| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail: A History in the American West. By Jeanne E. Abrams. (New York: New York University Press, 2006. viii, 279 pp. $39.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-0719-7.)
Jeanne E. Abrams's new book has two broad purposes: to balance the historiography of the western United States by showing how Jewish women individually and collectively contributed to building the region's infrastructure and to balance the historiography of American Jews by showing that Jewish women pioneers had a different communal and civic experience than their sisters in the East. This is the first book to survey the lives of Jewish women in the West, and it effectively demonstrates the broad spectrum of their activities and their early integration as pioneer leaders of women's civic endeavors.	1
The story begins rather conventionally by examining the process of migration, either across the plains to Denver or Salt Lake City or by ship to San Francisco to establish families and businesses. Since Jewish migrants to the West were set apart from their Christian neighbors by their religion, Abrams next examines how Jewish women raised their daughters to retain a belief in the unique qualities of Judaism despite the geographic isolation, not only through ad hoc ritual instruction but by creating benevolent societies. While monographs such as Peggy Pascoe's Relations of Rescue (1990) and Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999) illustrate how women created distinctive institutions and roles, Abrams, through examples drawn from a small subset of Jewish women, shows how cities, to survive, had to be as much a woman's world as a man's.	. . .

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