Female, Jewish, and Educated

by Freidenreich, Harriet Pass

• ISBN13: 9780253340993
• ISBN10: 0253340993
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-08-01
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

Female, Jewish, and Educated presents a collective biography of Jewish women who attended universities in Germany or Austria before the Nazi era. To what extent could middle-class Jewish women in the early decades of the twentieth century combine family and careers, or did they feel compelled to choose between the two? What impact did anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and gender discrimination, on the other, having in shaping the personal and professional choices of educated Jewish women? Harriet Freidenreich analyses the lives of 460 Central European Jewish university women, focusing on their family backgrounds, university experiences, professional careers, and decisions about marriage and children, as well as the ways in which their education helped mould their personal, political, feminist and Jewish identities. Freidenreich evaluates the role of discrimination and anti-Semitism in shaping the professional careers of female Jewish teachers, academics, physicians, and lawyers in the four decades preceding world War II and assesses the effects of Nazism, the Holocaust, and emigration on the lives of the younger cohort of the group of women studied. The life stories of the women profiled reveal the courage, character, and resourcefulness with which they confronted challenges still faced by women today.

Author Biography

Harriet Freidenreich is a native of Ottawa, Canada. She received her undergraduate education at the University of Toronto and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. As Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia, she teaches a wide range of courses in women's history, Jewish history, and European history. She is the author of The Jews of Yugoslavia, Jewish Politics in Vienna, and various articles on Central European Jewish women in the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

List of Maps	viii
List of Tables	ix
Acknowledgments	x
Introduction: Finding Our Mothers, Finding Ourselves	xiii
Note on Women's Names	xxiii
Emancipation through Higher Education	1	(17)
Dutiful Daughters, Rebels, and Dreamers: Shaping the Jewish University Woman	18	(24)
University Years: Jewish Women and German Academia	42	(25)
Professional Quest and Career Options	67	(41)
The Marriage Plot: Career versus Family?	108	(25)
Jews, Feminists, and Socialists: Personal Identity and Political Involvement	133	(30)
Interrupted Lives: Persecution and Emigration	163	(18)
Reconstructing Lives and Careers	181	(15)
Epilogue: The Legacy	196	(6)
Glossary and Abbreviations	202	(4)
Appendix: Tables	206	(12)
Notes	218	(45)
Bibliography	263	(18)
Index	281