num_pages: 153
description: Julia A Notable Woman is the biography of a woman who left her mark on urban immigrant education, the public schools, the social work profession, and Reform Judaism. A pioneering educator whose base was in New York City but whose influence was national, she belongs with the coterie of progressive women such as Jane Addams and Lillian Wald who were concerned with the immigrant children who were pouring into American cities at the turn of the century. More than most of her contemporaries, however, Julia Richman had a special rapid Americanization of the "little aliens" in order to push them into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible.Julia Richman was an unusual woman for her time and place. She was born in New York City in 1855, the middle child in a family of five children born to German-speaking Jewish immigrants from Prague. Her parents were middle class and conventional. They expected their daughters to be modestly educated and thoroughly domesticated, and they hoped they would make early marriages to men from backgrounds similar to their own. Her sisters fulfilled their parents' expectations - but Julia did not. A rebel from early childhood, she used intelligence, opportunism, and determination to shape a remarkable career as an educator and Americanizer.Physically, Richman lived and worked in New York; but her influence was much wider. As a result of her work with the Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants who arrived in large numbers from 1880 to 1914, she gained a nationwide reputation as an expert on the immigrant child, chairing various National Education commissions and acting as a consultant to educators in other cities that were experiencing problems similar to those of the New York City schools. Although she was a political conservative and not a feminist, she was an educational radical for her day. Among the innovations she instituted in the schools under her jurisdiction (later emulated by others), were the homogeneous grouping of students according to ability, promotion whenever a child demonstrated mastery of the assigned curriculum, and special classes for non-English-speaking children recently arrived in the United States.There were contradictions in Richman's attitudes. She won a bruising battle to establish the YWHA, was a founding member of the National Council of Jewish Women, and knew most of the settlement workers who labored among the Jewish poor, yet she did not share the political views of many who worked with her - most of whom saw the vote for women as an important goal. Her conservative focus did not impair her career, however. By working for children - and thus remaining within the sphere of women - Julia Richman somewhat surreptitiously became a leader and achieved prominence in a society that did not encourage leadership and innovation for the "gentle sex."
language: English
title: Julia Richman: A Notable Woman
titlecomplete: Julia Richman: A Notable Woman
publisher: Balch Inst for Ethnic Studies