Reviving Long Lost Names

Nadell, Pamela S.

Reviving Long Lost Names Woman's Cause The Jewish Woman's Movement In England and the United States, 1881-1933 Linda Gordon Kuzmack Ohm State University Press, 1990. 280 pp.. S39.50, Reviewed...

...A revision of her 1986 dissertation, Woman's Cause surveys the rise of what Kuzmack defines as a Jewish feminist movement in both England and the United States from the beginnings of the era of the great East European Jewish migration to the rise of Hitler...
...It revives many long lost names for our collective memory and its challenges will spur other historians of the Jewish women's experience...
...Since then, as Yale University history professor Paula Hyman astutely observed at the 1990 annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, Jewish feminist historical scholarship has progressed, but by no means has it kept pace with the explosion of writing seen in American and European women's history...
...Here extensive use of primary source materials leads the author to pull together for the first time significant information on Jewish women's involvement in the suffrage battle in both the United States and England...
...She explores the role of Jewish women in social reform movements, including their concerns for their less fortunate East European relatives and for the problem of white slavery or prostitution, their part in the suffrage and union movements and their attempts to expand women's roles in Jewish religious life...
...S39.50, Reviewed by Pamela S. Nadell Challenged by the rise of feminism in the 1970s, three author-scholars, Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman and Sonya Michel, began asking questions that hadn't been asked before...
...There is litde here on writers like Mary Antin, Elizabeth G. Stern (pen-named Leah Morton) and even Henrietta Szold, who called for the expansion of women's opportunities in their writings and through the example of their lives i Nevertheless, this book is'an important beginning to the discussion...
...In this ambitious project Kuzmack traces the two movements by focusing largely on the elite, upper and upper-middle class women and the organizations they founded to help them fulfill their visions...
...Perhaps the most important chapter is the one on women's suffrage...
...It is by no means certain that the disparate struggles to improve women's lives and their status constitute the first stage of a self-conscious Jewish feminist movement...
...Moreover, surprisingly Kuzmack misses important feminist voices...
...Part of that landmark book, regrettably now out of print, appeared in moment (May/June 1976...
...The result was The Jewish Woman in America (Dial, 1975...
...Pamela S. Nadell is associate professor of Jewish studies and history at The American University...
...Linda Gordon Kuzmack's Woman's Cause joins a small but growing body of Jewish women's history...
...Her most recent book is Conservative Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook (Greenwood, 1988...

Vol. 16 • April 1991 • No. 2


 
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