representative of the experiences available to Jewish girls of similar class and ethnic backgrounds at the turn of the century.
2. While schools participated in a process of modernization that transformed the form and extent of secondary education over the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century, the content of curricula and the physical location of schools reinforced class, gender, and race distinctions by offering different kinds of education to different groups of students at different levels of accessibility. Ironically, the ability of schools to preserve the social status quo only increased as more adolescents enrolled in high schools, the greater numbers of students allowing for more distinctions in targeted curricular offerings. For examples of contemporary sources (unconsciously) revealing the basic conservatism of secondary education throughout this period, even among authors pushing for expansion of educational opportunity, see Course of Study for Evening Schools (New York, 1895);
3. Myra Kelly, Little Citizens: The Humours of School Life (New York, 1904);
4. Mary Woolman, "Trade Schools and Culture," Educational Review, 37 (February 1909);
5. John M. Gillette, Vocational Education (New York, 1910);
6. L.B.R. Briggs, Girls and Education (Boston, 1911);
7. May Allinson, comp., The Public Schools and Women in Office Service (Boston, 1914);
8. Department of Education, City of New York, Division of Research and Reference, The School and the Immigrant (New York, 1915);
9. Ross L. Finney, The American Public School: A Genetic Study of Principles, Practices, and Present Problems (New York, 1921);
10. Mabelle Babcock Blake, et. al., The Education of the Modern Girl (Freeport, N.Y., 1929).
11. Relevant secondary studies include Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Boston, 1968);
12. Patricia Albjerg Graham, Community & Class in American Education, 1865-1918 (New York, 1974);
13. Samuel E. Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York, 1971)
14. William J. Reese, '"'Partisans of the Proletariat': The Socialist Working Class and the Milwaukee Schools, 1890-1920," History of Education Quarterly, 21 (Spring 1981): 3-30;
15. Julia Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools, Chicago, 1900-1950 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1982);
16. David J. Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Philadelphia, 1985);
17. Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York, 1985);
18. William G. Wraga, Democracy's High School: The Comprehensive High School and Educational Reform in the United States (Lanham, Md., 1994);
19. and David L. Angus and Jeffrey E. Mirel, The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890-1995 (New York, 1999). Much of this secondary literature is so critical of the conservative agendas of American schools that it often overlooks the identifiable benefits that even a "tainted" secondary education afforded virtually all students irrespective of class, race, or gender.
20. For further discussion of the effect of class and gender conventions on Jewish adolescents' education, see my dissertation, "'A Fair Portion of the World's Knowledge': Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920," (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2001), especially chapter two, 'It Wasn't Necessary for Girls': Domestic Economies, Vocational Education, and the Gender of Educational Opportunity" and chapter five, "'I Joined For Educational Reasons': Alternative Education for Jewish Teenagers."
21. On education and adolescence in the United States, see Victoria Brown Bissell, "Golden Girls: Female Socialization Among the Middle Class of Los Angeles, 1889-1910," in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950, ed. Elliott West and Paula Petrik (Lawrence, Kans., 1992), pp. 232-254;
22. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York, 1988);
23. John Demos, Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and Life Course in American History (New York, 1986);
24. Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1995);
25. Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York, 1999);
26. Harvey Kantor and David B. Tyack, Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education (Stanford, Calif, 1982);
27. Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977);
28. John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg, and Theodore Hershberg, "Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective," Journal of Family History, 1 (1976): 7-33;
29. Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York, 1996);
30. and Selwyn K. Troen, "The Discovery of the Adolescent by American Educational Reformers, 1900-1920: An Economic Perspective," in Schooling and Society: Studies in the History of Education, ed. Lawrence Stone (Baltimore, Md., 1976).
31. On the expansion of secondary education and the development of youth culture in high schools,:→ Susan B. Carter and Mark Prus, "The Labor Market and the American High School Girl, 1890-1928," Journal of Economic History, 42 (March 1982): 163-172;
32. Claudia Goldin, "America's Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century," Journal of Economic History, 58 (June 1998): 345-374;
33. Jurgen Herbst, The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education (New York, 1996);
34. Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (New York, 1964);
35. David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939 (New Haven, 1988);
36. John Modell, "Dating Becomes the Way of American Youth," in Essays of the Family and Historical Change, ed. Leslie Page Moch and Gary D. Stark (College Station, Tex., 1983);
37. William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, 1995);
38. Moses Stambler, "The Effect of Compulsory Education and Child Labor Laws on High School Attendance in New York City, 1898-1917," History of Education Quarterly, 8 (Summer 1968): 289-21
39. William Graebner, "Outlawing Teenage Populism: The Campaign Against Secret Societies in the American High School, 1909-1960," Journal of American History, 74 (September 1987): 411-35;
40. Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, Palladino, Teenagers;
41. Reed Ueda, Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
42. Sophie Ruskay, Horsecars and Cobblestones (New York, 1948), pp. 186-187.
43. Sophie was one of the earliest Jewish girls to attend what later became Hunter College, a popular institution of higher learning among Jewish girls in New York. See Ruth Jacknow Markowitz, My Daughter the Teacher: Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993).
