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  • Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, & Welfare in New York, 1900-1935
  • Batya Miller (bio)
Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, & Welfare in New York, 1900-1935. By Anna Igra. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. viii + 175 pp.

Wives without Husbands brings fresh and original scholarship to a previously neglected predicament that bedeviled the Jewish immigrant community in the early decades of the twentieth century: the growing crisis of husbands and fathers who deserted wives and children and the organized efforts of Jewish charities to address it. The heart of Anna Igra's book is based on a trove of case records of the National Desertion Bureau (NDB), which was founded in 1911. Its mandate was to expand on the work of the National Conference of Jewish Charities, which from its beginning had made desertion a high priority. These case records detail the histories of thousands of women who came to the NDB in search of support and include not only notes of social workers and lawyers but also correspondence from husbands and wives and reports of neighbors and children. Based on these primary sources, Igra is able to piece together the operation of the NDB as well as present the personal testimonies of the clients who used its services.

The NDB apparently was a unique institution; Igra mentions no similar private agency created by Italians or Irish or any other ethnic group. Its creation was fueled by anxiety over the image of the Jewish immigrant [End Page 489] in American society (and by extension the larger Jewish community), as well as by distress over a breakdown of family cohesion. Family instability, while exacerbated by the manifold dislocations inherent in immigrant life, had already raised alarm in eastern Europe where the divorce rate was rising (illuminating and increasing the problem of the agunah), and maskilim were criticizing the traditional model of marriage as an economic partnership and urging "idling" husbands to support their wives.

These concerns struck a resonant chord with the established maleled philanthropic organizations in America, which made marital desertion a central issue in order to protect both the financial resources of the charities and the reputation of Jewish family life. Unfortunately, Wives without Husbands does not shed much light on the dimensions of the problem, nor does Igra offer any useful comparisons with other ethnic groups; and so we cannot determine how appropriate the response was. But clearly the Jewish community perceived marital desertion as a serious problem and responded accordingly.

Igra limits her analysis of the response to the Jewish philanthropic world (with a nod to the influence of Abraham Cahan's famous "Gallery of Missing Husbands," which appeared in the Forverts). Hence we do not know how other groups within the Jewish community, especially the religious leadership, reacted both to the problem and the charitable response. Marital desertion certainly aggravated the plight of the agunah, a problem unique to the Jewish community, but there is no exploration of how that particular quagmire complicated either the problem or the response, nor is there any discussion about the creation of the NDB and whether other concerned leaders advocated alternative strategies.

Before turning to the NDB records themselves, Igra places the problem of desertion in a larger context and focuses on the role of Jewish charities in shaping the policies that determined how deserted families were to be treated. Leaders of Jewish charities, in contrast to Protestant progressive reformers, supported legislation that would include deserted women among the poor mothers eligible to receive public pensions; but legislation passed in 1915 limited aid to widows only. (Jewish charities also did not adhere to the mainstream policy of withholding private relief from deserted women.) Following that setback, the legal system, especially after the creation of domestic relations courts, was to become the avenue of redress for deserted women. Here Jewish activists played a large role in strengthening abandonment laws (making it possible to prosecute men who had fled New York State) and creating new courts that functioned as socio-legal institutions. These new courts conferred unprecedented discretionary power on judges to regulate family relationships and enforce family obligations (especially when [End Page 490] compared with judges in...

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