Historical Background Statement

The experiences and contributions of Jewish women within the second-wave feminist movement were unique due to Jewish women’s history of involvement in various strains of American activism, and their general status in American society at the time as educated, middle-class individuals. Examining the evolution of Jewish women’s activism and roles in American history provides useful tools for thinking about perceptions of gender and women’s societal inequalities. Throughout our readings we discovered a common theme of shifting modes of identity for both women in general and Jewish women in particular. The second-wave feminist movement was a struggle for women to obtain equal rights and engender respect, a manifestation of women’s desire to define their identities and lives for themselves.

Historically, gender roles are specifically defined and enforced by social expectations, with religion being a significant driving force in prescribing and maintaining them. Often going one step further, religion influences not just socially acceptable behavior but moral ideals.

The roles of women in traditional Judaism were specific and limited: women were not considered to be the spiritual equals of men, and therefore had only three commandments (of the 613 in the Torah) directed to them – the laws of family purity which mandate a ritual bath (mikveh) after menstruation, lighting the Shabbat candles, and burning challah to symbolize the tithe paid to ancient priests (Fermaglich, lecture, 20 November 2006). Women were responsible for worldly affairs, such as caring for the home and children, as well as keeping the accounts of the household and working to support the family. This division of labor existed so that men would be free to study the Torah, which was their duty as active religious participants.

However, this ideal of gender roles was often just that, while the reality of life in Europe presented roles that, by necessity, were much less segregated. The spiritual dynamic continued to shift as Jews immigrated to America, where men found fewer opportunities in which to continue their religious studies, and the necessity of a man’s income for survival became paramount. Nevertheless, many of women’s roles within the synagogue remained unchanged: women still found themselves behind the mechitzah or in separate seating, they were not counted as part of the minyan and could not recite Kaddish, they were excluded in the language of the Torah and not offered parallel life cycle rituals such as the bar mitzvah, and they were barred from synagogue membership without the connection of a father or husband.

Thus, traditional Judaism prescribed gender-defined expectations for both education and labor that influenced the consciousness of Jewish women, and would later be challenged by them, most significantly under the auspices of feminism beginning in the 1960s. Some synagogue practices in Reform and Conservative Judaism changed before 1960, as assimilating responses to American society, but these changes were often limited and superficial (Fermaglich, lecture, 20 November 2006).

Division of labor is often used to justifying gender roles; and Jewish women’s gendered experiences as nineteenth century immigrants and members of the working class influenced their economic activism. Both young women garment workers striking for better wages and older married women who organized the meat boycott of 1902 fought for economic power in contexts specific to women. These activities were particularly meaningful at a time when women were uniquely economically vulnerable, due to the high rates of desertion and wage inequality for female workers. Such disparities in wages and the work available to women were fueled by notions that women were a temporary and therefore exploitable class of workers, and that the income of a working woman was of secondary importance to the survival of a family, and thus justified as less economically valuable. The economic circumstances of immigrant life in America created new hardships and challenges for Jewish women, but also opened spaces for them to assert some power and agitate for workers rights and fair treatment.

Following the models of their Protestant sisters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish women extended their conceptions of themselves from caretakers of the home to mothers of the community, through activities like running settlement houses, Hebrew Sunday schools and women’s Zionist associations. When Jewish men holding factory jobs found it increasingly difficult to go to the synagogue, a call was extended to Jewish women to attend services, resulting in Orthodox leaders’ various “efforts to render Orthodox life more appealing to the modern woman” (Joselit 156). These efforts included changes that would facilitate women’s participation in religious life, such as doing away with the now irrelevant mechitzah. Through their newfound synagogue attendance, Jewish women found ways of being increasingly involved in their communities, although their participation still fell short of leadership in synagogues or broader Jewish community organizations. In addition, unlike the Jewish men who had public or community positions, their work was largely of a volunteer nature and therefore unpaid (and often undervalued and unrecognized as legitimate “work”).

Feminist ideas were not always a refuge for Jewish women. The suffragists of first-wave feminism were largely Christian, and sometimes used rhetoric that vilified Judaism as the root of women’s oppression. Also, arguments for women’s separatism in the late nineteenth century didn’t appeal to young Jewish women workers, who generally saw Jewish men as allies in a class struggle, not as contributing to their oppression as females. Self-definition continued to shape Jewish women’s goals. Jewish women’s often contentious identity – whether their priority was a sense of Jewish identity, their womanhood, or feminism, or whether such divisions were false – was further challenged by their participation in the women’s liberation movement.

The presence of Jewish women leaders in the feminist movement was sometimes missed because they often did not identify themselves as Jewish. This absence may be attributed to a genuine distancing from Judaism on the part of Jewish women, as well as the symptoms of anti-Semitism that plagued even the women’s movement, as evidenced by Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s article for Ms. Magazine in 1982, “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement.” The curious absence of Jewish women’s particular concerns and contributions that we noticed in Ruth Rosen’s history of the women’s movement, The World Split Open (which highlighted specific groups within the feminist movement such as lesbians, black women and Latinas) seemed significant because the overall contribution of Jewish women to the movement was substantial, and Judaism was profoundly affected by feminism.

The ideas of feminism and the women’s movement had a great impact on Jewish traditions and the Jewish community in a relatively short span of time. During the 1960s and 1970s, many Reform and Conservative synagogues seemed receptive to enacting and supporting measures for women’s equality in religious life. These changes included revising the liturgy to employ gender-neutral language and highlighting the stories of Jewish matriarchs. Women not only became more integrated into the religious life of Judaism, but started their own female prayer groups, the tradition of the feminist Seder and other female-centered rituals, as well as women’s study groups such as Ezrat Nashim (which issued the “Call for Change” in 1971). Women’s acceptance into rabbinical schools and subsequent ordination increased, with more than 500 women ordained as rabbis since Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative synagogues began the practice during and following the feminist movement, in the 1970s and 1980s (Lipstadt 291).

Jewish women agitated for and experienced many changes in their lives, in the religious institutions of Judaism, and in American society, through their participation in the second-wave feminist movement and their internalization of feminism’s basic ideas and goals. Within the movement, women’s paths and identities often diverged, and anti-Semitism remained an innocuous presence. However, Jewish women were represented among every aspect of feminist activism: from national leaders to local grassroots activists, across the spectrum of liberal, radical and cultural approaches, and advocating for changes great and small. Jewish women leaders like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem became the face of the movement. The contributions that Jewish women on all levels made to the movement were instrumental in the many successes achieved by women in this era.


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