44. Elliott Ashkenazi, ed. The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon: Growing Up in New Orleans, 1861-1862 (Baton Rouge, La., 1995), pp. 25, 48, 196, 216, 67, 388, 421, 385. Clara cordially loathed the Louisiana Normal School, her older sister's alma mater and an alternative to New Orleans's two other sex-segregated high schools, and took pleasure only in the patriotic activities with which the teacher training institution was involved. Her distaste for school stemmed largely from her aversion to studying and taking tests. As her preferred method of studying was to carry her books around "in hopes by so doing to instill it into my brain," she might have been justified in worrying about the "horror of horror" of examinations.
45. Fannie Hurst, Anatomy of Me: A Wanderer in Search of Herself (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), pp. 54, 75-77.
46. Fannie Hurst (1889-1968) was the only child of middle-class Jewish parents in St. Louis. After attending Washington University she began a very successful career as a novelist and playwright. She married pianist Jacques Danielson in 1915 and was active in New Deal politics as well as Jewish causes. See also Cynthia Ann Brandimarte, "Fannie Hurst: A Missouri Girl Makes Good," Missouri Historical Review, 81 (April 1987): 275-295.
47. Harriet Lane Levy, 920 O'Farrell Street (Garden City, N.Y., 1947), pp. 95-96.
48. 30 April, 4 June, 7 June 1918, Emily Frankenstein diary, Emily Frankenstein Papers, Chicago Historical Society (CHS hereafter).
49. Jennie Rosenfeld Gerstley, "Reminisces," 65, AJA.
50. Bella Cohen Spewack, Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side (New York, 1995), 86. Bella Cohen Spewack (1899-1990) came to New York as a toddler with her mother, who later remarried and had two more children. After graduating from high school in New York, she worked as a journalist and publicity agent. In 1922 she married Sam Spewack and began a successful collaboration with him as lyricists and librettists for the musical theater, producing such classics as Kiss Me Kate. She was a generous contributor to Jewish causes, especially organizations that helped children.
51. Kate Simon, A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence (New York, 1986), pp. 6-8. Kate Simon (1912-1990) came to America with her family at the age of four and grew up in the Bronx, an experience immortalized in her classic memoir Bronx Primitive. Partially estranged from her parents, she became interested in radical politics and married twice, having one daughter with her first husband. After her daughter's untimely death she began to travel the world and wrote a successful series of guidebooks that kept her constantly on the move.
52. Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, Fabric of My Life: The Autobiography of Hannah G. Solomon (New York, 1946), p. 30. Hannah Greenebaum Solomon (1858-1942) was the daughter of wealthy Chicago Jews. A serious student of music before she married Henry Solomon in 1879, she was the first Jewish member of the Chicago Women's Club and helped found the National Council of Jewish Women in the aftermath of the Jewish Women's Congress at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She was devoted to Reform Judaism and advocated woman suffrage. The mother of three children, she lectured widely all over the United States and was one of the most well-known American Jewish women of the turn of the century.
53. Marie Jastrow, Looking Back: The American Dream Through Immigrant Eyes (New York, 1986), p. 97.
54. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston, 1912), pp. 200-201. Mary Antin (1881-1949) was ten years old when her family emigrated from Poland to Boston. The precocious student immediately attracted attention and was still a teenager when her first book was published. In 1901 she married geologist Amadeus William Grabau, with whom she had one daughter, and then attended both Columbia's Teachers College and Barnard College. Her classic memoir The Promised Land became a bestseller and launched her into a literary career of mixed success that was marred by later personal problems.
55. "Twenty-Five Years of Progress with the Scholarship Association for Jewish Children, 1913-1938," 6, Box 2278m, Jennie Franklin Purvin Papers, MS 502, AJA.
56. Minnie Seltzer Schechter, "Memoirs: Three-Quarters of a Century of Life in Philadelphia," 1981, 3, SC 239, PJAC.
57. Gertrude Mandelbaum Ades, "Family History," 13, 1992, CHS.
58. For elaboration of the ways in which gender ideology shaped women's work and education, see Geraldine J. Clifford, "Marry, Stitch, Die, or Do Worse: Educating Women for Work" in Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education, ed. Harvey Kantor and David B. Tyack (Stanford, Calif, 1982), pp. 223-268.
