In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
were determined by gender in general, Jewish immigrant women working full time in garment shops and factories earned no more than 60 percent of the average male wage. Moreover, they were also expected to hand over most of their earnings to their parents, fulfilling in this way their filial duties to their families. Although they were put at a disadvantage with regard to the difference in wages and family obligations because of gender, young Jewish women managed to develop a sense of freedom which was reinforced by their participation in the labor force. Like other urban working-class girls, Jewish women generally immersed themselves in American popular culture, making good use of the leisure-time activities offered by American cities, such as cinemas, dance halls, amusement parks, and theatres (Glenn, 1994: 67–68, 84; Diner and Benderly, 2002: 167–177).
Jewish women also perceived education as the key to the freedom that America symbolized. This perception combined with the general belief in the great value of education in traditional Jewish culture encouraged many immigrant Jewish women to supplement their insufficient formal education by taking part in free public evening classes and lectures organized by Yiddish cultural organizations and settlement houses. Many immigrant women, therefore, had the opportunity to acquire secular education, at the elementary, high school, and even more advanced levels, of which they had been deprived in their countries of origin due ←25 | 26→to economic conditions and governmental discrimination (cf. Hyman, “Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 351; Diner and Benderly, 2002: 177–178).
As far as Jewish education is concerned, there were even fewer opportunities for women on the grounds that the traditional exemption of women from formal Jewish study continued in the American immigrant community. The situation began to improve after World War I when more Jewish girls were admitted to Jewish schools; yet their education was frequently limited to Sunday school. It was also during this time that the Jewish religious leaders were beginning to realize that a “healthy Jewish education” for all Jewish girls was extremely important to the transmission of Jewish identity to the younger generation, and that into the hands of Jewish women “[was] entrusted the fate of the future of [their] own history” (Hyman, 1997: 117).
Despite their secular knowledge and involvement in political life – they were active members of the labor unions in the United States – immigrant Jewish women were generally perceived by social reformers, both gentile and Jewish ones, to be obstacles to the successful Americanization of their families. This opinion assumed that since Jewish women’s daily lives and religious expression were confined mostly to the domestic sphere, they were most likely to be transmitters of the Old-World values to their families. Yet, at the same time, American Jewish social reformers acknowledged that immigrant women had the enormous potential as agents of assimilation, most likely to introduce middle-class standards of behavior and good taste into their homes, provided that they were directed and taught appropriate gender roles and behavior in accordance with the American middle-class paradigm (Hyman, “Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 351–352).
Some American Jewish historians, for example Paula Hyman, Hasia Diner and Beryl L. Benderly, however, reveal a far more complex role for Jewish women in the adaptation of immigrant Jews to American conditions. They argue that the analysis of oral history interviews, memoirs, and women’s fiction from that time seems to show a much more positive image of the immigrant Jewish mother and her centrality in the home than the one presented by the acculturated American Jewish social reformers. Hyman characterizes this positive image of Jewish women in such a way:
[…] immigrant women, in fact, used their domestic position to mediate between home life and the public world of school, work, and recreation. […] [Jewish] mothers supported their [daughters’] aspirations and desires for independence and education. […] Immigrant mothers [are also depicted] as wielding their influence, not always successfully, to mitigate a father’s rigid religious traditionalism that would deny their daughters freedom to choose a spouse or to go off to study. (“Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 353)
This quote seems to indicate that there might have been a transfer of power within the immigrant Jewish community from the father to the mother who seems to have occupied a more central position in the home, which is visible in her having a bigger say in the domestic matters. The fact that women gained a greater sense of ←26 | 27→independence from significant others in the family might have also had a broader impact on the position of women within the Jewish community as well as their Americanization.
Historical research into gender and assimilation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century European and American Jewish communities conducted by Paula Hyman (1995) and Marion Kaplan (1991) suggests that Jewish women have played a greater role than Jewish men in the transmission of Jewish culture and identity: men have focused their energy on acculturating themselves to the workforce and general public sphere, whereas women have maintained religious standards and customs in the home. Both researchers have noticed that in the nineteenth century, gender limited assimilation of Jewish women in Central and Western Europe as well as in the United States, by confining them, similarly to other middle-class women of that time, to the domestic scene and thereby restricting their economic, social, cultural and educational opportunities in the realm of public life. In this way, both Jewish men and women had adapted themselves, and their Judaism, to the prevailing bourgeois model of female domesticity, the so-called ‘cult of domesticity,’ which put an emphasis on the women’s creation of a peaceful domestic environment, and the preservation and transmission of traditional morality through greater involvement in religion. In other words, as Deborah Dash Moore aptly puts it, Jewish women “adopted American mores that placed religion within the feminine domain” (1998: 96). Jewish men, on the other hand, bearing the burden of supporting their families, were forced by external circumstances to abandon traditional Jewish culture and limit their religious expressions to periodic synagogue attendance. This contributed to Jewish men’s quicker assimilation into the larger society in comparison with Jewish women who, fulfilling the dominant societal expectations of women pursuant to the ‘cult of domesticity,’ assumed the role of guardians of religion (Hyman, 1997: 25–26). Although the twentieth century provided women with more educational and employment opportunities, “gender divisions and the presumptions of the appropriate female behavior that had developed in the nineteenth century retained much of their power, only gradually succumbing to the blurring of the boundaries between domestic and public realms” (Hyman, 1997: 19). On the basis of Hyman’s and Kaplan’s studies we might draw a conclusion that for most of the modern period, Jewish women have displayed fewer signs of radical assimilation than Jewish men.
However, it must be remembered that the situation of Orthodox Jewish women in Eastern Europe during the same period frequently looked the reverse. Apart from being vested with the important task of maintaining the fundamental rituals in the private domestic life, the Jewish wife was often the sole breadwinner of the Jewish family, which meant that she was forced to participate in the economic public world of the larger Russian or Polish societies. Hence, it was already in the Old World, before their emigration to the United States, that many Orthodox Jewish women were exposed to secularism, new Western ideas, and radical political opinions challenging traditional Jewish Orthodoxy. According to Susan A. Glenn, the powerful transformations initiated at the turn of the twentieth century in ←27 | 28→Europe, which resulted in a massive emigration of Eastern European Jews to America, “would also open the possibilities for reconstructing the relationships between women and men and between women and Jewish society” (1994: 9). Consequently, the emigration to the New World and the resulting assimilation of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe reversed dramatically the traditional Jewish family roles typical of the Old World: a Jewish man was no longer able to lead a life of an ‘idle’ Talmud scholar in America, but was expected to seek employment in order to support his family, whereas an industrious Jewish wife striving to make her family prosper in the Old World, was expected to conform to ‘the cult of domesticity’ in accordance with the American middle-class paradigm, similarly to other immigrant Jewish women from Western and Central Europe (cf. Glenn, 1994: 68–80).
Additionally, in her book The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany, Marion Kaplan also demonstrates that there appears to have been a significant difference in Jewish practice and religious identity between Jewish males and females. Jewish men were depicted as thoroughly assimilated