Why, then, does Israel hesitate to endorse the modern view of the education of women? Why does he lag behind in this important matter, and give the lie to his history?
Why does he lag behind in this important matter, and give the lie to his history? The beginning of the movement to raise the standard of woman's education was practically contemporaneous with two occurrences in Israel's history: with his emergence from the ghettos of West European cities, and with the rise of Jewish reform. Unfortunately, Israel, entered into the larger world, continued to hark back to the old cynic of the Talmud, though good authority might have been found for abandoning him to well-merited oblivion, by a judicious application of rabbinical dialectics, usually so keen to discern an advantage when one was sought.
one was sought. The first attack upon the problem, however, was made without resort to dialectics. The opportunist character of Jewish reform never presented so attractive an aspect as when it put the Jewish education of women upon its banner. Israel without a doubt had arrived at the juncture when women should have participated in his public activities. (The principle was unexceptionable, but its application was disappointing. The confirmation service for girls, in which the principle embodied itself, and which was to be the flower of female education, fell far short of fulfilling the hopes it had aroused. Like much of the work attempted by the reformers it will have to be done over again by another generation. It was sterile, ineffectual. It failed to stimulate the Jewish development of women, because it was an assertion of the principle of female education in theory only. In practice it put up with a minimum of superficial knowledge and an apology for Jewish training. With those outside of the reform party, it had the effect of throwing discredit upon the principle of female education, for to subscribe to a principle that seemed perforce to involve the introduction of a “custom of the Gentiles,” looked dangerously like dalliance with reform.
At best, a very small fraction of Jewish womanhood was prepared, in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, to lend itself to educational experiments. The vast majority of Jews lived in countries still untouched by the new education, whether of men or of women. When the changed spirit at last penetrated to Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe, the awakening was too abrupt for development to run along normal lines. So sober a concern as education occasioned riotous excesses. The old moorings gave way. Men and women were intoxicated as with young wine. No wonder the Jew felt justified in withholding his women from any imitation of this “custom of the Gentiles.” He had nothing to gain, it appeared, and everything to lose. If there was a modicum of truth in the whisperings and mutterings from across the German border, the reform Jewish mothers, with all their vaunted education, were not too successful in keeping their sons to the study and practice of the Law. The simple Jewesses of the East, in their unsophisticated way, were doing better Messianic work. As for Russian women students, with their mannish behavior, their participation in revolutionary projects, their absurd marriage relations assumed for the sake of intellectual ends, they assuredly were not attractive specimens of femininity in Jewish eyes. The Jew could never consent to put his daughters in the way of such spiritual debauchery. It was what the old Rabbi had warned him against. If his girls went into it of their own volition, he could only console himself piously with the reflection that they were not sons.
With these notions and this attitude, the Russian Jew arrived in the United States. Before he knew it, his girls had slipped into the public schools, and were being taught pretty much all his boys were learning. To his own amazement he found himself not half so rabid as before in opposing the “custom of the Gentiles.” Circumstances, or, in modern parlance, economic and industrial conditions, had not a little to do with his stoicism. They forced his hand, as two generations earlier they had forced the hand of all peoples in the matter of woman’s education. From being independent manufacturers in a home which was a miniature workshop for a dozen or more trades, women, with the removal of all industries from the home to the factory, became industrial agents in public life. They no longer worked for the home comforts of their men, but at the side of the men, as rivals. They worked for their own maintenance, and incidentally for the maintenance of the home. Things have come to such a pass that the economic no less than the spiritual survival of the family depends upon the exertions of its women as well as its men. The adequate education of women