Read more about this issue here or access the issue index here. Below is an excerpt from the editor’s overview:
This issue of Scholar and Feminist Online began with an insight: the growing realization of the importance of Jewish women in the history of feminism in the United States. When it comes to improving women’s lives, in many instances it is Jewish women who are changing America.
This insight is now coming to fore of scholarship on American feminism, as scholars reflect back on many decades of change, and particularly on the founders of what is generally called the “second wave” of American feminism, which began in the 1960s and continued through the twentieth century. Even in the first wave of activism, running roughly from the mid-nineteenth century through the suffrage movement of the 1920s Jewish women were not absent. Ernestine Rose, a Jewish immigrant from Poland and political activist, is generally credited as being one of the first women to speak in public to “mixed” audiences of both men and women in the United States. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the role of Jewish women in U.S. feminism is unmistakable with leaders like those named by Letty Cottin Pogrebin at the conference as “Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, [and] Gloria Steinem”. …
