Jody - # 12 Freidenreich

Freidenreich, Harriet Pass. Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)

Method:

This is a pseudo-collective-biography written from published memoirs, autobiographies, and a few interviews of university women around 1900 in central Europe. Her main goal is to access the impact of gender, education, and discrimination within a specific minority (xviii). 

Summary of Argument:

Jewish women of central Europe, born around 1900 or after, who went to university defied expectations set for females of their time. Being Jewish and female, they faced discrimination and stereotype. Freidenreich shows how these women courageously displayed nerve and determination that eventually led to their individual-emancipation of gender roles and societal expectation through their education. Family, Jewishness, and gender all had an effect upon these women and their career choices. While most historians have studied "The New Woman" of the era, Freidenreich goes beyond by exposing the determination of these Jewish women to challenge masculine norms and attend European university in disproportionately larger numbers than their gentile counterparts. In the end, these women - who showed courage, character, and resourcefulness - paved the way for the women of the twentieth-century.

Comment:

While the methodology of mainly examining published memoirs has its own downfall, this work is largely informative but dull. Freidenreich's work is solid but I kept hoping for a comparative edge - either with the "man's world" or with females of another minority at the time. The lack of juxtaposition with the masculine experience (Jewish or non-Jewish), even if it was one chapter, would have benefitted the work greatly. The most interesting points, for me, concerned the underlying questions of how major a role assimilation played in determining choices of family and career. 

Argument (Chapter Outlines):

I. Emancipation through Higher Education

II. Dutiful Daughters, Rebels, and Dreamers: Shaping the Jewish University Woman

III. University Years: Jewish Women and German Academia

IV. Professional Quest and Career Options

V. The Marriage Plot: Career versus Family?

VI. Jews, Feminists, and Socialists: Person Identity and Political Involvement

VII. Interrupted Lives: Persecution and Emigration

VIII. Reconstructing Lives and Careers

Epilogue: The Legacy

 Notes:

• Opened to women 1900 - empowering them from societal restraints (1)
• New women versus domestic
• Jewish emancipation A-1867/G-1869, but women's emancipation lagged behind (2)
• Jewish women high proportion of women in university (9) unlike US
• Negative stereotypes (10) and lack of career aspirations (13) abounded
• Higher % of women due to socio-economic and cultural factors (17)
• Mainly MC/German cultural values/defy norms/determination (18)
• typically urban and mobile/not following mothers but sought fatherly approval (23)
• resentment of femininity (32)
• less religious and observant, most went to secular school (36)
• German by culture and language - Jewish by religion (40) little Zionism  
• Very few, if any, female organizations - male dominated (48-9)
• Rarely self-sufficient or self-resilent (51)
• a third studied medicine (52)
• Reflective of male society - women doctors acceptable for their nurturing (53)
• A/S and misogyny but rarely admitted by women (54)
• Philosophy faculty was attractive for secondary education teacher (58)
• Discrimination as women more than Jewishness but had to work harder (66)
• Baptized Jews received more opportunities than non (72)
• Gender double standards in post-university careers (77)
• Religion/cultural factors led to personal choice not to marry (110)
• Less than 10 % married
• 2/3 bare children eventually (117)
• Married with children women had few full-time jobs except physicians (129)
• Jewish women did not identify with organized Jewish community (135)
• 60% were "just Jews"/ minority was "Jewish Jews" (144)
• Women solidarity through medicine (154) Represents the "new woman"
• Few baptized Jews were R-wing but most left or center (159)
• Vast majority did not return postwar (191)
• Return to Vienna (195)
• Pre '33 = gender discrimination, Post '33 = racial discrimination (198)