Not Quite "A Quiet Revolution": Jewish Women Reformers in Buffalo, New York, 1890-1914

62 SHOFAR NOT QUITE "A QUIET REVOLUTION": JEWISH WOMEN REFORMERS IN BUFFALO, NEW YORK, 1890--1914 Marta Albert Marta Albert is a graduate student in Women's Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her work explores feminist education, activism, and nonviolence. This paper, an exercise in archival research which has highlighted for Ms. Albert the need for further study of the lives of Eastern European Jewish women in the U.S., was written as a seminar project. On April 16, 1891, Rabbi Israel Aaron of Buffalo's Temple Beth Zion spoke at the first meeting of the Sisterhood of Zion and Daughters of the Star, heralding the infinite possibilities of work to be done by Jewish women in furthering "the mission of Israel." 1 Such zeal was typical of Buffalonians at the turn of the decade, a response to enormous growth in the population, from 174,057 in 1880 to 255,664 in 1890. By the end of the century, the population doubled from its 1880 figure, to 352,387; immigrants or the children of immigrants accounted for 73.5% of the total population.2 Buffalo's Jewish community, it is estimated, numbered about 1,500 in 1876, and was largely an eastern European, Orthodox community.3 By the early 1900s, the total population included at least 30,000 Germans, 27,500 Poles, and 4,000 Russians; by 1910, at least 10,000 Jews had settled in Buffalo.4 Building a strong community was becoming a national and local priority among Jews in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It required a 1"First Annual Report of the Sisterhood of Zion and Daughters of the Star" (Buffalo, NY, 1891-1892), p.1. 2Brenda K Shelton, "Social Reform and Social Control in Buffalo, 1890-1900" (Ph.D. diss., University at Buffalo, 1970), p. 2. 3Selig Adler and Thomas E. Connolly, From Ararat to Suburbia (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960), p. 115. 4peter Roberts, The Foreign Population Problem in Buffalo (Buffalo: Young Men's Christian Association, 1908), p. 1. Volume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 63 reformulation of the relationship between the domestic and public spheres and their respective female and male social worlds in middle-class society, as immigrant men and women sought employment and towns and cities coped with soaring populations. Women played an active role in Jewish settlement and community organizing, weaving interests in women's self-improvement, public welfare, and politics to create a unique public voice which influenced both Jewish and secular institutions. For many middle-class Jewish women in Buffalo, their efforts to build and sustain Zion House, one of the nation's first Jewish settlement houses, was a piece of their general participation in social reform, including the women's rights movement. As a distinctly gendered activity, Jewish women's social welfare work in the late nineteenth century may be viewed as an expansion of "woman's sphere," and thus may be described as a "quiet revolution" in the lives of women.5 However, within the context of the intricately organized and evolving charity system in Buffalo at the time, and both Jewish and nonJewish women's increasing participation in feminist politics, the emergence of Jewish settlement work driven by Jewish women may more accurately be described, in Beth Wenger's words, as "part of an interactive social process that involved a complex reworking of gender ideals and the division between private and public space within the Jewish community," and, I would add, within the Buffalo community in genera1.6 . Like other middle-class women beginning to take advantage of the inroads to education made by feminist agitation, Jewish women seem to have been searching for a way to combine politics, service, and self-improvement. In Buffalo, the existence of Zion House and the increasingly political nature of social work indicates that Jewish women's leadership placed social welfare needs on the public agenda. Their participation in other activist and feministoriented groups also suggests a dialectical relationship between Jewish 5See William Toll, "A Quiet Revolution: Jewish Women's Clubs and the Widening Female Sphere, 1870-1920," American Jewish Archives, Vol. XLI, No.1 (Spring/Summer 1989), pp. 7-26. Toll...