by Rebecca Honig Friedman

What struck me most upon reading Deborah Siegel’s engaging history of the modern feminist movement, Sisterhood: Interrupted, was the sense of absolute awakening that the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 70s gave to so many women. As a woman born into a world where the basic feminist tenet of equality between the sexes has always been taken for granted, at least in theory if not in practice, it had never occurred to me how profoundly the feminist “revolution” was a revolution, how profound a change it provoked in the basic attitudes of women and men about each other and themselves. The power that feminism wrought for so many women is precisely what Siegel tries to convey in her book, so that we women of the “post-feminist” era will get it. Because it’s the lack of such an inciting and inspiring spirit that has made feminism into such a bore, or a non-issue, or the F-word, for so many younger women today.

While it’s often assumed that Jewish feminism is decades behind the secular brand, and thus hasn’t reached the point where younger women can take its advancements for granted, that’s not necessarily the case, as this post by Shira Salamone of the blog On The Fringe-Al Tzitzit points out. Salamone links to two different posts about “the F-word” — one in which an Orthodox woman proudly declares herself a feminist though she has always believed she is not supposed to be one; in the other, a young Orthodox woman, Chana, declares she is decidedly not a feminist though everyone assumes she would be, since she is extremely bright, independent and loves to study Talmud.

The ideas at the root of the Jewish feminist generation gap, and the adamantly non-angry-feminist stance of Chana, are well illustrated by a feature in the current issue of Lilith, the mother-daughter companion pieces collectively titled “First Frissons of Feminism.” But the piece suggests that plenty more feminist awakenings are already stirring in our mother’s daughters, even if they don’t know it yet.
Read more on the Lilith Blog…

Posted on November 5th, 2007 Filed under: Lilith Blog |