The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany

by Marion A. Kaplan

Overview

A social history of Jewish women in Imperial Germany, this study synthesizes German, women's, and Jewish history. The book explores the private—familial and religious—lives of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and the public roles of Jewish women in the university, paid employment and social service. It analyzes the changing roles of Jewish women as members of an economically mobile, but socially spurned minority. The author emphasizes the crucial role women played in creating the Jewish middle class, as well as their dual role within the Jewish family and community as powerful agents of class formation and acculturation and determined upholders of tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195039528
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/15/1991
Series:	Studies in Jewish History
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.21(d)

About the Author

City University of New York

Table of Contents

	Introduction	3
Part 1	Women and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture
1.	Cultivating Respectability: A Family Enterprise	25
	Housework and Household	25
	Motherhood: Bringing Up German-Jewish Children	41
2.	Domestic Judaism: Religion and German-Jewish Ethnicity	64
	Women in Judaism: Personal Piety, Synagogue, and Community	64
	Women in the Home: The Tenacity and Decline of Jewish Traditions	69
3.	For Love or Money: Jewish Marriage Strategies	85
	To the Highest Bidder: Arranged Marriages and Dowries, 1871-1918	86
	The Dowry Chase: Critical Perspectives	99
	"Modern" Marriages in Imperial Germany	108
4.	The Labor of Leisure	117
	What Does "Leisure" Mean to Women?	117
	Home and Family: Domestic Ideals and the Goals of Leisure	119
	Beyond the Family: The Female World of Sociability	126
Part 2	Jewish Women Redefine Their "Place"
5.	Jewish Women Confront Academia	137
	Biases Against Women Students	138
	Choices: Turning Liabilities into Assets	143
	Student Life	146
	Anti-Semitism in the University	148
6.	Double Barriers, Double Burdens: Women's Employment	153
	Recognized and Unrecognized Work	153
	Working Population	157
	Attitudes Toward Middle-Class Women and Work	168
	Professional Career Women	171
7.	Her Sister's Keeper: Women's Organizations from the Chevra to Feminism	192
	Traditions and Social Change	192
	From Charity to Social Work	199
	World War I	219
	Conclusion	228
	Notes	235
	Selected Bibliography	304
	Index	321

Editorial Reviews

"A fascinating reconceptualization of German-Jewish history which is both fact-filled and scholarly as well as eminently readable."—Lilith

"This exciting new social history of Jewish women in Wilhelmine Germany constitutes a pathbreaking contribution...Kaplan's highly original study...significantly deepens our understanding of Jewish history, women's history, and German history...Dramatically reshapes the way we understand the German-Jewish past."—American Historical Review

"In her earlier work on German Jewish woman, Marion Kaplan ventured to attack tricky, emotion-laden subjects without the usual preconceptions and with impeccable scholarship. Now, in broadening her canvas, she once again sheds far more light than heat, and her readers have good reason to be grateful."—Peter Gay, Yale University

"Exceptional achievement...Careful and imaginative use of sources...Her extraordinary range of sources includes memoirs, cookbooks, newspapers, novels, oral interviews, as well as economic and sociological statistics....Especially impressive is the author's keen insight into the complex and often contradictory ways in which class, gender, and ethnicity intersected in the lives of German-Jewish women."—Report of the Biennial Book Prize Committee

"Kaplan's richly detailed The Making of the Jewish Middle Class eloquently explores the multiple and contradictory intersections of women's, Jewish, and German history in the Inperial era...Marvelous book."—Journal of Women's History

"In this superb book, Marion Kaplan argues convincingly that the making of a German Jewish middle class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century took place at home as much as it did at work, in private as much as in public; it was the work of women and men."—German Politics and Society

"Kaplan brings together important material from the fields of German history, women's history and Jewish history. Using sources which range from demographic and occupational statistics to organizational records and newsletters to prescriptive literature and personal memoirs, Kaplan charts a fascinating process of class building and identity construction among German Jewish bourgeois culture."—Labor History

From the Publisher