59. Charlotte Baum, "What Made Yetta Work? The Economic Role of Eastern European Jewish Women in the Family," Response, 18 (Summer 1973): 32-38;
60. Rose Laub Coser, Laura S. Anker, and Andrew J. Perrin, Women of Courage: Jewish and Italian Immigrant Women in New York (Westport, Conn., 1999);
61. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York, 1985);
62. Kathie Friedman-Kasaba, Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity, and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York, 1870-1924 (Albany, N.Y., 1996);
63. Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990);
64. Paula E. Hyman, "Gender and the Immigrant Jewish Experience in the United States," in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, 2nd ed., ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit, 1999);
65. Judith E. Smith, Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940 (Albany, N.Y., 1985);
66. and Sydney Stahl Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988) all explore the relationship between education and work in Jewish immigrant women's lives.
67. May Weisser Hartman, I Gave My Heart (New York, 1960), pp. 25-26.
68. Jerome Carlin and Alexander Carlin, Just So You Know: An Oral History of Leo and Celia Carlin (Chicago: privately printed, 1991), p. 16.
69. Bess Horovitz Winograd, quoted in My Voice Was Heard, ed. Ida Cohen Selavan (New York, 1981), p. 93.
70. Bella Cohen Spewack, Streets, p. 66.
71. "How a Girl Can Be Most Helpful at Home," S.E.G. News, 8 April 1916;
72. Fanny Goldstein, editorial, S.E.G News, 8 January 1916,
73. Gertrude Mandelbaum Ades, "Family History," pp. 7-8, 1992, CHS.
74. Kate Simon, A Wider World, p. 4.
75. Maud Nathan, Once Upon a Time and Today, (New York, 1933), pp. 44-45. Maud Nathan (1862-1946) was born into a distinguished Sephardic family in New York, although she spent part of her adolescence in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In 1880 she married her cousin Frederick Nathan and began to divide her time between her role as society wife and mother and communal activist. After her only daughter's early death in 1895 she became more deeply involved in the New York Consumers League and the General Federation of Women's Clubs, also supporting woman suffrage as her sister Annie Nathan Meyer, founder of Barnard College, did not. A highly visible Jewish presence in a variety of women's organization, she encouraged her fellow Jews to translate their religious convictions into social activism. For more on mother-daughter relationships,
76. see Linda W. Rosenzweig, The Anchor of My Life: Middle-Class American Mothers and Daughters, 1880-1920 (New York, 1993).
77. Helen Arnstein Salz, "Sketches of an Improbable Ninety Years," 22,
78. interview conducted by Suzanne Riess for the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library and University of California, Berkeley, 1975, SC-10726, AJA.
79. Susan Leaphart, ed., "Montana Episodes: Frieda and Belle Fligelman: A Frontier-City Girlhood in the 1890s," Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 32 (Summer 1982): 90. In rare cases parents promoted college to recalcitrant daughters. Mary a Marines greatly disappointed her family when she turned down scholarships from several women's colleges and the money her parents had laboriously saved to finance her education. She had no desire to "endure another four years with girls" and felt that formal education had little to offer her.
80. Marya Marines, Out of My Time, (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), pp. 56-57.
81. For more on this relationship, see, for example, Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976);
82. Cremin, American Education;
83. and Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977).
84. During the 1889-1890 academic year there were 84,451 male public school students; 47,534 male private school students; 116,351 female public school students; and 47,397 female private school students in American secondary schools. Of these high school students 7,984 male and 6,915 female public school students and 11,220 male and 5,249 female private school students enrolled in the classical college preparatory course. 6,946 male and 7,374 female public school students 6,326 male and 3,323 female private school students enrolled in the scientific college preparatory course. The classical curriculum included more foreign languages. These statistics, which refer to white students only, are drawn from the Commissioner of Education's annual reports. Sara A. Burstall, The Education of Girls in the United States (New York, 1894), p. 196.
85. "Professional Tendencies Among Jewish Students in Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools," The American Jewish Year Book 5681/1920-1921 (Philadelphia, 1920), pp. 383-393.
86. Ruth Sapinsky, "The Jewish Girl at College, 1916" in The American Jewish Woman: A Documentary History, ed. Jacob Rader Marcus (New York and Cincinnati, 1981), pp. 702,705.
