As this book opens, an 85-year-old grandmother is telling
her granddaughter how she became the woman she is. The grandmother, Addie Baum,
is The Boston Girl, daughter of a Jewish family, born in 1900 to parents who
were unprepared for America and its effect on their three daughters. Her
parents were Russian immigrants who were bewildered by this new world they were
occupying.
Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her
parents can’t imagine—a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and
new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of
going to college. She wants a career and to find true love. Her parents wanted
her to be a modestly dressed girl, to quit school and work to help support the
family; they considered it her responsibility to get married and have children
as soon as possible.
But Addie joins a library group for girls at a neighborhood
settlement house, stays in school as long as she can, has a disastrous early
relationship with a young man, and builds a career. She doesn’t marry until she
is 25, and then to a man she chooses for herself, not the man her mother wants
her to marry. The book follows her through a period of great change for women
in America.
333 pages
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