ch the same could be said of many of the adult summer camps that sprang up during the interwar period to provide affordable vacations for single men and women in their twenties. While some adult camps like Boiberik, Lakeland, and Unity House, the ILGWU-sponsored facility, stressed their educational programming (and their older, married clientele), others, such as Camp Utopia in the Poconos or the fictitious South Wind popularized in Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar, seemed entirely given over to personal fulfillment. “Part of that vacation at camp had as its goal sex on the part of the boys and marriage on the part of the girls,” reminisced Moss Hart, who in the 1920s served as Camp Utopia’s social director. “It was a game of endless variations—a stately minuet of lying and pretense,” which often crescendoed into marriage.
Having found a mate, many married people, ironically enough, found themselves without one for much of the summer. By and large, gainfully employed middle-class and working-class men of the prewar era could not afford to take a lengthy vacation. Sending their wives and children off to the country for an entire summer, the men joined their families only on weekends, arriving with great fanfare on the Friday evening or Saturday afternoon train—the so-called husband train—and leaving in a more subdued fashion on Sunday night. In their absence, Jewish leisure society was, de facto, a gendered affair. By the sea or in the mountains, at the grandest hotel or in the most modest kochalein, women and children dominated the scene.
Other vacation spots, like those maintained by the Jewish Working Girls’ Vacation Society, practiced a deliberate form of gender segregation. Established in 1892 by Esther Jane Ruskay and Selina Greenbaum on the model of the “unsectarian” Working Girls Vacation Society, the New York organization provided affordable vacations for those least likely to afford them: single, working Jewish women. For three dollars a week, milliners, stenographers, and machine workers—over one thousand women a season—enjoyed a respite from their ordinary routine amid the “cheery hospitality” of the society’s two vacation homes, one in Bellport, Long Island, and the other in the Adirondacks. At these facilities, staffed and inhabited entirely by women, the “Jewish working girl enjoys all the advantages of mountain air or seashore.... Here her health and her pleasures are studied, her comfort provided for and her social well-being considered.” A proven success, the Jewish Working Girls’ Vacation Society inspired the formation of similar societies throughout the country. The Welcome House Vacation Home in Long Branch, New Jersey, for example, catered to the recently arrived immigrant woman. “These girls feel happier among themselves rather than being with English-speaking girls,” explained Carrie Wise, its director. In Chicago, the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women maintained a summer sewing school in which students capped their education with a two-week group vacation. The Philadelphia Vacation Home for Jewish Working Girls sought to acquaint city-bred girls with the beauties of botany, giving them “a glimpse into the wonders of mother nature.” Frolicking in the surf or catching butterflies, formerly fatigued, downtrodden young women reemerged as “care-free, merry-hearted sprites.” Small wonder, then, that contemporary observers likened the Jewish Working Girls’ Vacation Society to a “truly American fairy tale.”
Several philanthropic organizations helped the underprivileged find respite from “sultry” city streets by exposing them to the cooling breezes of “marine ozone” or mountain air. “Summer Outings for the Jewish Poor,” explained the National Conference of Jewish Charities in 1904, “form an especially valuable branch of what is technically known as ‘preventive’ charity.” Claiming that “Jewish faults and failings can be traced to their being cooped up in towns,” conference officials argued for programmatically acquainting tenement residents with the joys of rural life. “You canno