The Housewife Who Would "Fly with Wings": The Emotional Life of the East European Jewish Woman

VoLume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 47 THE HOUSEWIFE WHO WOULD "FLY WITH WINGS": THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF THE EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH WOMAN Maxine S. Seller Maxine Schwartz Seller is Professor in the Department of Educational Organization, Administration, and Policy and Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of To Seek America: A History of Ethnic Life in the United States (1977, 1988), Immigrant Women (1981), Ethnic Theatre in the United States (1983), and many articles on the history and education of immigrants and women. She is past president of the History of Education Society. In the opening decades of the twentieth century the socialist-oriented Jewish Daily Forward was the most popular and influential Yiddish newspap'er in the United States with a daily circulation in 1920 of over 200,000.1 Like many other ethnic and mainstream newspapers of the time, the Forward had a women's page.2 During the spring and summer of 1919 IFor background on the Forward, see Barbara Ann Portnoy Berman, "Environmental Impact on the Ideology of a Social Movement: The Jewish Daily Forward 1887-1966." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1972; Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in the U.SA.: An Industria~ Politica~ and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement 1882-1914, Vol. I, chapter 18 (New York: Ktav Publishing Company, 1969); Moses Rischin: Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun Mein Leben, 5 volumes (New York: The Forward Association, 1926--1931). See also Mordecai Soltes, The Yiddish Press: An AmericanizingAgency (New York: Columbia University Presss, 1925), and Robert E. Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: 1922). Circulation figure is from Berman, op. cit., 35-36. Soltes (op. cit., 38) suggests that circulation figures should be augmented by 75% to approximate the actual number ofreaders. 2See Maxine S. Seller, "Defining Socialist Womanhood: The Women's Page of the Jewish Daily Forward in 1919," American Jewish History, LXXVI:4 (June 1987), pp. 416--438 and "The 'Women's Interests' Page of the Jewish Daily Forward: Socialism, Feminism, and Americanization in 1919," in The Press ofLabor Migrants in Europe and North American 1880s to 1930s, ed. Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder (Bremen: 48 SHOFAR the woman's page published a remarkable series of seven articles titled "The Seven Stages in the Life of a Woman." Signed by "Lead Pencil" and written by a journalist named Beryl Botvinik, the series follows a "typical" East European Jewish immigrant woman (a Jewish immigrant "Everywoman," although the term is not used) through the seven stages of life-schoolgirl, marriageable young woman, bride, new mother, homemaker, middle-aged woman, and old age.3 The series is remarkable for a number of reasons. Half a century before Gail Sheehy popularized "life cycle" theory with her widely read book Passages, "Lead Pencil" charted the passage of the East European Jewish woman through the successive phases of her life cycle.4 Moreover, decades before Talcott Parsons, Bruce Biddle, Robert Merton, and other sociologists developed role theory, Lead Pencil told the readers of the Forward that women played roles imposed by society (and, to a large extent, by men), and that these roles distorted women's personalities and limited their growth.5 To the historian the importance of Lead Pencil's remarkable series does not lie in its anticipation of the work of more recent social theorists, however, but rather in the light it sheds on the lives of the women it describes. "The Seven Stages in the Life of a Woman" is a valuable addition to an expanding body of sources on the Eastern European Jewish immigrant woman in the United States. Unlike memoirs or oral histories which provide recollections from a later vantage point, Lead Pencil's articles originate during the era they describe. Unlike most autobiographies, Lead Pencil's articles deal with the ordinary woman, the woman whose life was bounded by home and family and who would probably never have written an autobiography. Finally, unlike census, immigration, or labor department data, which describe the "external" facts of women...