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

When East European Jews migrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of that vast wave labeled the New Immigration, women were an important component of the newcomers. In fact, because this was a family migration, women constituted a greater proportion of Jewish immigrants than of any other immigrant population of the time. Yet in much of U.S. Jewish historiography women make scarcely more than a cameo appearance. Those who achieved fame or fortune in the public arena, such as Jennie Grossinger or Emma Goldman (to cite two very disparate figures), are duly noted. However, the historical experience of ordinary women is subsumed in that of the Jewish community as a whole; and the history of the Jewish community as a whole, like all history, has been retold from the vantage point of Jewish men. The perceptions, achievements, and institutions of men define the historical record of U.S. Jewry.

The development of the field of women's history, however, has alerted us to the distinctive nature of women's historical experience not only within the family but also at work and in the community. Gender has taken its place, alongside class and ethnicity, as an essential category of historical analysis. Defined as "the socially and culturally constructed aspects of the division of the sexes," as an analytic category gender enables us to reexamine and refine assumptions about historical development that are derived from the experience of one half of the population alone. It also prods us to take note of hierarchies within culture and society. In the words of Joan Wallach Scott, in an important recent theoretical essay, "Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power."

The complex interplay of gender, social class, and religio-ethnic culture shaped the ways in which Jewish women participated in the economic, cultural, religious, and political life of the immigrant Jewish community and U.S. society. Even as Jewish women shared a common heritage, living space, and some institutions, values, and aspirations with their husbands and brothers, they also created a female culture and constructed a community different from the organized community of Jewish men. Within the Jewish community women found their situation defined and limited primarily by their gender and class, while in the society at large they confronted the additional disability conferred by their ethnicity. The incorporation of the experience of women into the saga of East European Jews in the United States stimulates a rethinking of such familiar issues as social mobility, the processes of acculturation and integration, and the definition of community and politics. Similarly, sensitivity to the different forms of discourse about gender and to the concomitant differences in social behavior among ethnic groups is necessary to prevent the homogenization of experience that is all too common in the history of immigrant women in the United States. Immigrant Jewish women shared many of the characteristics of other early-twentieth-century U.S. immigrant women, but their experience was influenced by their Jewishness as well as their gender (itself constructed by a Jewish culture in transition and by the particular historical situation of Jews in Eastern Europe).

Immigrant Jewish women had their roots in an East European Jewish culture in which the roles of men and women were clearly differentiated, particularly in the religious realm. Positions of status within the public sacred sphere as well as seats of power within the community as a whole were reserved for men, as was access to the study of Jewish texts. Boys were raised to master those texts, to assume their rightful place within the synagogue and community, and to serve as the heads of their family. Girls, on the other hand, were given little or no formal education but learned at their mother's skirts the skills that were essential for maintaining a kosher home and sustaining a family.

East European Jewish culture offered women contradictory messages. Although their status was clearly inferior to men's, within the secular sphere women were given a great deal of autonomy in order to support their families and to provide social welfare through their own charitable associations. Because the full-time scholar was the masculine cultural ideal (though a reality for only an infinitesimally small elite) and because of dire economic conditions, economic activity was recognized as appropriate and normal for women. Thus, in addition to performing their household tasks, women also participated in what we would call the public sphere of marketplace life and, to a lesser extent, communal life.

By the end of the last century, the impact of urbanization and of such ideologies as Haskalah (Enlightenment) and socialism had enhanced the status of Jewish women. Both Haskalah and socialism attacked the disabilities that women suffered under Jewish law and proclaimed a theoretical commitment to female equality, thereby reinforcing the assertiveness and sense of competence that traditional Jewish culture had tolerated among women in the world of practical affairs. Since evidence indicates that the Jews who migrated from Eastern Europe were recruited overwhelmingly from areas that had suffered the most disruption of the traditional Jewish economy and culture, secular ideologies wielded considerable influence within the immigrant Jewish community. Although, as we shall see, immigrant Jewish women retained distinctly different roles from immigrant men, they were often granted more autonomy in matters of work and leisure than was the case for women in some other ethnic communities.