87. Bertha Szold's certificate of proficiency, signed by Ada E. Adams, 1891, L88.11.359, Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM hereafter). Many years later an article about Bertha Szold recounted the story. Baltimore Evening Sun, 21 December 1953, photocopy in Oheb Shalom Collection, L88.11.59, JMM. Bertha Szold Levin (1874-1958), a graduate of Bryn Mawr, was Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold's younger sister and a communal activist in her own right. She worked on Baltimore's Jewish Comment and became the first woman appointed to the Baltimore City school board.
88. Joseph L. and Lucille Eichengreen Block, Memoirs for Our Grandchildren, (Chicago: privately printed, 1989), pp. 43-44.
89. There is an extensive literature on women's higher education. In fact, the history of women's education has focused on higher education to the near exclusion of secondary education. See Glenn C. Altshuler, Better Than Second Best: Love and Work in the Life of Helen Magill (Urbana, III., 1990);
90. Patricia Smith Butcher, Education for Equality Women's Rights Periodicals and Women's Higher Education, 1849-1920 (Westport, Conn., 1989);
91. Elizabeth Seymour Esbach, The Higher Education of Women in England and America, 1865-1920 (New York, 1993);
92. John Mack Faragher and Florence Howe, eds., Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposium (New York, 1988);
93. Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York, 1977)
94. Lynn D. Gordon, "Annie Nathan Meyer and Barnard College: Mission and Identity in Women's Higher Education, 1889-1950," History of Education Quarterly, 26 (Winter 1986): 503-522
95. Lynn D. Gordon, "The Gibson Girl Goes to College: Popular Culture and Women's Higher Education in the Progressive Era," American Quarterly, 39 (Summer 1987): 211-230;
96. Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, 1990)
97. Patricia Albjerg Graham, "Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in Higher Education," Signs, 3 (Summer 1978): 759-773;
98. Elaine Kendall, "Peculiar Institutions": An Informal History of the Seven Sisters Colleges (New York, 1975);
99. Susan Levine, Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University of Women and the Challenge of Twentieth-Century Feminism (Philadelphia, 1995);
100. Amy McCandless Thompson, "Progressivism and the Higher Education of Southern Women," North Carolina Historical Review, 70 (July 1993): 302-325;
101. Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women (New York, 1959)
102. Sally Schwager, "Educating Women in America," Signs, 12 (Winter 1987): 333-372;
103. Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, 1985);
104. and Betty Spears, Leading the Way: Amy Morris Homans and the Beginnings of Professional Education for Women (Westport, Conn., 1986).
105. Jennie Mannheimer, "Higher Education for Women," address read at the Oratorical Exercises of the University of Cincinnati, reprinted in The Sabbath Visitor, 29 May 1891.
106. The American Jewish press tended to support women's higher education, albeit cautiously. The American Hebrew regularly ran notices about Jewish girls' achievements at Barnard. See, for example, American Hebrew, 20 November 1991. The weekly also promoted the possibility of opening evening college classes to immigrant women.
107. Lizzie Spiegel Barbe, Memoirs, Chicago Jewish Archives (CJA hereafter).
108. Undated draft of letter from Henrietta Szold, Baltimore, to John F. Goucher, Baltimore, Box 1, Folder 1, Henrietta Szold Papers, MS 38, JMM. The Alumnae Association was founded by the Class of 1897 in 1899, and Henrietta Szold was the first president. The Woman's College of Baltimore was later renamed Goucher College. Pamela A. Hartman, A History of the Western High School in Seven Decades, 1844-1913, (Baltimore, 1915), p. 67. Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) was the oldest and best religiously educated daughter of Rabbi Benjamin and Sophie Szold. Never married, she was a teacher in Baltimore, the executive secretary of the Jewish Publication Society, an early supporter of Zionism, and an anomalous female student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. After a 1909 journey to Palestine with her mother, she founded Hadassah, which became the largest Jewish women's organization in the world. As a Zionist executive in Palestine she worked to improve health and education services and also helped develop Youth Aliyah, a program which brought Jewish youth from Nazi Europe to Palestine.
109. Amelia Felsenthal Stern, "Aunt Meme's Story," 1967, SC-3414, AJA. Some of Amelia's new college friends introduced her to Al Stern, her future husband.
110. On "college girl" fiction see Sherrie Inness, "It is Pluck But is it Sense?' Athletic Student Culture in Progressive Era Girls' College Fiction," Journal of Popular Culture, 27 (Summer 1993): 99-123.
111. Sylvia Hirsch Lehman Stone, "Sylvia L. Stone: Lifelong Volunteer in San Francisco," 16, 19,
112. interview by Eleanor Glaser for Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library and the University of California, Berkeley, 1982, SC-1298, AJA.
113. Sunday Jewish Courier, 14 November 1920,
114. quoted in The American Jewish Woman, ed. Marcus, pp. 628-629.