Women
- American Jewish Women
History
Jewish women first arrived in North America in 1654 when a boatload of
refugees — four women, six men, and thirteen children — fleeing Dutch
Brazil after its reconquest by the Portuguese landed in New Amsterdam,
now New York City. Most of the refugees, known as Sephardim (the
descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497,
respectively), returned to Holland or sailed for the West Indies or
Suriname when they were unable to maintain a viable community of their
own in New Amsterdam. Nevertheless, by the eve of the American
Revolution, about twenty-five hundred Jews were in the American
colonies, many of them merchant families clustered in six eastern port
cities. It was another two generations, and with a steady infusion of
immigrants, before Jewish communal life in New York and the other cities
became firmly established.
Colonial Era
In this period, the typical Jewish woman, sometimes herself a
seamstress, was the wife of a craftsman or storekeeper. Perhaps involved
in the family business, she most likely kept a home where the dietary
laws were observed. Almost always literate, an important skill in a
family enterprise, these women were barely visible in early American
Jewish communal and religious life and publications. Public Judaism was
reserved for males. Women expressed their religion in the home as the
keepers of the spiritual legacy and then publicly as the founders of
associations such as the first Female Hebrew Benevolent Society
established in 1819 or the first Hebrew Sunday School dating from 1838,
both in Philadelphia.
An exception — like poet Emma Lazarus — was writer Penina Moise, who
lived in Charleston, South Carolina, her entire life. Moise wrote 180 of
the 210 hymns that appear in Hymns Written for the Use of Hebrew
Congregations.
Nineteenth Century
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, middle-class women played an
increasingly active role in philanthropic life, both Jewish and gentile,
while upholding the “cult of true womanhood.” They embodied the role of
pure and pious homemakers who stressed the ethical, rather than the
ritual and ceremonial. In the twentieth century, the new American Jewish
woman, primarily of German descent, sought higher education, other ways
to express her Judaism, and solutions to the challenges of the
Progressive Era. The National Council of Jewish Women, founded by Hannah
G. Solomon (1858-1942) at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago
in 1893, created mission schools and settlement houses and provided aid
for newly arrived Jewish immigrant women and children (see Labor and
Progressive Reform Organizations in the Manuscript section). Between
1881 and 1921 more than two million Jewish immigrants came to the United
States, most often in family units.
Twentieth Century
By 1920, Jewish women of Eastern European heritage and their
American-born children outnumbered Central European Jewish immigrants
and their native American Jewish children by five to one. Concentrated
in the large urban centers, hundreds of thousands of these female
immigrants made a living in the garment industry and sweatshops, as
reflected in the photographs and field reports of reformer Lewis Hines
(see Prints and Photographs Images from Organizations' Records). Many of
their daughters who took advantage of public schools and higher
education became teachers and others became physicians, dentists, or
lawyers. Other first-generation Jewish women became union leaders and
political radicals.
Five playscripts written by the Socialist reformer, lecturer, and labor
agitator Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933), who was on the staff of the New
York Yidishes tageblatt (Jewish daily news), are in the [Library of
Congress] Manuscript Division, as is a collection of sixteen items from
social worker Pauline Goldmark (1874-1962), who was an executive of the
New York office of the National Consumers' League. Rose Schneiderman
(1882-1972), Jewish labor organizer, socialist, and suffragist, was
president of the National Women's Trade Union League of America from
1927 to 1947 and went on to serve in government positions for the cause
of labor. Emma Goldman (1869-1940), the outstanding woman radical in the
Jewish community who spoke out against social injustice for half a
century, helped edit an anarchist journal. She is the best-known Jewish
woman represented in the Anarchism Collection and in the anarchism
materials in the Paul Avrich Collection (RBSC). Deported to Russia with
others during the 1919 Red Scare in America, she fled the Soviet regime
and lived in exile in Canada. Upon her death, however, the United States
government allowed her to be buried in Chicago, close to the graves of
the men executed in 1886 for the Haymarket killings. Political activist
Mollie Steimer (1897-1980) is represented in the Paul Avrich Collection
as well. The stage and screen also attracted Jewish women to the
spotlight, first as stars of the Yiddish theater and film and then on
the national scene.
Still, marriage was all-important to most American Jewish women, and
careers outside the home for middle-class women were not the norm. The
lives of Jewish homemakers were filled with child rearing, local female
mutual-aid societies, and involvement in religious life, primarily
through synagogue auxiliaries and national Jewish women's groups such as
Hadassah, a Zionist organization, or the National Council of Jewish
Women.
Feminism
American Jewish women began to find new voices at the same time that
Americans responded to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which
appeared in 1963. Some participated in campus upheavals, civil rights
marches, and protests against the war in Vietnam. The women's liberation
movement also appealed to many American Jewish women. They entered the
Reform and Conservative rabbinate and sought parity with men in
religious life, while Orthodox women began to learn traditional texts
generally reserved for men. Today Jewish women are academic scholars,
politicians, Nobel Prize-winners, and astronauts.
The [Library of Congress] Manuscript Division, for example, holds the
papers of the political philosopher, writer, and lecturer Hannah Arendt
(1906-1975), who wrote widely on Jewish affairs and totalitarianism and
on the Jewish response to the Holocaust, and of current Supreme Court
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933).
The Future
Currently, the Jewish population of the United States numbers close to
six million individuals. Jewish women in this cohort continue to adapt
to change and challenge even as they seek new ways to maintain their
Jewish identities. Sources on these women are abundant throughout the
Library of Congress and may be found as part of collections discussed
throughout this guide, through catalog searches by individual name or
organization, and through the use of selected reference tools that yield
relevant information. In all cases, as perhaps nowhere else, the
immensity and range of the Library's resources can be used, to
synthesize an understanding of American Jewish women within the broader
society.
From:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awas12/jewish.html
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