Week of February 11

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February 11, 1976

Adlene Harrison becomes first Jewish female big-city mayor

February 13, 1913

Los Angeles Council of Jewish Women opens day nursery

February 13, 1945

Death of Henrietta Szold

February 16, 1963

Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" appears in "The New Yorker"

February 16, 1997

First conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy

February 17, 1925

Florence Prag Kahn elected as first Jewish woman in U.S. Congress

February 17, 1963

Publication of "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan

 

February 11, 1976

Adlene Harrison becomes first Jewish female big-city mayor

On February 11, 1976, Adlene Harrison became the acting mayor of Dallas after the presiding mayor's resignation. She was the first Jewish woman to become mayor of a major American city, as well as the first woman mayor of Dallas. Harrison, who had been a Democratic city councilwoman since 1973 and mayor pro tem, succeeded Wes Wise, who resigned to run for Congress. Harrison served only until the election of a new mayor at the end of the year.

Always an activist for environmental causes, Harrison, while on the city council, had co-sponsored an ordinance to establish a city environmental committee and supported a strict air pollution ordinance. In addition, she was a member of the National League of Cities' Steering Committee for Environmental Quality. As mayor, she continued her work for the environment, as well as encouraging legislation for historic preservation in the city.

Following her tenure as mayor, Harrison was appointed an Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator in 1977, responsible for directing the EPA's anti-pollution efforts in five states. She held this position until 1981, when she became chair of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Authority Board.

Harrison's other civic involvements have included work on the boards of the Women's Museum, the Women's Center of Dallas, the Dallas Jewish Coalition, the Metropolitan YWCA and the Dallas Arboretum. Harrison has been awarded the Women's Council of Dallas Distinguished Service Award, and Southern Methodist University's Profiles in Leadership Award. In addition, she was awarded a Special Honor Award for furthering the EPA's affirmative action program.

Sources: www.dallashistory.org/history/dallas/1970s.htm; www.epa.gov/history/admin/reg06/harrison.htm; www.epa.gov/history/topics/perspect/women.htm; www.smu.edu/newsinfo/releases/00229.html; www.texaslegacy.org/bb/transcripts/harrisonadlenetxt.html.

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February 13, 1913

Los Angeles Council of Jewish Women opens day nursery

On February 13, 1913, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) opened a day nursery for the children of working mothers. The nursery was expected to "lighten the burden of mothers who are compelled to labor in the factories, laundries and shops." The children were to be provided with milk, paid for by the ten-cent nursery fee, and any children deemed "unkept" would be bathed and given clean clothes.

Like many such projects, the Los Angeles nursery served two purposes: it aided working women by providing low-cost child care, but it also sought to teach them how to care for their children. To that end, the provision of baths and clothes was seen as an "object lesson" to mothers. These mothers, many probably immigrants, were to be taught American norms of cleanliness and dress.

The nursery project thus reflected broader trends in women's reform work of this period. The National Council of Jewish Women, which had initially focused on preserving Judaism among Americanized women, shifted its focus to social work after debates over proper religious observance split the group at its 1913 convention. In focusing on immigrant aid—including Americanization classes, practical job training, and settlement houses—the women of the NCJW and its Los Angeles chapter joined thousands of others in transferring women's traditional caretaking roles from the home into the broader world.

See also: This Week in History for February 28, 1935, May 9, 1894, September 4, 1893, and November 15, 1896.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 968-979; Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1913; Faith Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993 (Tuscaloosa, Ala, 1993).

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February 13, 1945

Death of Henrietta Szold

Failing health had brought Henrietta Szold, in July 1943, to the Henrietta Szold Nursing School on the grounds of the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Even as she received care, she sustained her interest and involvement in her public activities, and American Hadassah members were kept informed of her condition. She died there on February 13, 1945. Thousands attended her funeral, and a boy from one of the last groups of children rescued from the Nazis by Youth Aliyah, an effort that she had directed, read kaddish, the Jewish mourners' prayer.

Szold is best known as the creator of Hadassah: The Women's Zionist Organization of America (founded February 24, 1912); she also worked strenuously for decades as secretary (meaning translator, indexer, fact checker, proofreader, statistician, administrator, and editor) of the Philadelphia-based Jewish Publication Society. But Szold spent most of the last 25 years of her life in Palestine where she made crucial contributions to the Jewish settlement that would become the state of Israel.

Szold moved to Palestine in 1920, at the age of 59, to take charge of the Hadassah-funded American Zionist Medical Unit, which was attempting to bring modern medical care to the region. She oversaw the transformation of this World War I-era emergency effort into the Hadassah Medical Organization. Emphasizing the health needs of women and children and serving people of all origins and religions, the organization expanded into the creation of milk clinics, food programs, a nursing school, and Hadassah Hospital.