This was so despite the fact that within the family circle girls, especially the eldest, were expected to assume more responsibility than were boys. They were assigned traditional female tasks of household chores and child care for younger siblings, in addition to paid labor. One immigrant woman remarked, "I always used to help my mother.... I never let her wash a floor." Another described how her parents depended on her as an adolescent to accompany them and translate for them in their contacts with English-speaking personnel. "Oh yes, they depended on me," she concluded. "My brother really enjoyed his life -- I had the responsibilities." A three-generation comparative study of Jewish, Italian, and Slavic women confirms her remark. It discovered that of the three ethnic groups, Jewish women of the first generation were overwhelmingly the most likely to perceive sex distinctions in their parents' treatment of them and their brothers (not that they were necessarily discriminated against more: it's possible they were more sensitive to differential treatment). More than 95 percent of them complained that their brothers had been favored by their parents.

If boys and girls were the recipients of different parental expectations of behavior at home, they also approached the major aspect of life outside the home -- wage labor -- with perspectives shaped by their gender. The place, type, and significance of work differed substantially for women and for men in the immigrant Jewish community. While full-time, lifelong and highly paid employment replaced the mastery of Jewish texts as the gender ideal for Jewish men in the United States, Jewish women, like their sisters in other ethnic groups, saw work out side the home as a temporary phenomenon, limited to the hopefully brief period between the completion of their education and their marrying. For women work was a function of their place in the life cycle. Because immigrant Jewish men were highly skilled and well endowed with entrepreneurial talent relative to other immigrants, married Jewish women worked outside the home in much smaller numbers than did other immigrant women. For example, a U.S. Senate report on immigrant work patterns revealed that in 1911 1 percent of immigrant Jewish wives in New York City were officially employed as compared with 36 percent of their female Italian neighbors. (East European Jewish and Italian immigrants are often compared because of the coincidence of their mass migration to the United States and the proximity of their settlement, though in different urban immigrant neighborhoods, in several cities.) While there was considerable local variation and the New York City disparity is the most extreme, the pattern generally holds true. These ethnic differentials increased with the passage of time as the majority of Jewish men experienced relatively rapid upward social mobility. The ability of many immigrant Jewish men to provide for their families without the employment of their wives (but often with the wages of their children) led to a decline between 1910 and 1925 in the percentage of employed Jewish women while the percentage increased among other ethnic groups.

