"Adeline and Julia Graham, daughters of a prosperous Michigan farm family, kept diaries during key moments in their young lives. Addie, the younger sibling, consciously kept a very personal and literary record of her adolescence (ages 15-19) during the years 1880-84. The next year, older sister Julia penned a less personal but equally interesting account of her great "adventure" homesteading in western Kansas.

Taken together, these two diaries tell us many things about the opportunities and challenges facing white, middle-class women in the latter part of the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.