STUDY QUESTIONS

Paula Hyman, "Gender and the Immigrant Jewish Experience in the United States" in Judith Baskin, ed., Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit, 1991): 222-239

1) Did being Jewish exacerbate or mitigate the gender-based burdens and limitations typically imposed on women in the first half of the twentieth century?

2) How was the Jewish "masculine ideal" altered by the immigrants' arrival in the United States?

3) How did the former Jewish "masculine ideal" affect the economic role and freedom of movement of Jewish women in the Old World? How did the evolution to the new "ideal" affect women in this regard?

4) Why did the status of Jewish women in particular rise by around the turn of the previous century in both Europe and the United States?

5) Why did married Jewish immigrant women tend to work less outside the home than did their counterparts in other immigrant groups?

6) What did historians Yans-McLaughlin and Weinberg discover about Jewish immigrant women's attitudes towards paid employment? Why?

7) What were some of the socioeconomic effects of increased female autonomy within the Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century?

8) Why were Jewish women's political activities in the United States often ignored by historians of politics?

9) Why was a National Desertion Bureau established in 1911 and whom did it service?

10) What was one significant sign that Jewish culture had evolved to accept a "secular public role for women"?