Sherman 100 Years in the Life of an American Girl

True Stories 1910 - 2010
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9904527-1-3
Verlag: SZS Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 315 Seiten

The fascinating story of a century through the eyes of American girls under age 13 in every decade from 1910 to 2010. In over 50 beautifully crafted narratives, women and young girls born between 1907 and 2001 describe the life and times that are new in every decade and vanishing just as fast. The author collected most of the stories by interview and retains the girls' voices as they tell about far more than playing with paper dolls and hearing the first radios open the door to the world. They are dancing in the streets at the end of WW I, climbing trees in a skirt and pantaloons, using the first telephone. They lose Japanese American friends to internment camps and undergo nightly blackouts during WW II. One girl escapes Saigon as a 5-year-old at the end of the Vietnam War to grow up in Dad's rural Georgia. As the 20th century goes on, American Bandstand gives way to MTV and family life includes single moms and weekend dads, stepfamilies and open adoption. Sex education classes amuse, stress is treated with medication, and the entertainments of the digital age compete with TV. By 2010 girls have role models in leadership and contribute to culture like never before. In 1931 a girl's big achievement was winning at jacks; in 2009 it was coordinating a National Day of Silence at school. Each chapter includes fun pop culture highlights - did you know peppermint Life Savers were inspired by the life saving devices used in the Titanic disaster of 1912? - and a short history of the decade's events in politics, education, medicine, technology and entertainment. These young girls of different races and classes show American culture at its truest as they describe life-altering inventions and shifting social codes across ten decades. They reveal what's universal and what's unique about social challenges and racial prejudices, desires and disappointments, hopes and losses. It's history in motion powered by the personal.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sherman, Suzanne

