On Their Own Terms: America's Jewish Women, 1954-2004

In the half century since the 1954 tercentenary celebration of Jewish life in America, a sea change has occurred in historical writing. As fresh approaches emerged, first social history and more recently cultural history, scholars of American Jewry eagerly embraced new angles of vision and innovative methodologies. One approach to historical writing, which merited only the most cursory attention during the tercentenary celebrations,¹ has moved, if not to the center of the writing on the American Jewish experience, then at least firmly within its mainstream. Today's historians take into account women and gender as they construct narratives of the "remembered past."² While scholars once "subsumed women. . . in a generalized, unified conception that was represented in the idea of man,"³ in recent decades they have attempted to open up the "true history of women [which] is the history of their ongoing functioning in that male-defined world, on their own terms."⁴

Writing about women and gender—that is, the social construction of the relationships between the sexes⁵ —in the context of American Jewish history means writing about Jewish women against the backdrop of U.S. women's history. Not surprisingly, the diversity of America's women precludes a single story. Criticizing some of the early efforts to write women's history, historian Estelle Friedman observed, "The most serious of the problems which recent studies manifest is that of excessive generalization—the tendency to write about the American woman, when race, class, region, and ethnicity have significantly divided women."⁶ She could have, although she did not, added religion to that list of factors complicating women's history.

Subsequently, the most important single-volume histories of American women grappled with that complexity chiefly by incorporating the different experiences of African American women.⁷ But the particularity of America's Jewish women rarely surfaces in these narratives, and, when they do merit attention, the topic is almost invariably East European Jewish immigrant women, especially their 1909 shirtwaist makers' strike.⁸ Even the widely-taught Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women's History did not embrace American Jewish women's historical particularity until its third edition.⁹

Not surprisingly, just as the diversity of America's women precludes a single story, so too the diversity of America's Jewish women makes it difficult to construct a single, overarching narrative. Even ethnicity and religion, which would seem to bind Jewish women, are deeply variegated historical variables for America's Jews. Surely, gender roles are constructed rather differently among Lubavitcher men and women than among late-twentieth-century Jewish feminists. Not surprisingly, then, to write the history of America's Jewish women in the half century between the tercentenary of American Jewish life and the 350 th anniversary of American Jewish history in 2004 demands significant attention to this diversity. And even though the dates are utterly arbitrary for periodizing American Jewish women's history, the current anniversary does provide, as such moments so often do, the impetus for reflection.

Certain themes—among them, domesticity, work, politics, and feminism—emerge time and again as reflective of the gendered realities of Jewish women's lives as they are of the lived experiences of America's women. This essay begins to explore these themes, acknowledging commonalities with the broad construction of U. S. women's history, even as it foregrounds distinctions and complexities essential to understanding the particular history of America's Jewish women.

As historian Nancy Woloch has observed, "During the 1950 s, women's expectations were shifting in two directions, simultaneously."¹⁰ On the one hand, this was the era in which American women rushed to embrace what Betty Friedan later called "the feminine mystique," which prescribed that women could only find fulfillment in marriage and motherhood in the patriarchal family.¹¹ Among the most powerful female images of this era were television's contented suburban middle...