Week of April 14

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April 14, 1912

Review of Mary Antin's "The Promised Land" appears in the "New York Times"

April 18, 1987

Annette Greenfield Strauss becomes first elected female mayor of Dallas

April 18, 2002

Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" acquired by the Brooklyn Museum

April 19, 1972

Ten works by Diane Arbus are featured in Venice Biennale

April 20, 1976

Paula Hyman discusses publication of "The Jewish Woman in America"

 

April 14, 1912

Review of Mary Antin's "The Promised Land" appears in the "New York Times"

Only thirty years old when she published her autobiography, The Promised Land, Mary Antin captured the dreams and experiences of turn-of-the-century Russian Jewish immigrants. The book, which was reviewed in the New York Times on April 14, 1912, recounted Antin's early life in Russia, her immigration to the United States at age 13, her successes in the Boston public school system, and her subsequent marriage and entry into the American middle class.

The Promised Land was the second book by this precocious writer. At thirteen, she had written a series of long letters to an uncle, chronicling her journey from Polotsk, Russia, to Boston. At the urging of a local Jewish communal leader, the collected letters were translated from Yiddish and published as From Plotzk to Boston in 1899. Income from sales of the book helped support Antin's family, and allowed her to finish her education.

After her 1901 marriage to geologist Amadeus Grabau, Antin studied at Columbia University's Teachers College and at Barnard College, but did not finish a degree. In New York, Antin continued to write both poetry and prose. Most of her poems remained unpublished, but a short story was printed by the Atlantic Monthly in 1911. Just two months later, the magazine began serializing what became The Promised Land, which was eventually published in book form by Houghton Mifflin. The book celebrates the promise of America, contrasting the abundant opportunities of the United States to the economic and cultural oppression faced by Jews in Europe. Making Antin an instant celebrity, the book sold almost 85,000 copies over the next four decades. Despite its rosy picture of the American dream, The Promised Land was one of the first books to present the stark realities of the immigrant experience to an American audience in English.

After the publication of The Promised Land, Antin campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt's (unsuccessful) presidential bid, and then traveled the country speaking about the themes of her book. Roosevelt later said that his support of women's suffrage came from his association with Antin and women like her. Despite Antin's zeal for Americanization, she was also a dedicated Zionist, arguing that Zionism was "in no sense incompatible with complete civic devotion" to the United States.

In 1914, Antin published They Who Knock at Our Gates, a passionate defense of the immigrant and an argument against immigration restriction. When the U.S. entered World War I, in 1917, she lectured on behalf of the Allied cause, but her activism led to an estrangement from her husband, a German sympathizer. By 1919, they had separated permanently. Around this time, Antin retired from public life, but continued to publish occasional essays. She died of cancer in 1949.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 55-57; New York Times, April 14, 1912, June 30, 1912, May 18, 1949.

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April 18, 1987

Annette Greenfield Strauss becomes first elected female mayor of Dallas

Although Adlene Harrison had won appointment as mayor of Dallas in 1976, Annette Greenfield Strauss became the city's first elected woman mayor on April 18, 1987, two weeks after winning a plurality of the vote in a mayoral primary.

The election capped Strauss's long history of involvement in civic affairs in Dallas. Although she did not become a member of the Dallas City Council until 1983, her engagement with city affairs started in 1947, when she began volunteering as a fundraiser for the United Jewish Appeal. Her success with the UJA led to a well-recognized career as Dallas's most effective volunteer fundraiser. Over four decades, she worked on behalf of causes ranging from the Dallas Symphony to the Baylor University Medical Center, and from the Dallas Black Dance Theatre to the United Way. By one estimate, she raised over $20 million for citywide campaigns and projects.

When she turned to the political arena, Strauss's long experience of networking for fundraising helped her to win votes. Promising to be the "mayor of all the people," she pulled together a coalition that included both affluent white voters and poor black and Latino voters. Together, their votes enabled Strauss to defeat her main challenger, who was supported by the Dallas business establishment that had traditionally anointed the city's leaders.

Strauss served as mayor of Dallas until 1991, then became a public relations consultant. As mayor, she was noted for her ability to build consensus across political lines and across economic strata. After her term, she was appointed ambassador-at-large for Dallas, a position she held until her death in December, 1998. In the intervening years, she continued to be active in social and philanthropic causes, and was frequently honored for her work. In 1996, she was awarded the first Annette G. Strauss Humanitarian Award by a homeless shelter she had previously helped to found. She was inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame and received the University of Texas's Distinguished Alumnus Award. Today, an arts commons in Dallas, a lecture series at Southern Methodist University, and an Institute for Civic Participation at UT-Austin are named in her honor.

Sources: communication.utexas.edu/strauss/legacy.html; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, p. 1348; New York Times, April 6, 1987, April 20, 1987.