Although always supported by Hadassah, Szold found new roles beyond the organization's continued focus on medical care. Chosen in 1927, as a member of the three-person international Zionist executive committee overseeing Jewish life in Palestine, Szold worked to create systematic frameworks for the provision of medical and educational services. In 1931, elected to the Jewish settlement's National Council, she created, from scratch, the basis for a national system of social welfare.

The last major effort of Szold's career, beginning in 1933, was her leadership of Youth Aliyah. In this role, she oversaw a massive effort to secure the departure of 11,000 Jewish youth from Germany and other nations threatened by the Nazis, and to arrange for their education and care within Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Szold tried to meet every arriving transport and took a personal interest in the placement and situation of each child. This work absorbed her into her 84th year.

Szold remains revered for her impact, as the founder of Hadassah, in reshaping American Zionism and in radically expanding public identities for American Jewish women. It is remarkable that in addition, we can point to Henrietta Szold as largely responsible for the healthcare, educational, and social welfare infrastructure that defined Israel at its founding in 1948.

See also: This Week in History for February 24, 1912, July 28, 1893, December 21, 1935.

Sources: jwa.org/exhibits/wov/szold/; Joan Dash, Summoned to Jerusalem: The Life of Henrietta Szold (NY, 1979); Marian Greenberg, There is Hope for Your Children: Youth Aliyah, Henrietta Szold, and Hadassah (Hadassah, www.hadassah.org; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1368-1373.

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February 16, 1963

Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" appears in "The New Yorker"

When Hannah Arendt published her first article about Adolf Eichmann's war crimes trial in The New Yorker in its February 16, 1963 issue, she was already a well-known political philosopher with a successful career and several books to her name. Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt studied theology and philosophy at the University of Marburg, where Martin Heidegger was on the faculty, and at the University of Heidelberg, where she completed a dissertation on St. Augustine.

Living amidst the political turmoil of Europe greatly shaped Arendt's studies and interests. Arendt shifted her focus away from theology to the rising anti-Semitism permeating the German polity in the 1930s. She began a study of the Enlightenment-era Jewish salon hostess Rachel Varnhagen, eventually published in 1958, in an attempt to understand the position of Jews within German culture and society. Arendt also became involved in the German Zionist Organization in 1933 and worked to bring Nazi atrocities to global attention. Arrested for investigating anti-Semitic propaganda, she befriended a Berlin jailer who enabled her escape.

Fleeing to Paris, Arendt worked with Youth Aliyah to help rescue Jewish children from the Third Reich by bringing them to Palestine. While in Paris, Arendt met her second husband and both were sent to internment camps in southern France. In 1941, both were able to reach America and reunite with Arendt's mother.

Once in America, Arendt began publishing political commentary and philosophy in journals such as Jewish Frontier and Partisan Review. After the war, Columbia historian Salo W. Baron put Arendt in charge of a program called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, which was intended to recover and restore lost and damaged Jewish archives and cultural markers. The publication of her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1951, made Arendt an intellectual celebrity as America, searching for answers to the horrors of World War II, careened into the Cold War. The Origins of Totalitarianism sought to explain the rise and appeal of both Hitler and Stalin and the nature of the societies created under their rule. Over the following decade, she published three more books: The Human Condition (1958); Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (1958); and Between Past and Future (1961).

In 1961, The New Yorker sent Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had been captured the previous year by Israeli security forces. The articles she wrote for the magazine were later expanded and published, in 1963, as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In the articles and the book, Arendt argued that Eichmann, the "father" of Hitler's "final solution," was no monster, but rather an ordinary man following orders and trying to advance his bureaucratic career. She asserted that even the evil of the Holocaust came from everyday thoughtlessness and the failure of ordinary people to take responsibility for their own actions. She called this condition "the banality of evil." In addition, Arendt suggested that, within the corrupted moral universe created by Nazi rule, local Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis bore some responsibility for the deaths of the six million, because of their partial collaboration. These assertions created a storm of commentary and criticism around the book, which remains Arendt's most controversial work.

Until her death in 1975, Arendt continued to write, often focusing on the problem of evil and the challenges of modernity. Among her later works were On Revolution and Men in Dark Times (both 1968). The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age and The Life of the Mind were published posthumously, in 1978. She also wrote for the New York Review of Books, criticizing the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and the associated abuses of executive power. In addition, Arendt taught at Princeton University, where she was the first woman to become a full professor, at the University of Chicago, at Wesleyan University, and at the New School for Social Research. During her lifetime, she was one of the country's most well-known intellectuals; her work remains influential in the fields of political theory and philosophy.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 61-64; Finding Aid, Library of Congress: memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/chron.html; Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963); New Yorker, February 16, 1963.

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February 16, 1997

First conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy

The first Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy took place in New York City on February 16-17, 1997, with the theme "Exploring the Impact of Feminist Values on Traditional Jewish Women's Lives." A series of major international and regional conferences have followed, focusing on topics such as "Discovering/Uncovering/Recovering Women in Judaism" and "Women and Men in Partnership."

