Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access toFeminist Review.

www.jstor.org®

who need to be alerted to 1980s questions on critical methodology for black women's literature and unquestioned assumptions about 'tradition'. However, for both readerships, this can be categorized alongside other single-authored classics of 1980s African-American feminist criticism such as Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Barbara Christian's Black Feminist Criticism (Pergamon Press, 1985).

Delia Jarrett-Macauley

Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women Paula E. Hyman

University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 199S

ISBN 0 295 97426 5, $14.95 Pbk ISBN 0 295 97425 7, $30.00 Hbk

Adive Voices: Women in Jewish Culture Maurie Sacks (ed.)

University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago, 1995

ISBN 0 252 06453 4,$12.95 Pbk ISBN 0 252 021541,$34.95 Hbk

'Women are, in a certain sense, like the Jewish people,' wrote Chaim Malitz, an immigrant journalist to New York in 1918. These books, in a certain sense, invert this statement to transform the way we think about Jewish societies - Maurie Sacks's by placing centre-stage women as agents and Paula Hyman's by examining the conceptualization of gender in Jewish communal writing.

Both Sacks and Hyman use their introductions as part-confessional vehicle to situate their own development as politically and culturally conscious Jewish women. Given her focus on Judaism (in contrast to Hyman's on Jewishness), Sacks has a clear idea of her readers, who come from a relatively conservative Jewish tradition and are suspicious of attempts to dismantle their hierarchized vision of Judaism. Indeed, Sacks's explanation of feminism takes little account of recent studies of the politics of gender, or of more radical work on Jewish women and sexuality, published largely in the United States since the 1980s. 129

.. .. = z :1

"' ... "' c .; ... 0 z !: i: "' Iii z ~

The subject and methodological range of the edited anthology Active Voices is extensive: essays examine the Talmudic representation of wives; pre-1930s European Zionist women, and women in the American Reform synagogue during the same period; the early nineteenth-century British writer, Grace Aguilar; women's Holocaust testimony; newly Orthodox women; mothers' organization of bar mitzvahs; new inventions of ritual; Tunisian women, and piety among Middle Eastern women in Israel; an Orthodox girls' school play; and Judeo-Spanish folk-song. An ethnomusicologist and a family therapist write alongside historians, literary critics, and anthropologists. As with many such volumes, there is some unevenness in quality and approach: Susan Starr Sered and Debra Renee Kaufmann, for example, each argue for a refinement of their very discipline (in this case anthropology) and their breadth and capacity to engage with the theoretical limitations by which they feel confronted sit a little uneasily with papers of a lesser quality.

Agency and assertiveness are such crucial concepts in this volume that they are in danger of becoming synonymous with liberation. All the essays concentrate on the internal dynamics of Jewish culture - I worry about the use of the singular - and there is no implication that the 'active voices' were heard particularly loudly beyond. The essays link by positioning their subjects as inheritors and recreators of an old tradition, Judaism. This is shown to be more malleable and subject to specifically feminine interpretations and, hence, transformative influence, than might be imagined from a reading of the 'patriarchal' canon, though this term is never dearly defined. Central to their so-called 'gynocentric' interpreta­tion is the view, outlined by Sered, that, while Jewish women in any given culture probably bear greater similarity to other women in the same milieu than to other Jewish women across time and space, what binds them 'as Jewish women' rather than 'women who happen to be Jewish' is their relationship to Jewish tradition and texts. In arguing for the necessity of a positive relationship to this tradition, she underplays its inimical elements. In so doing, she repositions but re-ignites the defini­tional conflicts and exclusionary tendencies characterizing the - not necessarily uncreative- tension between Judaism and modernity.

