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

"I like the wonderful voices of the women and the author's own valuable opinions as a member of this group. This is her story as well as theirs and she is responsive to nuances in how they answer her questions in ways that are revealing. Women have been ignored in previous histories of Brownsville, and Ford does a fantastic job of retrieving their past for us. Ford has broken new ground here, and done it in a way that links her fresh story with what is known about American women's history. This is a distinctive ethnic story that is important in itself as well as being central to studies of American Jews, gender in the city, and working-class history." — Deborah Dash Moore, author of B'nai B'rith and the Challenges of Ethnic Leadership"The book has rich and interesting information that really does not exist in other works on American Jewish life. Women who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s in Brownsville, New York are a fascinating cohort and the author has learned a great deal about them, their hopes, aspirations, and reflections on life." — Riv Ellen Prell, University of Minnesota