The full-time housewife thus appeared sooner in immigrant and second-generation Jewish communities than among other immigrant groups. Jewish women experienced more rapid mobility than other immigrant women, but their experience of mobility was vicarious and left them dependent on their husbands for their status. The decision to work outside the home was not left to women themselves. Indeed, immigrant Jewish men -- and undoubtedly many women as well -- shared the cultural norms prevalent among both European immigrants and the middle-class U.S. public that declared that wives working outside the home reflected the failure of their husbands to fulfill their responsibilities. Except when prolonged unemployment or illness dictated otherwise, Jewish men insisted that their wives abandon outside employment. Some immigrant Jewish women, interviewed in the mid 1970s when they were between seventy and ninety years old, expressed their regret at the absence of choice and pointed to the negative consequences of their early retirement. As one commented, "If a wife worked, the husband couldn't dominate as much as he could with a girl who depended on him for all the income. When men came home from work . . . they were kings in the house." Housewives worked, too, but their work was not generally reflected in official statistics and perhaps was not even considered as real work by the women themselves. They helped their husbands in mom-and-pop stores, did piecework at home, or took in boarders to supplement the family's income. Sydney Stahl Weinberg's oral history project on elderly immigrant Jewish women in New York has found that while all forty-six women in the study had worked outside the home at some point in their married lives, most initially denied that they had worked after marriage and volunteered the information that they had entered the labor force during the Depression or after their children were grown only late in the interview.  When immigrant Jewish women entered the labor force in their youth, they found their job placement affected by their gender. Like their brothers, they generally secured employment through family contacts. Not surprisingly, they concentrated in the typical Jewish trades, particularly in the garment industry. Because of their work experience in Eastern Europe, their literacy, and the Jewish devaluation of unskilled manual labor, they tended to be more highly skilled than other employed immigrant women. However, they were less likely than their brothers to hold white collar jobs. Thus, in New York City in 1905 when more than 45 percent of immigrant Jewish men were employed in white-collar positions, only 21 percent of their sisters were so employed.  Within broad categories of jobs, as well, there were important gender distinctions. In the garment shops the most highly paid positions were regularly assigned to men, the less remunerative jobs to women. Women working full-time in the clothing trades scarcely earned 60 percent of their brothers' wages. The sons and daughters of immigrants were also segregated by gender in the labor market. Jewish immigrants prepared their sons for careers as business entrepreneurs and later as professionals; their daughters were trained to become clerical workers, department store saleswomen, and schoolteachers. In the settlement houses, clubs and classes were segregated by gender. Following the prevailing pattern for women, the Baroness de Hirsch Training School for girls in New York, to cite one example, offered courses in millinery, cooking, washing machine operating, hand sewing, and dressmaking. The aspirations that young women developed were therefore limited by prevailing cultural values of appropriate gender behavior. Second-generation Jewish women eagerly accepted the U.S. female dream of clerical work and teaching. By 1914 some observers commented, inaccurately, that Jewish women had already replaced U.S.-born and Irish women as the single largest element among New York City schoolteachers.  Because of the cultural disparagement of employment for married women, internalized values, and actual discrimination, the work worlds of women and men were distinct.

Although paid employment occupied relatively little of an adult woman's life, the significance attached to the work experience by the woman herself and by the community as a whole appears to have had a strong impact on immigrant Jewish women. One study by Virginia Yans-McLaughlin found that Jewish women employed in garment factories, in contrast to their Italian fellow workers, saw themselves as autonomous beings in control of their own lives.  Sydney Stahl Weinberg's interviews also revealed that immigrant Jewish women felt that work conferred freedom. Their parents respected that freedom; while they expected their daughters to contribute to the family's income, many allowed them to decide for themselves how much of their earnings they would hand over. In most Italian families, on the other hand, employed daughters were expected to give their parents their entire pay and received a modest allowance in return. Thus, work conveyed the status of autonomous adult to young Jewish women though it did not necessarily do so to the daughters of other ethnic groups. As one immigrant Jewish woman (from Pittsburgh) recounted, "The best part was when I got a job for myself and was able to stand on my own feet." The sense of competence and independence experienced in the workplace in their youth appears to have remained with immigrant and second-generation Jewish women even after their retirement into the home.

Jewish women displayed their sense of autonomy in a number of ways. The norms of their community permitted them considerable freedom in choosing their work and their leisure activities. For example, it was considered socially acceptable for them to attend public lectures and meetings at night unchaperoned, and they did so. After marriage, Jewish women expressed their desire for enhanced control over their own lives by seeking birth control information and becoming efficient users of contraception. Jewish women flocked to hear birth control lectures in Yiddish given by such prominent radicals as Emma Goldman and Rose Pastor Stokes and then wrote them letters asking for further information. When Margaret Sanger opened one of her early birth control clinics in the Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn in 1916, women lined up outside on opening day even though the dispensing of birth control information was then illegal. The rapid decline in Jewish fertility within one generation provides statistical evidence of the impact of increased female autonomy on the family lives of the entire Jewish community and is a central aspect of the historical experience of Jewish women in the last century.

