The Girls, livre ebook

Tells the stories of the Jewish women who came of age in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 1950s—the choices they made, and the boundaries within which they made them.

Tells the stories of the Jewish women who came of age in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 1950s—the choices they made, and the boundaries within which they made them.

This book tells the stories of the Jewish women who came of age in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 1950s. Through in-depth interviews with more than forty women, Carole Bell Ford explores the choices these women made and the boundaries within which they made them, offering fresh insights into the culture and values of Jewish women in the postwar period. Not content to remain in the past, The Girls is also a story of women who live in the present, who lead fulfilling lives even as they struggle to adjust to changes in American society that conflict with their own values and that have profoundly affected the lives of their children and grandchildren.

Preface
Reclaiming our Past
Acknowledgments
Prologue
They Still Call Themselves "the Girls"
Profiles of Two Brownsville Women
Chapter 1
Missing
Fifty-One Percent of the Stories
Chapter 2
Brownsville
The Nurturing Neighborhood
Chapter 3
Jewish Women
Mothers
Chapter 4
Coming of Age in the Forties
Choices
Chapter 5
The Cult of Domesticity
Coming of Age in the Fifties
Chapter 6
Unfinished Business
Becoming Your Own Person
Chapter 7
Conclusions
Looking Back
Epilogue
Daughters
New Dilemmas
Appendix
Notes
Glossary
Sources
Index