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Reviews
| Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail: A History in the American West. By Jeanne E. Abrams. New York: New York University Press, 2006. vii + 279 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.00 (cloth).
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Nothing stirs my imagination like the 1910 images of a young family on horseback enjoying the sight of Seven Falls, Colorado, or a solid row of matronsfounders of the Denver Jewish Sheltering Home. These, among others, depict Jewish women who made their lives and fortunes in the West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose history is here related by Jeanne Abrams. |
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We are more familiar with their northeastern garment-worker counterparts; Jewish women of the American West have until now been relatively unexplored subjects of scholarship. Abrams is first to examine them within their geographical and intergenerational totality. In tracing the life paths of Jewish women, Abrams demonstrates the opportunities available for social and economic advancement in the West. Social mobility, combined with a distinctive Jewish cultural ethos, enabled Jewish women to redefine the private and public spheres and, ultimately, to acquire social and political rights of citizenship. |
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Abrams relates the stories of women in families but also as migrants trekking alone, in wagons, in ships sailing around Cape Horn, on mules crossing Nicaragua, and on trains after 1869. These pioneers started coming in the mid-nineteenth century from Germany, eastern Europe, and the cities of the Northeast. They settled in gold-mining communities and laid the economic and communal foundations for Jewish settlement. Abrams finds Jewish women taking responsibility for economic and community-building projects on the frontier and later in the expanding urban centers of the western states. They acted as transmitters of religious traditions and pioneered the establishment of voluntary welfare and educational institutions. In their roles as mainstays of religious life and as exemplars of maternal and nurturing ideals in charitable endeavors, Jewish women did not differ from their non-Jewish sisters. The Progressive temper of the late nineteenth century enabled themas it did women generallyto step out of narrowly prescribed arenas and gain a public voice on issues of social welfare and reform. Furthermore, the advent of early electoral suffrage reform in the western states, expanding state college education, and commercial expansion afforded later generations of Jewish women with unprecedented chances for economic and social advance. While some women won access to the male-dominated professional bastions of law and medicine, others fought for suffrage, new constitutions, and protective legislation; one even gained a seat in Congress. |
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Abrams cites examples of women's activism in philanthropy, education, and religion as central not only to Jewish culture and society but also instrumental in building bridges to the fledgling civil society of the West. Jewish middle-class women provided linkages to non-Jewish women and men activists from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and opened doors for Jewish participation in political and social institutions. Although incidents of anti-Semitism were not unknown, according to Abrams, the expanding economic opportunities, the absence of a single, distinct, dominant ethnic group or religion, and the relative social fluidity in the West all contributed to the acceptance of the Jewish presence and facilitated integration into the political power structure. |
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Abrams has made imaginative use of an impressive collection of memoirs and records to present a profile of strong and enterprising women whose distinctive Jewish ethos of social justice inspired their first steps in community building. Nevertheless, traditional maternal feminism played no less a role in their story than in the lives of other middle-class women. The book's narrative reveals that the formation of Jewish women's identity in the West was strongly shaped by their class status, even more so than by their ethnicity. One is left wondering, therefore, whether or not race was equally important in the successful rise of Jewish women from their ethnic niche into the world of politics and social citizenship.
Hadassa Kosak
Yeshiva University
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