The Rabbi's Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life

5. “ Please [ Don’t] Call Me Rebbetzin!”

“Please [Don’t] Call Me Rebbetzin!” “Hearing ‘woman of valor’ makes me want to throw up.”1 This rebbetzin’s lament resonated all too often in the mid-1970s. Though rabbis’ wives had begun to express frustration with the role in the previous generation, nothing could have prepared them for the turmoil they would undergo in this one. The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s called into question basic assumptions about how women and men lived their lives. It challenged American women to reexamine their choices, goals, and priorities and to rethink their lives accordingly. By the 1970s, these ideas had gained national attention and broad support. The abortion and Equal Rights Amendment battles politicized not only younger women but also those who had previously been content with a full-time homemaking role. With the founding of Ms. Magazine and the introduction of women ’s studies, dozens of articles and books in both popular and scholarly venues probed many of the beliefs upon which women had based their adult lives.2 Pioneering works, such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and William H. Chafe’s The American Woman,3 examined gender in society and its impact on the history of women. Feminist theory helped women understand how societal assumptions had discriminated against them and, as a result, how they might alter their lives to seek equity. The sociological perspective, popularized in such works as Woman in a Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, focused attention on gender roles, voluntarism , and the politics of marriage. Other studies, such as Janet Finch’s Married to the Job: Wives’ Incorporation in Men’s Work, highlighted the extent to which women sought fulfillment through their husbands’ careers. These new ideas challenged the status quo of many women’s lives. 5 168 Voluntarism, for example, which had provided a meaningful outlet for the talents and energies of women for centuries, suddenly lost its standing . Feminists discredited it as “pseudowork” and disparaged it as being less about helping out worthy causes and more about giving women “busywork” to fill their empty lives. Declaring any unpaid work exploitative , feminists decried voluntarism as completely antithetical to the goal of women’s liberation.4 By the 1970s, the postwar supportive spouse found herself under attack from all quarters. Rebbetzins, because they functioned as the unpaid half of a two-person career, understood themselves to be especially easy targets. The derivative nature of a rebbetzin’s status offended all that feminists stood for. Moreover, rebbetzins’ volunteer duties sapped talents, energy, and creativity that feminists felt ought to have found an independent outlet elsewhere. All of these influences led to a sustained push by younger women to create a different future for themselves by earning advanced degrees and moving into professional careers. Though marriage and children remained “essential elements of the ‘good life’” for both women and men, women became increasingly concerned with controlling and organizing their lives to meet their own personal and career objectives. The proportion of women who graduated from college and the number who entered the professions rose dramatically during this period. Significantly , these women saw themselves preparing for long-term employment and careers.5 This phenomenon affected the ministry as well, and by the late 1970s, all the mainline Protestant denominations were ordaining women.6 Within Judaism, the Jewish Feminist Movement advocated equality for women in Jewish religious life: equal access to both ritual honors and positions of leadership, including ordination. While individual women had pressed for this outcome at various points earlier in the century in both the Reform and Conservative Movements, only in the 1970s did this desire for ordination stem from a sustained movement for change. In 1972, women from Ezrat Nashim, a newly formed group of Conservative Jewish activists, lobbied the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly at its annual convention, calling for women’s equality. That struggle proved protracted, and the Jewish Theological Seminary did not ordain a woman until 1985. But in 1972, Sally Priesand became the first woman to be ordained by the Reform Movement’s Hebrew Union College. Reconstructionist Rabbinical College ordained its first woman in 1974, “Please [Don’t] Call Me Rebbetzin!” | 169 in its second graduating class. Only the Orthodox Movement still struggles with the question of women’s ordination.7 The early years of the ordination battle accent the lingering ambivalence over the...