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Writing the History of Jewish Women

May 1996

by Pamela S. Nadell, Ph.D., American University

Titles like "Jewish Women of Biblical and Medieval Times" (1893) and "Jewish Women Through the Ages" (1937) disclose a trail of historical writing about Jewish women going back more than a century.  Often these early "historical" essays deduce some rather astonishing interpretations.  For example, at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition's Congress of Jewish Women--the occasion for the founding of the first Jewish women's club, the National Council of Jewish Women--Louise Mannheimer reported that those
seeking the prophetess Huldah found her in the College, a sure sign that ancient Israelites had no policy of restricting "even married women('s)" access to higher education.  In the 1950s, the writer and editor Trude Weiss-Rosmarin convinced that "The 'Declaration of Equality' of woman is laid down in the very first chapter of Scriptures," called for amending Jewish law to end the plight of the agunah (a woman unable to end an untenable marriage of her own accord).

 

Undoubtedly, these early essays were largely motivated, if not always articulated, as integral to the project of expanding women's roles within contemporary Jewish life.  The sense that Jewish women in the past enjoyed equality and esteem in their communities became fundamental arguments employed by those pushing the parameters of women's roles, whether they yearned to join a club or to amend Jewish law.  Early female "historical" writers sought to prove, just as male Jewish communal leaders then did, that the adaptations to modernity they advanced were firmly rooted in or, at the very least, not opposite to the course of Jewish history.

 

Not surprisingly, even more recent historical investigation of Jewish womanhood grew from corresponding motives.  In the 1970s, personal politics, in this case, feminism and "anger at being deprived of the opportunity to express herself fully as a Jew," became the impetus that led another writer, the pioneering historian Paula Hyman, to question why the history of Jewish women had not yet been written.

 

Hyman's response, the publication, with Charlotte Baum and Sonya Michel, of The Jewish Woman in America (1975) launched a new stage in the writing of Jewish woman's history.  In the late 1970s and 1980s an avocational project born out of the political was recast as a mainstream area of historical inquiry.  As increasing numbers of women became professors of history, women's history emerged as a flourishing sub-discipline.  This should not be a surprise since the historian's own particular nexus of the personal and political has often led to new subjects, as was true for the sons of the "uprooted" who studied immigration.  Now a new generation of historians-including some formally trained in Jewish history--juxtaposed overlapping interests in their profession, in women, and in Jews to ask questions about the history of Jewish women.

 

Two decades later the fruits of this scholarship have dramatically reshaped the contours of Jewish history by investigating subjects hitherto ignored--Jewish women's voluntarism, their suffrage campaigns, consumer activism, early feminism, female experiences with work, and especially the lives of Jewish girls and women as immigrants in America.  This research, from those seeking knowledge for its own sake, thus stands
independently--formally, although by no means utterly, divorced from the political motivations behind the early writing on Jewish women in the past.

 

Current research on women and gender in Jewish history proceeds in two directions.  The first remains compensatory, redressing the scholarly imbalance that ignored one half of the Jewish people to subsume all experience under the category of male.  It reclaims women prominent in their own time to stand alongside the better known Henrietta Szold.  It also sends our attention to projects pioneered by Jewish women--hitherto overlooked as of limited significance--their organizations, philanthropies, and spiritual lives.  Other work applies new methodologies of feminist scholarship to the writing of Jewish history.  Incorporating the prism of gender, the social and cultural construction of the differences between the sexes, expands, for example, our understanding of Jewish assimilation by weighing in the domestic realm.

 

Yet these twenty years of writing on women and gender in Jewish history have raised more questions than answers.  What were the shifting boundaries of women's roles and status within all spheres of Judaism?  What can we learn about female religious lives in the public spaces of the synagogue and school and in the private worlds of home and family?  How does the category of gender refine our understanding of other major themes of modern Jewish history-migration, industrialization, urbanization, anti-Semitism, and Zionism?

 

 

The historical inquiry rooted in the gender politics of American Jewry now stands as a legitimate discipline within what was once also a political project.  The history of American Jewish women is now an integral part of the scientific study of Jews.