Their early work experience often introduced Jewish women to another arena in which to exercise their autonomy, politics. Like their brothers, Jewish women proved to be fervent union activists. Gentile observers often commented on the high level of union participation and social consciousness displayed by Jewish working women. As the Women's Trades Union League, an association of middle-class female reformers and working-class women dedicated to improving working conditions for women, reported in 1909, "The Jewish women are quick to organize, and the League has found in several trades that the membership of the union was wholly Jewish, while the other nationalities working in the same trade were non-union.  A contemporary investigator from the Russell Sage Foundation also commended the "public spiritedness" of the Jewish girl and her "sense of relationship to a community larger than the family or the personal group of which she happens to be a member." The labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris found that Jewish women were "responsible for at least one quarter of the increased number of unionized women (in America) in the second decade of the twentieth century." In New York City before World War I, female Jewish garment workers constituted the majority of unionized women workers and the majority of the membership of the Women's Trade Union League. Indeed, Jewish women emerged as union leaders and displayed their steadfastness to the union cause during protracted and bitter strikes in the garment industry. The female shirtwaistmakers strike of 1909, in which Jewish women predominated, for example, was the largest strike by women until that time in the United States. The historian of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) commented of that strike that "though the principal union officials were men and the direction of the strike was in the hands of men, the women played a preponderant part in carrying it through. It was mainly women who did the picketing, who were arrested and fined, who ran the risk of assault, who suffered ill-treatment from the police and the court." The success of the strike demonstrated that women could be counted on in the picket line and in the shops.

Despite their dedication to the union cause, Jewish women labor leaders found themselves discriminated against by the male union leadership, which was ambivalent at best about women working outside the home. When Pauline Newman, for example, organized a group of Philadelphia candymakers in 1910 and sought a charter for them from the International Bakery and Confectionary Workers' Union, the parent union delayed so long in issuing the charter that the local group fell apart. Because women were considered merely temporary members of the work force, pushing down wages, even progressive unions like the ILGWU were reluctant to invest substantial efforts and resources in their unionization. Moreover, despite their theoretical commitment to the equality of women and men, male union leaders seem to have had difficulty in accepting women like Pauline Newman, Fannia Cohn, Rose Pesotta, and Rose Schneiderman in positions of authority. Within the union leadership ranks these women often felt isolated. The garment unions also colluded in the sexual division of labor in the industry, with the higher-paid jobs reserved exclusively for males. The Protocols of the Dress and Waist Trade of 1913, accepted by union and management alike, established a wage scale in which the lowest salary for male jobs exceeded the highest pay for female jobs. Finally, male union leaders did not see the sexual harassment of women workers as an issue worthy of their attention. Thus, gender considerations limited the effectiveness of trade unions in dealing with specific needs of women workers.

Gender also affected women's economic fortunes. In spite of their relative autonomy within the family and in their social life, the immigrant Jewish women who could not count on a husband's wages suffered from the limited job opportunities available to women, as well as their lack of experience. As in many societies, they and their children were the primary victims of poverty. The absence, disability, or death of the male breadwinner threw working-class families into disarray. Widows and their children accounted for the largest budget item in cash relief funds disbursed by the United Hebrew Charities in New York City before World War I. Moreover, economic circumstances, easy geographic mobility, and separation incurred in the migration process led thousands of Jewish men to desert their wives and children. Abandoned women and their families constituted the second largest item on the United Hebrew Charities cash relief budget, receiving 14.6 percent of the relief disbursed in 1905. So seriously did the Jewish community treat this social problem that it established a National Desertion Bureau in 1911 to locate missing Jewish husbands. The statistics are likely to understate the scope of the problem, for many deserted wives sought assistance from public charity with great reluctance, some only years after their husbands left them. The establishment of Jewish orphan asylums in this period also offers poignant testimony to the difficulties experienced by women in supporting their children in the absence of their husbands, for many children placed in orphanages had one surviving parent. Some Jewish women, faced with the harsh working conditions and the brutally low wages available to them in factories and with families offering little emotional support, chose (or were lured into) prostitution as the alternative. A 1910 study of 647 prostitutes released from the Bedford Kills Reformatory found that Jewish women constituted 19 percent of the group, about equal to their proportion of New York City's population. By 1924 the percentage of Jewish women among those arrested for prostitution in New York had fallen to 11 percent, although the Jewish population had increased. Yet it is important to recognize in prostitution a gender-specific, as well as a class-specific, response to poverty and limited options.

