Of Cows and Women: The Animalization of Victimized Women in Devorah Baron’s Fiction

Devorah Baron’s literary oeuvre primarily portrays oppressed women, trapped in patriarchy, and other marginalized groups or individuals in the Lithuanian shtetl, whose liberty and dignity are trampled. Throughout her writings, animals appear as the most deprived and vulnerable members of society, and their oppression is often compared to oppression within humanity, particularly the oppression of women. This article seeks to explore the literary transaction between gender and animality in Baron’s writings, focusing on the parallel between the victimization of women and cows. Unlike her male contemporaries, whose lighthearted woman-cow analogy stems from the sexual objectification of women, Baron empathically depicts bovinized women, who are reduced to their reproductive system and maternal functions just like cows. The homologous biopolitical management of both women and cows, which was first theorized in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1898 feminist treatise Women and Economics, is poetically embodied in Baron’s tales of wet nurses—“Hitparets” (“Burst”), “ʿAtsbanut” (“Nervousness”), and “Shifra”—and barren women who are forced to divorce—“Mishpaḥah” (“Family”) and “Keritut” (“Bill of Divorcement”)—as well as in “Shavririm” (“Sunbeams”), which woefully tells of the most wretched woman in the shtetl and her empowering bond with a cow.