“The Whole Wide World, Without Limits”
International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893-1930
Publication Year: 2005
Published by: Wayne State University Press

Acknowledgments
This book started as a dissertation at Ohio State University, where I had the great fortune to work with a number of remarkable people who helped me combine my interests in women’s, Jewish, American, and European history. Susan Hartmann was a model adviser, keeping me focused while at the same time allowing for, and fostering, my disparate interests. ...

Introduction
Hannah G. Solomon, founder of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW; also Council), could well have been describing the achievements of many women’s organizations besides her own in the era preceding World War I. From the end of the Civil War through the 1890s, the decade of the NCJW’s birth, ...

1. Creating Organizations for Women, 1892–1912
At the Columbian Exposition in 1893, participant Helen L. Bullock exclaimed, “We are all doubtless aware here that Columbus discovered America. America’s uncrowned queen, Miss Frances E. Willard [founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement], once said the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century ...

2. The Crisis Years: Jewish Women and World War I
The First World War had a profound impact on the American Jewish community despite the fact that the United States did not directly involve itself in the conflict until mid-1917. Following the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, American Jewish organizations immediately turned away from their individual projects ...

3. The Move Toward Autonomy: The NCJW and Hadassah in the Postwar World
Nancy Cott and others have argued that after World War I and the attainment of suffrage, many American women turned away from separatist organizing and other forms of the nineteenth-century “woman’s rights movement,” acknowledging instead a diversity among women and experimenting with newer modes of feminist activism. ...

4. Women Organizing Women: Gender and American Jewish Identity, 1920–1930
In breaking some of the bonds tying them to male-dominated organizations, Jewish women in the 1920s strengthened their own groups. At the same time they built alliances with other women, both Jewish and gentile, nationally and internationally. The NCJW and Hadassah shared with others a continued interest in women’s and children’s issues, ...

5. The Feminization of the Workmen’s Circle, 1920–1930
Like women in the NCJW and Hadassah, those in Arbeter Ring worked vigorously to raise relief funds during the war, putting aside their earlier attempts to achieve equality through the separate ladies’ branches. After the war some women in the Circle returned to their interests in gender issues ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780814337523
Print-ISBN-13: 9780814332290
Page Count: 296
Publication Year: 2005
OCLC Number: 849944460
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