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13 Jewish Women Remaking American Feminism/Women Remaking American Judaism reflections on the life of betty friedan daniel horowitz This essay begins with the life of Betty Friedan and moves out to explore a series of issues central to the ways historians think about the history of Jewish women in the United States since 1945. I concentrate on four key topics that both illuminate Friedan’s life and connect her life to larger concerns animating this volume. First, to what extent did the “feminine mystique,” to use the phrase Friedan connected to motherhood, generations, and careers, shape her own life and the lives of Jewish American women? Second, how do we understand suburbanization as a force that influenced Friedan’s life and the lives of Jewish American women in the postwar period? Third, how did many of the major public issues that Jewish women distinctively faced in the postwar period, particularly anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Israel, shape both Friedan’s life and the lives of her peers? Fourth, how does a consideration of Friedan’s life help us ponder questions surrounding the definition of Jewish women’s history as a field, especially the relationship between post-1963, presumably secular, feminism, on the one hand, and post1972 , more religiously connected Jewish feminism, on the other? To begin with, the concept of a feminine mystique has fundamentally shaped how scholars understand the history of American women in the postwar world. Although it had precedents before 1940 (as we see in discussing Friedan’s own life), it was to a considerable extent a postwar phenomenon, a way of marking a cultural formation that differed somewhat from what had come before. In her transforming 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, and in her life, Friedan connected this key notion of the feminine mystique to issues of motherhood, generations, careers, and suburban captivity. In her life and in the lives of other Jewish American women, the feminine mystique tied into issues of motherhood, both Friedan’s relationship to her mother and her own role as a mother of three children.1 Friedan was profoundly 235 shaped by her own mother’s frustrated aspirations, as well as by her mother’s efforts to frustrate her daughter’s ambitions. The father of Miriam Horwitz Goldstein blocked his daughter from going to Smith College, and Harry Goldstein, Betty’s father, forced his wife to give up her career as a writer and stay at home to raise their children, Betty and her two younger siblings. This suggests that, for Friedan, the notion of a feminine mystique drew on her family’s experience in the 1930s, as well as on what she herself confronted in the 1950s. With Betty’s arrival in 1921, Miriam Goldstein had begun an active life as a volunteer woman in the Jewish community and in non-Jewish Peoria, yet she never overcame her anger at having given up so much—and in turned passed that sense of loss and anger on to her daughter Betty. In the scholarship on the history of Jewish women in America, the relationships of women to their mothers loom large.2 Yet Friedan’s life offers several cautionary notes. First, it is problematic to focus primarily on the mother/daughter dyad without giving full attention to the mother/daughter/father triad. For instance, in Friedan’s life it was precisely the fights between her parents, as well as her mother’s frustrations and her father’s high ambitions for her, the daughter, that so shaped her. Moreover, no single type of Jewish mother produced secondwave feminists. The differences in the lives of Friedan and Bella Abzug, born one year apart, can be instructive: Friedan reacted to the ways her mother frustrated her ambition, while Abzug achieved with the encouragement of her mother.3 Friedan’s portrayal of motherhood was a commentary on the stereotypical Jewish mother seen in postwar portrayals such as Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar (1955). Many historians have suggested that one phenomenon that proved distinctive about the experience of Jewish American women was the depth of their commitment to domesticity and family. How then do we read the trajectory of Friedan’s writings?4 For Betty, her own mother’s example of Jewish-inflected domesticity or community service was negative.5 Perhaps, in The Feminine Mystique, Friedan thus was offering a critique of the domesticity of the traditional Jewish woman or, more likely, the particular aspirations of middle-class Jewish upwardly mobile...

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