3. Entering The Modern World.
Thus, as we get to the birth of the modern age, we find a situation where
almost all women are locked into a low-status rank in society, and, at least
in theory, a high-status one within the traditional family structure. Many
women are involved in economic activity but this is connected to their secondary
status within the Jewish tradition. All public posts and scholarly positions
are held by men, and a very strong legal tradition has been developed by those
same men which, although by no means totally unfair to women in all situations,
nevertheless reflects the rights and perspectives of the men who wrote the
legal decisions and developed the law.
We have little knowledge of how women felt in this situation. The sources,
as mentioned, are almost entirely male, and women’s voices are almost
completely absent. We should not assume, however, that women were necessarily
unhappy with their situation. The horizons of women’s expectations had
been, more or less, at a certain fixed point for thousands of years and there
seems no reason to doubt that the majority of women had internalised, to one
extent or another, the traditional assumptions of the system and the place
that the system assigned to them. The one real autobiography we have of a
woman in the pre-modern period, that of the German Jewess, Glueckel
of Hameln who wrote in the late seventeenth century and the beginning
of the eighteenth, reflects, to be sure, a basic acceptance of her role and
seems to have no problem with the place of women.
However, it must be emphasised: the women might feel more or less happy with
their place in the system according to their own personal circumstances and
their own personal predilections, but that place had been assigned to them
by a world in which men were dominant and in which men made the law. Up to
now, history had been made by men largely for men. As we come down toward
the wire of modernity, things are about to change.
3A. Modernity And Change: Women Enter History.
There are two major keys to understanding the change in the position of
women in the modern age. First, we have to understand the changes in the surrounding
societies and the increased interaction with outside societies and their different
norms that affected Jews in many different communities. Second, we have to
understand that many Jews stopped defining themselves by the Halachic
ideas that had previously united almost all Jews, providing the framework
for Jewish life up until now.
For the first time, it was possible in many places to break out of the traditional
framework but to remain a Jew. Inevitably, as more and more Jews did this,
they encountered a new series of norms that were developing, or had developed
in the surrounding society and Jewish horizons started to change. In such
a context, it would hardly be surprising if the horizons of – and for
– Jewish women would not, themselves, start to change.
To start with, was men who largely initiated the change for women. The ideologists
of Haskalah started hesitantly, gradually, acquiring confidence,
to embrace and advocate the idea of formal education for women. The anomaly
of a society that mandated education for boys and praised it in a thousand
texts and a thousand ways, but saw education for girls as unnecessary, and
formal Jewish education as negative, was too striking to be ignored.
Slowly but surely, educational frameworks for women started to develop. The
traditional Orthodox world had to respond and it, too, began to encourage
formal education for women in general and Jewish subjects. Originally, it
allowed girls to be educated within the general non-Jewish school system (as
opposed to boys, who would have been tainted by such an exposure to outside
culture). With time, however, the initiative for Jewish schools for traditional
girls, arose in the heart of the Orthodox world. The Beit Ya’akov schools,
started themselves by an exceptional woman, Sarah Schneirer,
who opened her first school in Cracow in 1917, would soon have tens of thousands
of girls enrolled in Poland.
But what started with education, could not and did not end with education.
Desires and dreams, nourished within or without the educational system, soon
started to break loose and influence different models of Jewish womanhood,
far from the borders of the world of tradition.
Jewish women were affected in different ways according to time, place and
circumstances, but direct or indirect exposure to some kind of modernity almost
inevitably led to some kind of change.
In Western Europe, where Jews were drawn into the wider society through a
mixture of Haskalah and emancipation, the models which influenced
the aspirations and the horizons of most Jewish women tended to be those of
the middle and upper–middle classes of the general societies in which
they lived.
However, in Eastern Europe, under the Russian Empire where most Jews in the
world lived, there was no emancipation before the twentieth century; a different
process developed here. Although a few wealthy Jews were allowed to live in
the large Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and some of the women
there were influenced in the same way as their Western European counterparts,
most women lived in the Pale of Settlement, the area designated for the Jew
in Western Russia, where other influences prevailed.
Many Jews remained within the framework of traditional society and, for the
most part, the traditional norms prevailed for women as much as for men. Especially
in the areas where Chassidut held sway, women found their lot unchanged
and a mixture of dreadful poverty and mystical belief made it difficult for
any change to penetrate. In the non-Chassidic areas, there was more
chance of changing horizons, since parents were more inclined to give their
daughters access to outside education in the hope of giving them the ability
to transcend the terrible poverty which held the Pale in its grip.
As we come to the last decades of the nineteenth century, we see this phenomenon
beginning to widen among boys and girls. Among many parents, the traditional
reluctance to allow children anything but a narrow Jewish education for the
sons began to soften under the impact of poverty. More and more young people
were sent to non-Jewish schools or to more open Jewish forms of education
that began to appear in the Pale. This exposure to a wider world would have
a great effect on many of the young, drawing them beyond the traditional boundaries
and horizons that had framed the experiences of generations and exposing them
to other norms and possibilities.
Not unnaturally, where some young people were now being exposed to different
possibilities, excitement about those possibilities began to develop even
among many youngsters who had not been directly exposed to them through a
school education. Books from the West had a large effect on some of these
and many found their way to broader ideas through exposure to the Haskalah
literature that had penetrated from Germany and other Western countries. As
a result, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a rebellion against
traditional Jewish and traditional parental norms began to spread among many
of the younger generation of Russian Jews. This rebellion would take different
forms, but all were characterised by a sense of new possibilities and wider
horizons.