Just as women were largely segregated in job categories and experienced work and poverty differently from men, so, too, their experiences with education were linked to their gender. Like Jewish men, Jewish women internalized the value of education, which was so prominent a part of East European Jewish culture. Their opportunities to express their passion for education, however, were far more restricted than were their brothers'. To put it another way, they shared the ethnic cultural and class factors that led to a higher percentage of immigrant and second-generation Jews in high school and college than other immigrant groups, but their gender prevented them from achieving parity with their brothers.

Although older children of both sexes, whose financial contribution was usually necessary for the survival of the family in its early years in the United States, were likely to begin work in garment shops in early adolescence while their younger, sometimes U.S.-born, siblings were able to prolong their education, girls' aspirations for education were deemed less worthy of consideration than boys'. Immigrant families with limited resources to invest in education chose the strategy of expending them on their sons, on whom the responsibility of supporting a family would fall. It is not surprising, then, that a 1950 New York census survey indicated that among foreign born Jews aged twenty-five to forty four, the mean number of years of education for men was 10.9, while for women it was 9.7. And these figures represented a narrowing of the discrepancy that had existed in earlier years. It was not uncommon to remove a daughter from school and send her to work in order to maintain a son in high school or college. One such story, that of Bessie, a department store girl with a brother in the College of the City of New York, was retold in the pages of McClure s Magazine in 1903. Another immigrant Jewish woman, Ella Wolff, described how her father removed her from school over the opposition of the school principal, who had even threatened to have him imprisoned.  Yet a third woman, who became a worker in a garment shop at the age of thirteen in the early years of this century remarked in an interview, "I accepted my responsibility to help support my family even though this meant I wouldn't go to high school. I wanted to go to school but I knew this was not possible." As the daughter of an immigrant family living in Pittsburgh commented, with some exaggeration, of the milieu in which she grew up, "The boys all went to college, but the girls worked to help the boys through."

Even when young women were allowed to graduate from high school and attend college, in New York City they found the doors of their brothers' preferred public college closed to them. In fact, women were not admitted to the famed College of Arts and Sciences, the main undergraduate school of the City College of New York, until 1950. Instead, they would attend the Normal College (later called Hunter College), where they could prepare for the preeminent female profession of teaching. By 1916, young Jewish women of East European origin accounted for fully one-quarter of the graduates of Hunter College. According to a study by Leonard Dinnerstein, in the 1920s Jewish girls were more likely to attend high school and college than the daughters of other ethnic groups; and by 1934 more than 50 percent of female college students in New York were Jewish. As immigrant and second-generation families prospered, the gender difference in education narrowed substantially. By 1950, for example, native born Jewish women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four averaged 12.4 years of schooling, while their brothers' mean was 12.7 years.

Most immigrant and second-generation Jewish women could not afford the luxury of college, though. To acquire the education they sought, they turned to adult education courses which were offered free of charge in the evenings to working women. In two separate studies, one conducted on the eve of World War I in New York City and the other in the mid-1920s in Philadelphia, gentile observers commented on the disproportionate representation of Jewish women in the evening classes. In Philadelphia in 1925, for example, 70 percent of the night school students were Jewish women.