The century 1850 to 1950 forms the basis for Paula Hyman's illuminat­ing exploration of gender and assimilation, disrupting assumptions impli­cit within former works that 'the Jews' are homogeneously male. There are only four chapters- on Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the arrival of Eastern Jews in the West, principally the US, and a final chapter on the sexual politics of Jewish identity - but the book is no less worthy for that. Less condemnatory of assimilation than earlier writers, and

uo refreshingly sceptical of claims to an essentially feminine spirituality

which can be historically traced as providing a route for female expres­sion, Hyman enlarges our total understanding by analysing the highly gendered nature of arguments about assimilation which were played out during the process itself. She distinguishes two trends: first, the socio­logical assimilatory process whereby the larger society's basic markers such as language, dress, and mores are adopted, and which culminates in the intermixing via marriage of the two groups who inevitably both agree on the desirability of such fusion; and, second, the assimilatory project, the Jewish establishment's official response which, she argues, never involved the wholesale disappearance of Jewish particularism within larger Western societies but was intended to expunge the last vestiges of prejudice against Jews.

Thematically complementary to the Sacks volume, Gender and Assimil­ation's multi-lingual sources (in English, French, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish) are employed in a skilled and convincing investigation not only to lay bare the inadequacy of our prior understanding of assimilation but to expose little-known aspects of contemporary Jewish and women's history. I was fascinated, for example, by the account of the autonomous Polish Jewish feminist movement in the 1920s. Claiming both particular­ist and universal rights - as Jews, as women, and as human beings -these activists demanded full political and social equality and challenged the male leadership of Jewish communal and political organizations at roughly the same time as their more celebrated German counterparts.

If her reading of autobiographies is untroubled by recent theorizations of that genre, Hyman's thematic concentration on educational opportunities discussed by the authors provides a subtle vision of girls' secular and Jewish education as the site of special anxieties about women's relation­ship to the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Class is key here, and the push for education carried different meanings: in a poor and religiously orthodox Eastern Europe where women were economically active in public, girls were more likely than boys to receive secular education, a situation regretted by some women organizing girls' education; in bourgeois Western Europe during the invention of Judaism as a domestic religion, women were idolized as guardians of the home and transmitters of Jewish education to their assimilating sons - and then condemned for the speed at which assimilation was proceeding.

To an extent, though without being reductive, the book traces the changing configuration of the Jewish mother, from her responsibility in Western Europe for the very Jewishness of an entire community, to her literary appearance in post-Second World War North America as a con-straint to vigorous Jewish masculinity. This creates a certain disparity u1

.. ... = z :E :::> ... ~ • "' 0 z 31: ... > ... a: t; z ~

between the ardent new young American woman epitomized by Mary Antin (whose precocity led her to publish her autobiography at the age of 30) and the ubiquity of the normative female as mother .

The study of Jewish history has been hindered too long for want of a work of this kind. Meticulous and generous, not only is it a necessary book but one that will inspire further research and ought to render impossible a disregard for gender in future studies of Jewish communities and their articulations for a place in the modern Diaspora.

Karen Adler

Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo University of California Press, 1994

ISBN 0 520 07514 5,£12.95 Pbk ISBN 0 520 0075137,£37.50 Hbk

Patriarchy on the Line: Labor, Gender and Ideology in the Mexican Maquila Industry Susan Triano Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1994

ISBN 1 56639 196 2,£16.95 Pbk ISBN 156639195 4,£44.95 Hbk

Both of these books are meticulously researched but theoretically offer very little that is new. I think part of the theoretical problem is that the research was designed and the fieldwork carried out some time ago, in the case of Susan Triano's study 1983-4 and Pierrette Hondagneu­Sotelo's 1986-8. Thus, while the theoretical framework is entirely appro­priate in both cases, neither engages with the more contemporary debates around diversity and identity, opting instead for a 'safe' human agency and structure approach. In fact Susan Triano spells out quite clearly in her study of women export-processing workers that 'In my opinion, the primary purpose of contemporary research is the refining, elaborating, and evaluating of earlier work to produce empirically accurate and theo­retically coherent accounts of women's roles within the new international division of labour' (1994: 2).

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's study of the interaction between gender m relations, immigration, and settlement patterns among undocumented