The Diary of Emma Beck - Cover

This is the cover of Emma Beck's Diary of 1896. She bought it around1895, as there is an entry from a friend dated Christmas Eve of that year.

Emma Beck was not a relative or an ancestor, but was an average young woman, probably about twenty, in the middle of the 1890s. Even though she only made entries for twenty four days, her meandering, detail laden writing is a treasury, and a perfect account of what daily life was for many in the nineteenth century.

Emma's writing also contradicts many myths that people have as to the general atmosphere of the 1890s. Her writing can represent a wide, broad spectrum of young women at the time - and at no point to my knowledge in the diary does she mention the word "ankle", or "scandal." She wasn't condemning others, or scandalizing about whether she say somebody's ankle or anything of the sort. People back then were too busy staying alive to be scandalizing and condemning everything that we, today, say they did. It was only those who had nothing better to do than to sit around and tell everyone else how to live, that wrote or spoken such idiotic diatribes that have permanently scarred our image of the past.

In fact, this girl flirted (even though she says she has "Sworn off it.") Noticed men, and played cards. I wouldn't imagine she was looked down upon by others, rather, she seemed a popular girl.

She also doesn't make any mention of her mother in this diary, but only her father - who was an alcoholic. She mentions a girl named "Clara" but I believe this to be her sister (I can't remember if she outright says Clara was her sister.) Emma did not live in the vacuum that countless history textbooks and article writers say nineteenth-century women lived in. No one lived in a vacuum, not the average, working American. Male or female.

"But you can't use Emma Beck as an example of every young woman in America at the time. She might be an isolated case." One could say. Indeed - she can't represent every young person back then, thinking so would be unfair and unwise, but she did represent a large portion of the youth of the period. If one really wants to get into history, you have to consider every person and every group of people that lived from time to time. You can't just look at the rich and define a period by what they did and how they acted, just as you can't look at the poor and do the same. You have to take every person into consideration, because every being that lived in that period is an important element to the history of that period. If you ignore one person, then you ignore them all. Emma Beck was just one person, no one famous, not a celebrity, but she was an American girl in the nineteenth century, and that is enough for me to think of her as an important element of her time. Just as today, you and I, and every individual and their Aunt Lillian, will be part of history one hundred or two hundred years from now. Everyone is important in history, not just an isolated group or class or celebrity. Everyone.

And that's what makes Emma Beck's diary an invaluable document of her period.

Emma started her diary of 1896 on January first. So starting January first, I will upload a shot of the corresponding page in the diary, and transcribe her entry for that day, as a way to show what daily life was for her, and perhaps many young Americans one hundred and eleven years ago.