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NWSA Journal 15.3 (2003) 212-213



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Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women, by Harriet Pass Freidenreich. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 224 pp., $34.95 hardcover.

Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women profiles two generations of Jewish women who studied in twentieth-century German and Austrian universities. The book compares the lives of those attending universities before the end of World War I with those attending between the wars. Using unpublished memoirs, biographies, essays, interviews, questionnaires, and letters, Freidenreich wrote a collective biography of 460 women. While Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein are generally known, most of the women in this book are not. By using religion as an organizing concept, this book deepens our understanding of its relation to class, sexuality, and race. As a Jewish academic, I am especially interested in Freidenreich's work.

With regard to class and religion, Freidenreich finds that many of the women were from middle-class, urban families. Raised in secular homes, most did not receive a Jewish education. Their upbringing was for the most part religiously and politically liberal. Their mothers were homemakers; their fathers were professionals. Freidenreich credits the Jewish secular, cultural home life for propelling the women toward higher education. This distinction between secular and religious Judaism is useful for showing the ways in which the women were affected by central European, as well as Jewish values. Religion influenced education in at least two ways. With respect to enrollment, the number of Jewish women enrolled in universities was disproportionately higher than non-Jewish women. This may stem from the manner in which the women and their families transformed religious values into secular ones, an interesting phenomenon that deserves further analysis. Religion also influenced one's field of study. The women gravitated to medicine and the humanities, rather than law, natural sciences, or social sciences, since appointments to the judiciary, civil service system, and the academy often required proof of baptism.

As for sexuality, this book reveals that the younger generation was more likely to marry and have children than the older generation. Although the majority of women did marry, they did so at an older age than the norm for their period; less than half of them had children. Overall, the university women had less traditional marriages than their parents. Freidenreich's study does not discover much about lesbianism, which may be accounted for by censorship. Unfortunately, the book's appraisal of the ways in which sexuality relates to religion is undeveloped.

Nazism changed everything for European Jews. Before the Nazi period, for instance, the university women primarily experienced gender discrimination, [End Page 212] whereas during the Nazi period, most discrimination was anti-Semitic. Since the Nuremberg Laws imposed a racial identity on Jews, race became an issue for the women, regardless of their self-identity. Although under-explored by Freidenreich, racism and anti-Semitism have been examined by scholars such as Ruth Frankenberg and Sander Gilman. Referring to that scholarship would have helped Freidenreich situate her work within a broader view of race. The postwar period affected the women's religious, class, and racial identities yet again. Some were able to re-establish their careers; others were not. Some returned to Judaism and were buried as Jews; others did not. And in the United States, postwar Jews were classified as white.

In addition to deepening our understanding of religion, class, sexuality, and race, Female, Jewish, and Educated shows that our contemporary struggles as university-educated women continue the struggles of our predecessors. Our role in academia provides a clear illustration. During the first half of the twentieth century, academic careers for Central European university women were rare. For example, Freidenreich found that women held 1.2% of academic appointments before the Nazi period and that Jewish women held 40% of these positions. Two-thirds of the women were either single or married without children. In the second half of the twentieth century, even with the increasing presence of women in the professoriate, the choice between work...

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