Thesis:
Being born Jewish shaped these women’s lives, even though organized religion had little meaning to these women. Use analysis of the past and female Jewish university women of the past to understand more about ourselves today – where we came from to know where we are now, and recognize that many obstacles remain the same. Freidenreich posits that before 1933, Jewish university women were more likely to encounter obstacles and hostility due to their gender than because of their Jewish origins (165).
Questions:
How did Jewish origin, family, and gender affect their lives and shape their career trajectories? Did attending university help emancipate women from traditional gender roles and societal expectations for women?
Sources:
Published and unpublished memoirs, biographies, essays, interviews, questionnaires, and letters (correspondence with the women and/or their children, relatives, and friends.)
My comments:
What about lesbians? Not enough about sexuality overall; when she does deal with it, it’s as abortion and birth control, ‘sex reform,’ so not enough.
I prefer this to Rose’s, although both were good and important to adding to the other half of the history I have been studying. I like that Freidenreich ties her scholarly work and thesis to the personal quest of understanding more of where she comes from, as a Jewish female scholar, and puts it in perspective for female scholars today.
I especially appreciate (and am depressed by) her discussion relating to or revealing that in fact many of the problems professional women had at that time are still obstacles we encounter today.
Social history of 460 women who graduated from universities in Germany and Austria in the early 20th c., prior to the start of WWI. Freidenreich analyzed two cohorts or “generations,” the first born before the turn of the century, beginning their university studies before the end of WWI; the second born between 1900 – 1916, receiving their education during the interwar years.
Chapter 1 – Emancipation through Higher Education
Chapter 2 – Dutiful Daughters, Rebels, and Dreamers: Shaping the Jewish University Woman
Jewish parentage and a secular, cultural home life, along with socioeconomic status and the esteem of higher learning and German culture in the homes of acculturated Jews propelled Jewish women to university education and professional careers. Freidenreich emphasizes that their fathers served as role models for them.
Chapter 3 – University Years: Jewish Woman and German Academia
Jewish women heavily overrepresented among C.E. university students before WWII. This partly due to socioeconomic reasons, and was also partly cultural. Most middle-class, from urban homes – both of which are indicators for (male and female) educational achievement. Freidenreich also claims that Jewish families wanted to ensure that those who did not marry could care for themselves. Birth order and sibling rivalry also affected attendance at university.
Jewish women able to attend university without leaving parents’ home. Most secular, with little or no Jewish education, and highly assimilated. Religiously and politically liberal. Freidenreich questions hypothesis (Huerkamp) of a declining birthrate that left fewer sons to educate, making education of Jewish girls possible. Jewish women tended to study medicine and humanities.
Chapter 4 – Professional Quest and Career Options
Medicine was considered appropriate for women because of traditional familial nurturing roles, also easier to combine with having a family. Eve of WWI, approximately 25% of the licensed women physicians in Germany were Jewish. Female physicians had less lucrative practices, worked in less prestigious fields of medicine (pediatrics, psychiatry, gynecology, ophthalmology, dermatology) and tended to establish private practices in their homes, treating mainly working-class women and children.
Chapter 5 – The Marriage Plot: Career versus Family?
Problems balancing career and family. Once married, often faced opposition of husbands. Those who succeeded and had longer careers had financial resources (for childcare and housekeeping) and supportive spouses. The younger generation was more likely to marry and have kids than older. Most married but at an older age. Less than ½ had children. Many had less traditional marriages. 25% never married; of the older generation, 40% never married. If married, large proportion childless.
Chapter 6 – Jews, Feminists, and Socialists: Personal Identity and Political Involvement
Divides the women of this study into three groups: “Jewish Jews” (religious and observant), “Just Jews” (accepted Jewishness as a fact of life and remained nominally within the formal structure of the Jewish community), and “Former Jews” (baptized or officially disaffiliated from the IKG). 60% of the women in her study were “Just Jews.” Those who left Judaism to be baptized mostly did it out of practical reasons, as religion meant little to them. Not necessarily observant, even if they participated in family religious occasions or held onto some Jewish traditions. For the most part, did not identify with the Kultusgemeinde – marginal members, on the periphery.Most women of the younger cohort derived identity from their left-wing political affiliations. Most didn’t consider selves feminists, nor did they want to appear to be feminists; bad for career and work at university. Some of the socialist women could really be considered feminists. Many took part in sex reform movement – abortion, birth control; could be seen as “New Women.” ¾ of this group Social Dems, ¼ Communists. “Red Vienna” (more than Berlin) served as an incubator for left-leaning university women.
Chapter 7 – Interrupted Lives: Persecution and Emigration
Most pre-Nazi discrimination gender; during Nazi time, female professionals had double antisemitic and sexism (targeted as “double-earners,” non-Aryan, socialists, communists). Pre-Nazis, women held 1.2% of the academic appointments and 40% of those were Jewish. 2/3 of the women were either single or married without children. Most in her study went to US, Palestine, England, where they encountered language barriers and lack of professional accreditation.
Chapter 8 – Reconstructing Lives and Careers
Female Jewish immigrants to other countries (fleeing the Nazis) faced triple discrimination: as Jews, women, and as foreigners. From Freidenreich’s sample, a relatively small number returned to Austria or Germany. A big problem for these émigrés was loss of social status – physicians had to work as domestics in their new countries, etc. Age was a factor – older émigrés rarely reestablished careers in new countries; those under 40 were more likely to continue career paths.
Scientists and social scientists had a better time adapting their professional careers than those lawyers and journalists who were tied to language and culture. Female psychoanalysts, psychologists, and social workers generally could continue their careers. Language barriers greater for educators and journalists/writers; Hebrew a greater language barrier than English.
Gaining professional accreditation in their field a particular problem for doctors and especially dentists. Less favorable conditions for women doctors in the US after emigration than it had been in the decades before the war in Central Europe. Of the approximately 500 in her sample that went to the US, however, 4 out of 5 had requalified by 1950! Women psychoanalysts had the most success in her sample; others did well in medical and scientific research. Difficult for women to get academic positions in the US, especially at the same institution as their spouses due to nepotism restrictions (similar to Nazi “double-earner” policy, actually). Single women still faced the triple discrimination – Jews, women, foreigners. Many Jewish émigré women involved in research and writing about antisemitism and racism.
Most in her sample stayed in their adopted countries; 1 out of 10 women returned to live in C. Europe. Many of them were communists and socialists who wanted to rebuild Austria or Germany. “Academics such as Gerta von Übisch and Käte Hamburger, educators like Minna Schiffman Lachs and Stella Herzig Klein-Löw, lawyers like Erna Aronsohn Proskauer and Käte Lowey Manasse [Maybe a relative of Eva Menasse?], as well as several writers, returned for professional reasons, having concluded that they would be unable to pursue their careers in emigration. In their later years, some older women decided to spend their retirement in Central Europe, mainly for economic reasons.”
Some of the women emigrated again later to new countries. Hilde Zaloscer, a Bosnian Jewish woman had been educated in Vienna, moved to Egypt and married and converted to Islam to stay safe. She was finally expelled as a Jew in 1968. She tried to reestablish herself in Vienna, but was not successful and went to Canada. In discussing her anxieties and lifetime of flight but also how she regrets only one thing and would have done it differently, Zaloscer writes: “No, I regret nothing [and] would probably do everything again as I did [and] make the same decisions. Only one thing do I regret, one thing I should not have done; only once did my instinct deceive me, and that embitters the short time that remains for me: I should not have come back to Vienna.”
Most recognition of these women posthumous.