If Jewish women enjoyed more limited opportunities to acquire advanced secular education than their brothers, they were even more restricted in their access to a religious education. In immigrant neighborhoods only a relatively small percentage of Jewish children were given a formal Jewish education. Several surveys conducted in the first three decades of this century discovered that just twenty-five percent of school-age children were studying in a cheder, or afternoon Hebrew school. Of those, the vast majority were boys; for a formal religious education was deemed at best unnecessary, and at worst inappropriate, for girls. One immigrant woman testified to the norms of her community with her remark, "I was the only girl attending Hebrew school." Most girls acquired their Jewish knowledge in a less formal manner. As one woman who grew up in Pittsburgh commented, "I had received a strong sense of Jewish commitment from my childhood experiences in a very Jewish home, but my sister and I did not receive a religious education--my brother did." Just as the Jewish socialization of boys and girls had differed in the East European shtetl and city, so it continued to differ in the immigrant ghetto and second generation neighborhood. While immigrant Jewish boys received less Jewish education than had been the case in the shtetl, the communal ideal still prescribed for them the study of at least the rudiments of a literate Jewish culture. For the majority of those who failed to do so, the break with the East European experience was a radical one. Jewish girls, on the other hand, had always derived their Jewish knowledge and identity from observation and celebration within the home. They continued to do so in the immigrant period, acquiring what anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, in her study of elderly immigrant Jews living in Venice, Califomia, called "domestic Judaism." As one of her female informants put it, "You know Judaism is really what happens in the family, and this makes it something a woman knows best."

The Jewish identity of Jewish women, then, was integrally connected with home and family life rather than with institutions and seems to have been characterized by continuity (at a low level of formal instruction) rather than disruption. In the absence of contact with Jewish educational institutions it may have been sustained longer than was the case with Jewish men, whose traditional role was played out in synagogue and house of study. It would be of interest to discover whether this domestic foundation of Jewish identity enabled some working- and middle-class twentieth-century U.S. Jewish women to display the patterns of behavior that Marion Kaplan found among German Jewish women at the end of the nineteenth century, such as a greater degree of ritual observance than among their husbands and a tendency to serve as the transmitters of Jewish identity within the family circle.

Because immigrant Jewish women had fewer institutional affiliations than men, the community they defined for themselves was less dependent on formal institutions than was the Jewish community that emerges in our classic history texts. Perhaps the most important gender-linked form of community was the urban neighborhood. While men, women, and children shared the stoops and sidewalks of immigrant and second-generation Jewish neighborhoods, at least during the daytime the neighborhood was the special turf of women. Women often looked to their neighbors as their particular community. Moreover, they used the neighborhood as the locus-of their political activity. Historians have often asserted that Jewish housewives, particularly in immigrant settlements, were apolitical. Had they looked to the neighborhood rather than to the unions or to formal meetings under the auspices of political parties, they would have found evidence of a high degree of female political activity. The social consciousness that so many observers noted among Jewish working women did not disappear after marriage; it simply changed its place and mode of operation.

Jewish women used the neighborhood for grassroots political organizing, both sporadic and sustained. At least three major gender linked issues engaged their attention in the first two decades of this century: food prices, rising rents, and women's suffrage. The earliest and most dramatic incident of women's neighborhood-based political activity occurred in New York City in 1902, when the price of kosher meat soared from twelve cents to eighteen cents a pound. Concerned that they would not be able to stretch their husbands' wages to provide meat for their families, middle-aged housewives (their average age was thirty-nine) organized a boycott of kosher butcher shops, which spread from the Lower East Side to Williamsburg and Harlem and attracted the attention of all the New York City newspapers because the women milled in the street, broke into butcher shops' and flung meat onto the sidewalks. The leaders of this movement used their presence in the neighborhood to good advantage. They utilized a house-to-house canvas to provide information to their constituency and to collect bail funds for women who had been arrested. Further, they were on hand to enforce the boycott, through a combination of moral and physical suasion. Thus, they went so far as to inspect the cholent (Sabbath stew) pots of women en route to the bakery on Friday afternoon in order to ensure that the Sabbath meal would be a meatless one. Relying on their recognition as respected figures in the neighborhood, they also interrupted synagogue services on the Sabbath in order to gain the support of male worshipers for their cause and to secure rabbinic endorsements. Within the neighborhood the leaders also organized large protest meetings to spur on their troops and provided political leaflets to maintain the momentum of their movement. Thus, with the neighborhood as their base, they combined the most current political concept of the mass strike and boycott with such traditional Jewish concerns as kashrut (observance of the Jewish dietary laws) and the resort to the synagogue as an institution concerned with communal justice. Through the neighborhood they seem to have transcended the divisions, religious and secular, radical and liberal, that divided the organized immigrant Jewish community.

