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  • Writing the Feminist Past
  • Susan A. Glenn (bio)

In a provocative 1992 essay published in Women's History Review, the historian Antoinette Burton, a scholar whose work focuses on modern Britain and its empire, analyzed what she called the "production of historical feminisms." What we call "history," wrote Burton, is "not simply what happened in the past but, more pointedly, the kinds of knowledge about the past that we are made aware of." How, asked Burton, do we "end up" with "the stories about historical feminism upon which we rely?" Her answer was that what we "know" about the feminist past is itself a product of "discrete historical moments" in which certain kinds of histories fulfilled the "needs" of feminist movements and feminist critics. As Burton put it, the production of knowledge is a reflection of the "now" as much as the "then."1 Burton's essay was a critique of how "Western feminist experiences" had become an "exclusive point of reference for 'feminism.'" The result, she pointed out, was not just the failure to "come to terms with the ethnocentric/imperial/racist ideologies which structured the white middle-class feminism of Europe and America" but the failure to "see" and thus to "know" both non-Western and nonwhite forms of "women's resistance."2

In 1992, when Burton published this essay, Jews in the United States had long since taken up residence on the "white" side of the color line and the question of how, why, and even whether Jewish "difference" mattered in what Burton called the construction of the "feminist past" did not figure in her discussion. Yet the theme of visibility and invisibility that concerned Burton not only animated the broader field of women's history, it also stirred debates about the writing of Jewish women's history. Listen, for example, to the words of historian Melissa Klapper, who observed in 2005 that "American women's [End Page 17] history has marginalized Jewish women; American Jewish history has marginalized women; [and] Jewish women's history has marginalized nineteenth century middle-class Jewish women." To the extent that the history of Jewish adolescents—the topic of Klapper's first book—had been considered at all, she noted, it was only as "sweatshop girls."3 Klapper may have overstated the point about the marginalization of middle-class Jewish women's history, a history that had been well documented by Paula Hyman and other historians, but she was definitely onto something important.4 Her comments anticipated what only a few years later would become a full-blown debate about why Jewish women remained largely invisible within the historiography of American feminism when so many of the pioneers in the field of women's history had come from Jewish backgrounds.

When and on what terms were Jewish women "seen"? In what follows, I examine three "now" periods in which feminist historians, animated by differing concerns and paradigms, engaged with the topic of Jews and Jewishness in different ways. I begin by offering some general observations about the "then/now" phenomenon in the production of feminist knowledge about Jewish women in the United States, suggesting how the need to see radicalism in Jewish women's history accounts for many of the stories that we "ended up" with. Ironically, though the tendency to equate radical with Jewish brought greater attention to gender difference in fields like American labor and working-class history, the collapsing of categories had the effect of both erasing and accentuating Jewish difference in the historiography on women and feminism.

Seeing Working-Class Radicalism

The first "now" period in the production of feminist knowledge about Jews—roughly the mid-1970s to the early 1990s—was part of an explosion of interest in women's class and labor radicalism. "Sweatshop girls" (and women) became iconic figures of early twentieth-century Jewish women's history in the United States in part because they fulfilled the need of a rising generation of left-leaning feminist scholars to emphasize both that Women Have Always Worked (the title of Alice Kessler-Harris's 1981 book) and that they had actively inserted themselves into the struggle to improve the lives of working-class people.5 In...

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