Childhood and Youth

Abstract

The material in this chapter comes from three main sources: (1) “Mor”, Elise’s memoir about her mother Birgit, (2) her first journal which includes about 100 pages written during a five-month period from June to November, 1935, and (3) her second journal which includes a scant 14 pages written from November, 1939 to July, 1940 while she was in college. Reading these journals gave me a new way of looking at Elise, as an earnestly passionate adolescent and young adult. At the age of 15, Elise’s main passion outside of the vicissitudes of adolescent male and female relationships that she recorded in her journal (not reflected in the selections I have chosen) was playing the cello with a trio that included two other young string players. This passion continued when she went to New Jersey College for Women (now Douglas College), and that, along with the fact that she graduated in 3 years rather than the usual 4 probably accounts for the lack of journal-keeping during that time. Elise kept no journals of her early married life after she married Kenneth Boulding in 1941 and I was born in 1947. I have included a copy of their 1945 Christmas letter to give a flavor of their early married life.