Similar tactics appeared in subsequent food riots and boycotts (e.g., New York City, 1917), as well as in rent strikes and suffrage campaigns. Thus, hailing the meat boycott as their model, Jewish housewives played an active role in Lower East Side rent strikes in 1904 and 1907-8. Beginning with a house-to-house canvas, women strike leaders promoted neighborhood solidarity by collecting written pledges of refusals to pay rent.

The suffrage campaigns on the Lower East Side, where support for female suffrage was higher than in any other immigrant neighborhood in New York City in the state elections of 1915 and 1917, also took extensive advantage of the neighborhood network of women. While most historians have focused on large, often citywide, rallies and on the pronouncements of the leadership of the suffrage movement (which was reluctant to acknowledge Jewish support), Elinor Lerner's pioneering study of the suffrage vote in individual election districts has revealed that immigrant Jewish women did painstaking community organizing on the issue for years and were instrumental in getting out the vote. Young working-class women in the garment unions provided the initiative for undertaking intensive public activity on the Lower East Side beginning in 1907, as well as much of the membership for the Wage Earners' League of the Woman Suffrage party. In the Woman Suffrage party itself Jewish women constituted 17 percent of the founding members and 64 percent of the members in the most highly Jewish assembly districts. In four of those districts Jewish women served as chairpersons and coordinated the propaganda campaign. Incidentally, those four districts had the highest pro-suffrage vote in all of Manhattan in 1915. Married women, too, like their working sisters, played a role in organizing the suffrage campaign both on the Lower East Side and in more affluent Harlem. Mary Beard, historian and suffragist, happily noted that "[the] army of tenement mothers and working women [who marched in the last suffrage parade] ought to stir the sluggish to action." Yiddish leaflets addressed tenement mothers directly, appealing to their desire to solve their housing and food problems by touting the power of the ballot box.

Most importantly, Jewish women applied the techniques they had developed in the meat boycott and rent strikes to the suffrage campaign. In 1911 Lavinia Dock, South Manhattan organizer for the Woman Suffrage party, commended "the splendid captains and workers [who] were making woman suffrage known in shops and homes and even in the political life of the district." These activities, she noted, "represented the most sincere kind of propaganda work, personal interviews, street meetings and earnest argumentation."  On the Lower East Side, Jewish women were particularly assiduous in carrying out a neighborhood canvass. Trudging up tenement stairs, they went from flat to flat to speak about women's suffrage. For each visit they recorded in a card file the attitude of each voter toward the issue and the type of literature distributed to the household.

Even women who were not actively involved in the campaign were aware of, and interested in, the issue. In her reports on the neighbor hood, Lavinia Dock, who worked on the staff of the Henry Street Settlement, pointed out in 1911 that women and children she met in the settlement knew many details of the victory of suffrage in Washington State and that Jewish women, on their own initiative, consulted with her on the issues of suffrage and becoming citizens. In 1915 she was able to report that the neighborhood canvass yielded a 75 percent approval rate for women's suffrage among Jews on the Lower East Side, a figure suggesting that Jewish culture now affirmed the acceptability of a secular public role for women. Not surprisingly, after the suffrage amendment was ratified, Jewish women registered to vote in large numbers.

While much of our information is from New York City, scattered evidence from other communities suggests that women performed similar communal-political tasks elsewhere as well. For example, the first mass suffrage meeting in Philadelphia was organized and attended for the most part by Jews.  One Pittsburgh woman reminisced, "I was one of the girls who marched for women's suffrage. I was not a speaker. I was one of those we called 'Jimmy Higgins' in the Socialist Party -- who sells literature, gives out literature, carries the platform."