Leseproben

The 1910s The twentieth century is off to a running start in the Progressive Era, with extraordinary inventions that will change lives forever. Who are the young girls residing in the country’s forty-eight states in 1910? To a great extent they’re first- and second-generation immigrants and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of pioneers and slaves. Half the country’s population, some 45 million people, live rurally and in small towns. New York tops the list as the biggest city, with Chicago and Philadelphia next in line, as they will be for decades. Horse-drawn carriages and wagons travel wide, dusty streets and bumpy dirt roads. School buses are horse-drawn. Lamps are gas- or kerosene-powered until electricity comes in to light homes, and coal is used for heat. Wood-burning stoves also heat homes, and bake bread, cook meals, warm bathwater, and heat irons. Indoor plumbing is rare outside of cities, and outhouses are the norm at homes and schools. Water is hand-pumped from wells. The telephone is new and still fairly rare in homes in this decade. How do people stay in touch? By writing letters, which are dropped off and collected at local post offices. Long-distance mail is transported by horse-drawn wagon or train. Schools are mostly one-room buildings, with all eight grades learning together, and for most, education ends after eighth grade. New high schools are built in smaller cities, but it won’t be until 1935 that 40 percent of the country’s population holds a high school diploma. Health is a concern in these years before antibiotics and vaccines, and contagious diseases like smallpox, measles, rheumatic fever, whooping cough, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and pneumonia threaten or take many lives. The Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 kills a quarter of the U.S. population, many of them children. World War I is on, and in 1917 the country enters it, with brothers and other relatives shipping overseas to fight. Some never return. History is made again when the war ends in 1919, the same year American women gain the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment after a seventy-year battle. Once the 19th Amendment is made law, girls witness great change as their mothers not only vote at election time but become more actively involved in society in general. For now, though, homemaking is women’s primary duty, and daughters are at their mother’s sides helping with chores and childcare. Babies are born at home, not in hospitals, and families tend to be large and often include live-at-home grandparents. Children may help out the family, too, by working in factories to bring home a bit of money. There are no employment age restrictions, and child labor is attractive to businesses because it’s cheap. At home, girls help out in the kitchen, where bread is baked along with pies and cakes, and summer fruits and vegetables are canned for the rest of the year. Laundry is typically a two-day event, using water that’s hand-pumped from the well and heated on the wood-burning stove. Clothes are stirred in big buckets with shaved bar soap or laundry soap powder, then scrubbed, squeezed, and hung on long clotheslines to dry. The second day is ironing day, using weighty irons heated on the stovetop. Mom also spends a lot of time at the sewing machine, as most clothing is made at home on pedal-powered sewing machines, and girls are right there to help. The pace of progress picks up mid-decade when families leave their horse-drawn buggies in the dust, replacing them with the new “horseless carriage” — the automobile, which bumps along unpaved wagon roads at an unprecedented fifteen miles an hour. Automobiles built on Henry Ford’s first-ever assembly lines are the new horsepower, and by the end of the decade, when the price of cars drops significantly, more of them are in use and traffic lights go up in cities and towns. In 1910, girls’ skirts and dresses hang to just below the knee. Blouses are simpler, with less fluff and ruffle than in earlier years, and fabrics are lighter and available in more colors. Buttons and tie-up laces are the only fasteners (no snaps or zippers), and they’re used for underclothes, too — petticoats and pantaloons. Leather button-up high tops and patent leather Mary Jane’s are common shoes. Entertainment in this decade is self-made, with hopscotch, hide and seek, tag, skipping ropes (jump ropes), spinning tops, tree swings, and handmade dolls and paper dolls some favorite ways to have fun. Books are expensive, with hand-set type, and so are hand-cranked phonographs, for listening to wax cylinder records that play classical music and opera. If a family has a piano, girls often learn to play it for their own entertainment and to entertain at family gatherings. When Dad has any pennies to spare, a girl may get to go to the candy shop for a bagful of penny candies, which are sold by the weight from bins. Chocolates aren’t available year-round in these days before refrigeration, but if she’s lucky, a girl may find a box of the new individually hand-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses or the new Tootsie Roll, which is “Made Clean, Kept Clean, Wrapped Dust Proof”!
    What Else Is New? Coca-Cola is sold in bottles. A chocolate manufacturer invents a “summer candy” that doesn’t melt: Pep-O-Mint Life Savers. The wrapping is cardboard, the shape is inspired by the life-saving devices used in the Titanic disaster of 1912. Girl Scouts of America is formed. Jell-O is a packaged dessert mix that comes in a few fruit flavors. The number of circuses traveling on rails reaches a high point, with more than thirty shows touring the country. Small “prizes” — toys like temporary tattoos and decoder rings — are in every box of Cracker Jack. Silent movies include The Little Princess, starring Mary Pickford, Tarzan of the Apes, Charlie Chaplin comedies, and a dramatic twenty-episode serial, The Perils of Pauline. “Cut-outs” appear in weekly newspapers — paper dolls with cut-out paper tab clothing options and paper farm animals that can be pasted to cardboard before cutting so they’ll stand. Marshmallows! Marshmallow Fluff, a homemade cream first sold door-to-door by its creator, is used on everything from breakfast cereals to sandwiches. Moon Pies are thick with marshmallow sandwiched between two chocolate-covered cookies. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, and The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Raggedy Ann debuts in Raggedy Ann Stories, by Johnny Gruelle. The Tinkertoy Construction Set. Oreo cookies come out. Vicks VapoRub, belladonna, and homemade mustard plasters are cold remedies. Kewpie dolls. Kool-Aid starts as a soft drink syrup (“Kool-Ade”) available through a mail-order company. Dolly Dingle Paper Dolls (Dolly Dingle of Dingle Dell) appear in one of the first popular women’s magazines, Pictorial Review, in 1913.   10 Top Girls’ Names Mary, Helen, Gladys, Elizabeth, Frances, Virginia, Hazel, Mildred, Anna, Ruth     Big Savage Mountain Mary Kent — Frostburg, Maryland Mary was born on May Day in 1914 in a coal mining town on Big Savage Mountain. Her father, an Irish Catholic, was born nearby, in Frost Mines. He was the second youngest of fifteen children, and like his brothers, he started working in the coal mines at thirteen. Her mother, a Methodist, was born in West Virginia, and she went to school through the eighth grade. Mary’s older brother, Larry, was four years old when she was born, under the care of the local doctor. His wife performed midwifery duties.
 
The day I was born, the scent of pear blossoms perfumed the air and the mines were closed because it was a Saturday. Dad went up the hill to summon the doctor, who arrived with his wife in his Ford automobile. While everyone else was busy, against orders, Larry crossed the street to the meadow and picked a bunch of dandelions. He presented them to our mother when he was invited into her bedroom to meet his new baby sister. To this day when I see the bright yellow flowers I feel a tinge of love for this kind and caring act. Not long after I was born Mother was back to taking care of the home and family, and as soon as I could walk, I was right there at her side. My father worked long hours at the mines. The rent on our home was $5 a month, not a small sum. At 3:30 every afternoon Mother dragged a wooden tub out of the cellar and heated water in big kettles on the stove so Dad could take his bath when he got home from the mines. Then she went back to washing clothes, cleaning house, preparing dinner, or baking bread or pies. She baked six loaves of bread twice a week so Dad had sandwiches to take to work in his lunch bucket. We had no electricity in my early years. Our substitute for an icebox was a pantry adjoining the kitchen, and that’s where the pies and breads were put to cool. We had freshly made fruit pies of all kinds in that unheated room, and millions of green snap beans, in summer. We would sit on the front porch swing and snap and snap and then Mother would put the...