In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction hasia r. diner shira kohn rachel kranson In her classic 1963 manifesto The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan railed against a postwar American culture in which women “no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children, or attend a social engagement with their husbands.”1 Although she herself grew up in a Jewish home that exerted a powerful impact on her development as an intellectual and an activist, Freidan’s portrait of domestic housewives collapsed the experiences of all American women living in this era, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or class, and presented the white, middle-class, Christian woman as the norm against which she issued her manifesto for change.2 Friedan’s formulation has served as the departure point for most scholars of American women’s history in the postwar period, scholars who have, by and large, taken her analysis of the “problem that has no name” as an accurate depiction of the ways in which all, or at least most, women experienced the years from the end of World War II through the 1950s and early 1960s.3 Where scholars have parted company with Friedan and her analysis, they have done so by exposing the racial and class bias of this now firmly fixed way of thinking about American women of the 1950s. These historians have, rightly, noted that many workingclass women did not have the luxury of enjoying, let alone hating, life in “comfortable concentration camps,” and that women of color often grappled with a different set of gender expectations. Their need to work to support themselves and the families who depended upon them, as well as distinct cultural traditions of work and communal activism, gave them a chance to live, and to be studied, outside the scope of the “mystique.” This book broadens the parameters of the historical writing that takes to task the simple paradigm that in the postwar period American women retreated from the public sector into the private. We train our lens on American Jewish women, and ask how they negotiated postwar pressures to limit their lives to domestic and familial pursuits. Although Jews never constituted more than 4 to 5 percent of the general population, it should not detract from thinking about them as historical actors whose experiences in the postwar period can both shed light on the 1 limitations of the feminine mystique and, at the same time, provide a richer and fuller history of American women in these years. Jewish women functioned within particular communities and distinctive institutions that made their postwar history different from the U.S. norm. We therefore ask, to what degree did the ideology of the feminine mystique apply to them? In what ways did their activities and aspirations conform to or deviate from the model that so dominates thinking about women in America in the years following the end of World War II? At first blush, Jewish women would seem excellent candidates to embody the era’s dominant theme of women living domestic suburban lives, dissociated from the world of work and wages. After all, most American Jewish women enjoyed the comforts of the middle class, and in numbers greater than non-Jews. Surveys from the period demonstrated that 75 to 96 percent of American Jewish men earned their living in nonmanual occupations, while only 38 percent of other American men were similarly employed.4 The professionalism of Jewish men translated into higher earnings, as well. Even among Jews living in New York, the city in which the majority of working-class Jews resided, a 1951 study found that 12 percent of Jewish households earned yearly salaries of over $10,000, as compared to 5 percent of non-Jewish households, while only 29 percent of Jewish families brought in less than $4,000 a year, as opposed to 49 percent of non-Jews.5 These numbers reveal the extent to which most Jews in the postwar period had attained middle-class status and show that few remnants of the Jewish working class remained. By and large, those who found themselves still in the ranks of economically marginal industrial laborers and petty shopkeepers represented the older members of the Jewish community, vestiges of the immigrant era. With their increasing postwar salaries, young, middle-class Jews chose to invest in new housing opportunities that lay outside of their current urban surroundings. They participated enthusiastically, and often disproportionately, in the migration to the suburbs that Friedan had so harshly maligned. While the population of Newton...

Share