It was in their neighborhoods, then, that immigrant women, primarily of the working class, constructed a female community. Through the neighborhood network they provided advice and emotional support for each other as well as acting on issues of broad social consequence.

When immigrant women and their second-generation daughters did affiliate with formal communal institutions, they did so in institutions that were by and large segregated by gender. Landsmanshaft societies, which provided social services and companionship for immigrants hailing from the same town, generally boasted a "ladies auxiliary" through which women participated in the affairs of the society. Upwardly mobile immigrant women adapted to the norms of U.S. Jewish life by joining the synagogue sisterhoods that had emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and had- become nationally organized in the second decade of the twentieth. Sisterhoods were seen as the most acceptable mode for middle-class Jewish women to express their religious commitments, for in the United States the public expression of piety was increasingly linked with the female gender. The synagogue sisterhood offered a venue for Jewish women to apply their domestic skills, such as food preparation and decoration of the sanctuary, to the formerly masculine domain of the synagogue without disrupting the hierarchy of status within the congregation itself. It was "Americanization," then, that provided a new public religious focus for women's Jewish identity.

With upward mobility and the increasing leisure time it provided, immigrant women and their daughters also joined such Jewish women's organizations as Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women, which built on a triple legacy: traditional Jewish philanthropy, the nineteenth-century Ladies Aid Society, and the U.S. Women's Club movement. These Jewish women's organizations enabled women to take their talents and energy outside their own households in a socially approved manner; in a Jewish version of what has been called "domestic feminism," civic concern became an expression of domestic responsibility writ large. Some historians have pointed out that Jewish women's social welfare associations were often more involved in the general civic affairs of their region than were parallel local men's organizations. Because of their concern with such "women's issues" as family stability, health, and child care, they may have retained an interest in causes associated with the Progressive movement longer than did male-dominated Jewish communal institutions. Although these women's organizations never openly challenged the primacy of the home and domestic responsibilities as the proper central focus of women's lives, they reconfigured the boundaries between the domestic and public spheres. In teaching administrative skills and conferring public positions of authority and responsibility upon their members, they also expanded the range of appropriate female behavior. The impact of these organizations on the self-definition of their activists deserves further attention.

Since immigrant Jewish women experienced work, domestic responsibility, and community differently from their male peers, it would be worthwhile to explore what values they contributed to Jewish associations such as Landsmanshaftn and synagogues or secular organizations. At least one labor historian has suggested, for example, that female organizers were the initiators of the advanced educational, cultural, and recreational programs that ultimately became the pride of the Jewish garment unions. For them, the realization of the ideals of the Labor movement could not be limited to higher wages or improved working conditions alone but included the creation of a community offering workers the potential for self improvement and for life-enriching leisure. Were there other female visions of community expressed implicitly in the educational, cultural, social, and philanthropic activities of the major Jewish women's organizations?

The largely domestic religious experience of immigrant Jewish women and how they transmitted their concepts of Judaism and Jewishness to their children in an era of little formal Jewish education could perhaps be explored through memoirs, diaries, and literature to gain a fresh perspective on the adaptation of Judaism in the United States. While the "feminization" of nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Christianity has been the object of study, a parallel trend in U.S. Jewish life has yet to be fully investigated. The religious functions of women's philanthrohpic societies and sisterhoods also deserve sustained attention. The relatively hig level of gender segregation in traditional Judaism and even in modernized forms of Judaism necessitates the explicit study of the religious, as well as the social, experience of Jewish women. The historical experience of immigrant Jewish women embraced work and family, politics and social welfare, friendship groups and neighborhood. We can understand their experience and its significance only if we expand our definition of the historical arena, ask questions that do not presume male experience as the norm, and look for new sources of information. As we have seen, oral history, when combined with more traditional documentation, has much to offer in facilitating the integration in historical narrative of the private and public dimensions of women's lives and of human experience in general. By including gender as one of their tools of analysis, historians of U.S. Jewry will produce a more complex and nuanced account of the transformation of the Jewish community and its culture on U.S. soil.