Struggling seriously with questions about the intersections of traditional Judaism and modern feminism, over 1,000 participants at the 1997 conference discussed topics ranging from rabbinic ordination for women to Jewish divorce law to synagogue seating patterns. Arguing that increasing women's participation in Orthodox Judaism would benefit men as well as women, conference organizers gave prominent roles to rabbis and male scholars as well as to women.

The success of the first conference prompted the growing Orthodox feminist community to realize that it needed a more permanent presence and an organization for its concerns, and the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance was born. Among the founders of JOFA was Blu Greenberg, a prominent Orthodox feminist scholar and author who also chaired the first conference. Greenberg's best known works include On Women and Judaism: A View From Tradition and How To Run A Traditional Jewish Household. JOFA's mission is to "expand the spiritual, ritual, intellectual and political opportunities for women within the framework of halakha." Echoing a theme from the first conference, JOFA also devotes significant resources to aiding agunot, women whose husbands have denied them a Jewish divorce document, without which they cannot remarry or even seek potential new mates.

JOFA's website offers a rich array of resources related to women within contemporary Jewish Orthodoxy and within Jewish law. The organization celebrated a decade of work on February 10, 2007, by gathering for their Tenth Anniversary Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy, entitled "V'Chai Bahem? Passion and Possibility, Invigorating Orthodox Jewish Life."

Sources: www.jofa.org; New York Times, 22 February 1997; Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism; jwa.org/discover/recollections/greenberg.html.

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February 17, 1925

Florence Prag Kahn elected as first Jewish woman in U.S. Congress

As the wife of Julius Kahn, a U.S. Representative from San Francisco, Florence Prag Kahn had developed her own public identity by writing a column on Washington doings for her hometown newspaper. When her husband died, she ran in a special Congressional election held on February 17, 1925.

With her victory, Prag became the first Jewish woman and only the fifth woman to serve in Congress. She was reelected five times, serving until 1937. The next Jewish woman elected to Congress would be Bella Abzug in 1970.

In 1930, Kahn became the first woman to serve on the House Military Affairs Committee, where she introduced legislation that led to the creation of numerous military bases in her district and to the building of the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland.

A Republican, Kahn had excellent relationships with the leaders of her own Party. Yet, she was also the first Republican legislator to dine in Franklin Roosevelt's White House. During her years in Congress, Kahn was noted for her support of the rights of Chinese women and Native Americans and for her opposition to Prohibition and movie censorship. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, called Kahn "an all-around first-rate legislator, the equal of any man in Congress and the superior of most."

Kahn argued that “there is no sex in citizenship and there should be none in politics.” She made this point in a slightly different way in the context of a newspaper interview that noted her refusal to lose weight or tend to her hair in order to please others. When asked later in the interview why it was that she received more than twice as many votes as her late husband ever got, she responded, “sex appeal!”

Kahn died in 1948.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 712-714; www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/kahn.html; jwa.org/discover/inthepast/infocus/politics/kahn.html; New York Times, February 18, 1925; Communication from Ava Kahn, October 2004; Glenna Matthews, "'There is No Sex in Citizenship': The Career of Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn" in We Have Come to Stay : American Women and Political Parties, 1880-1960, edited by Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth I. Perry. (Albuquerque, 1999), pp. 134-140.

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February 17, 1963

Publication of "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan

The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, on February 17, 1963, is often cited as the founding moment of second-wave feminism. The book highlighted Friedan's view of a coercive and pervasive post-World War II ideology of female domesticity that stifled middle-class women's opportunities to be anything but homemakers.

A survey she conducted of her Smith College classmates indicated that many felt depressed even though they supposedly enjoyed ideal lives with husbands, homes, and children. Enlarging her inquiry, Friedan found that what she called "the problem that has no name" was common among women far beyond the educated East Coast elite. In The Feminine Mystique, she showed how women's magazines, advertising, Freudian psychologists, and educators reflected and perpetuated a domestic ideal that left many women deeply unhappy. In suppressing women's personal growth, Friedan argued, society lost a vast reservoir of human potential.

Friedan's book is credited with sparking second-wave feminism by directing women's attention to the broad social basis of their problems, stirring many to political and social activism. Although Friedan faced some negative reactions, she also received hundreds of letters from women who said that The Feminine Mystique had changed their lives. Since 1963, the book has sold over two million copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. Thousands of copies are still sold every year.

Friedan went on to help found the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), and the National Women's Political Caucus. She taught at colleges and universities from coast to coast, and published in magazines from The New Republic to Ladies' Home Journal. Her more recent work, including the 1993 book Fountain of Age, addresses what Friedan called the "age mystique." Friedan died at home in Washington, D.C. on February 4, 2006, her 85th birthday.

See also "We Remember: Betty Friedan".

Source: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 482-485; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963); Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism.

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