Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
From 8-year old Hilda Firestone’s diary:
This morning was terrible. Uncle Harold, he is my youngest uncle and he still lives here, all the others are married and have their own homes. Well, Uncle Harold came into my room and pointed a dagger at me. I screamed so loud that everyone in the room came running, and even after Uncle Harold showed me that it wasn’t a real dagger but a rubber one. I couldn’t stop screaming. After that, I threw up all over the bed and then everyone began screaming at Uncle Harold. I hate him. He is always doing things like that. I always try and remember not to be alone with him. Once he came into my room wearing his pajamas. He opened the pants of his pajamas and showed me something on his body. It looked like a piece of rope, only it was pink like his skin. Then he made me put my hand on it, and then he made me promise not to tell anyone. I wanted to tell Alma, because I wanted to ask her if all the boys had them, but I was afraid to tell her. When I think of it, it frightens me, and my heart beats so fast, I don’t know why. I didn’t have to go to school today because I was sick from the dagger, so I had breakfast in bed, only I couldn’t eat, and Aunt Tillie brought me my crayons and a new fashion book to color.
Uncle Harold would have been in his early 20s years old in 1912. At the least, he delighted in torturing his sensitive niece, at worst, he was a sexual predator. I imagine that Alma was the only person Hilda felt safe enough to talk to, and even that was impossible. Alma was probably closest to Hilda in age in that household, and someone she could identify with and trust. I found a help wanted ad in the July 10, 1911 edition of the San Francisco Examiner:
“GIRL for general housework and cooking. Apply with reference. Mrs. J. Levy, 1328 Pierce st.”
I imagine that this is the job Alma applied for. Earlier want ads when Hilda was a baby included childcare, but by 1912 Hilda was a schoolgirl and presumably it was felt that she needed little looking after. Looking through other listings, a “girl” could have been as young as 12.
Sadly, Hilda’s experience would not have been unusual. Girls weren’t told or taught anything about human sexuality or anatomy, or of predatory behavior. She would have had no idea how to respond to her Uncle Harold.
In a memoir about her childhood, my grandmother Helene wrote about being 15 years old in Bohemia in 1902 and being flashed on the street by a strange man: “where I before thought that the difference in sexes consisted mainly in the garments and that men have beards and mustaches and women busts”. She came home quite upset and feeling awful. Overnight, she found she had been bleeding. She came to the conclusion that somehow the man had made her pregnant. She was sure she had had a miscarriage (although she didn’t have a word for it), like the one that caused her eldest sister Ida’s death a few months earlier, and believed she would die soon too. Helene’s mother had too been preoccupied with Ida’s death and caring for the Zerzawy children to pay attention to her youngest child: “‘You could read everything at four years old and do not know anything about the facts of life.’” Like Hilda, Helene couldn’t tell her mother the story of the flasher, just of the other events of the day: “My mother explained to me how senseless my fear was, but I didn’t tell her that horrible encounter with that devil and that I still was afraid that my shock had something to do with my menstruation on the same day.”
How sad to carry such fears and self-blame for years. And that this was (and is) true for innocent girls everywhere.