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April 18, 2002

Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" acquired by the Brooklyn Museum

Artist Judy Chicago is best known for her monumental mixed-media sculpture, The Dinner Party, which was first exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979. A symbolic history of women in Western civilization, the piece comprises an enormous triangular table with thirty-nine place settings commemorating women such as the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Sojourner Truth, and Virginia Woolf. The table stands on a tile floor marked with the names of an additional 999 women. A landmark in feminist art, The Dinner Party was controversial for its use of sexual female imagery. Since 1979, the piece has been seen by more than one million people in a variety of venues. On April 18, 2002, The Dinner Party was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum for its permanent collection. The permanent installation opened on March 23, 2007 as the centerpiece of the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

The Dinner Party remains a powerful reminder of the transformative power of inviting the legacy and heritage of women's achievements into one's life and consciousness. Boston's Fenway Community Health Center, for instance, sponsors an annual fundraiser inspired initially by Chicago's work. The fifteenth installment of "The Women's Dinner Party" gathered more than 1,100 women in support of the health center's outreach to HIV-positive clients and to the LGBT community in April 2006. Another indication of the continuing evocative power of this work is in the way that some schools have used the dinner party concept as an educational tool. The Blue Oak School in Napa, California, for instance, presented "The Dinner Party Art Exhibit" in May 2005. Blue Oak School's students from kindergarten through the sixth grade honored historic women by creating ceramic plates and place settings representing women from the fields of cooking, writing, inventing, athletics, and art, and of general achievement in the United States and around the world.

A descendant of twenty-three generations of rabbis, including the eighteenth-century Lithuanian rabbi the Gaon of Vilna, Chicago was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and at UCLA, where she earned a master's degree in 1964. Her work has always explored questions of gender and power. Significantly, many of Chicago's creations have involved the collaborative work of dozens, even hundreds, of women volunteers. Her first major exhibit, Womanhouse (1972), was a joint creation of the members of the Fresno Feminist Art Program, which Chicago created at California State University in 1970.

The Birth Project (1980-1985) grew out of Chicago's realization that the birthing process was rarely a subject of Western art. For this piece, Chicago designed images of women in labor, which were then translated into needlework by women around the U.S. Needlework is also the medium for Chicago's Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (1994-2000), which reinterprets traditional proverbs. Other mixed-media projects, combining paint, photography, and bronze relief, include Powerplay and The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985-1993).

Chicago has also taught courses at Indiana University, Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and Pitzer College in California. Currently, Chicago offers classes through her non-profit Through the Flower foundation, based in New Mexico.

Sources: www.judychicago.com; www.brooklynmuseum.com; jwa.org/discover/infocus/artists/chicago; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 217-219; Amelia Jones, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (Berkeley, 1996); Edward Lucie-Smith, Judy Chicago: An American Vision (New York, 2000); Gail Levin, Becoming Judy Chicago, A Biography of the Artist (New York, 2007); Letter from Adriana Guitierrez to the Jewish Women's Archive, March 7, 2005; Boston Spirit Magazine, April/May 2006; Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution: jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA013; Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation (New York, 2007).

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April 19, 1972

Ten works by Diane Arbus are featured in Venice Biennale

Photographer Diane Arbus got her start in fashion photography in the 1940s. However, by the time ten of her works were chosen for the Venice Biennale on April 19, 1972, a year after her death, she was much better known for her photographs of people on society's margins.

Born Diane Nemerov in New York City in 1923 and educated at the Ethical Culture School, she married photographer Allan Arbus when she was 18. In collaboration with her husband, who took care of the technical aspects while she styled the photo shoots, she became a successful fashion photographer. In the late 1950s, tired of the fashion world, Arbus turned her camera to social outcasts and misfits. Her disturbing images included photos of "freaks," carnival performers, twins, children, nudists and the residents of a home for retarded women. Arbus's work was distinctive in portraying her subjects looking directly at the camera, a pose that made them appear vulnerable but which was tempered with what a critic called "an extraordinary candor and sympathy."

Arbus's career took off when Esquire magazine published six of her photos in a special July 1960 issue on New York City. Over the next eleven years, Arbus published over 250 photographs in more than seventy magazine articles. Her work appeared in Harper's Bazaar, New York, Essence, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times, and the (London) Sunday Times Magazine. Unusually for a photographer, Arbus was able to combine commercial success in magazines with success as an independent artist. Beginning in 1965, she had several shows at the Museum of Modern Art. She was also awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1963 and 1966.

Losing a long-standing battle with depression, Arbus committed suicide on July 26, 1971. In the wake of her death, however, her fame grew. A review of her exhibit at the Venice Biennale called her photos "extremely powerful and very strange." The reviewer concluded that the ten photos on display were "enough to make us eager to see the full range of this amazing camera artist." After the Biennale, a major retrospective of her work was mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted the first major overview of her work since the early 1970s in Fall, 2003. The exhibit also appeared at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in Spring, 2005. Michael Kimmelman's review of the New York exhibit observed that Arbus's most memorable work "was all about heart – a ferocious audacious heart. It transformed the art of photography ... and it lent a fresh dignity to the forgotten and neglected people in whom she invested so much of herself."

Arbus's estate presented the artist's complete personal and professional archive to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2007.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 58-61; Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York, 1984); New York Times, August 22, 1971, April 20, 1972, June 17, 1972, March 11, 2005, December 18, 2007.

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April 20, 1976

Paula Hyman discusses publication of "The Jewish Woman in America"

When Paula Hyman, Charlotte Baum, and Sonya Michel published The Jewish Woman in America in 1976, it was a groundbreaking work. This book represented one of the first efforts to offer a systematic consideration of Jewish women's history in the United States and was considered a pioneering work of Jewish feminism. Consequently, it received a great deal of attention. On April 20, 1976, Paula Hyman spoke about the book—and the topic of Jewish women's history—on New York City radio station WEVD, on the half-hour Postscripts program hosted by Katharine Balfour.

In a recent interview, Hyman recalled that The Jewish Woman in America grew out of “our passion as feminists.” It was “just simply something that we felt had to be done.” Hyman is careful to note that The Jewish Woman in America was not the first book on the subject, but it was the first to approach it from a feminist orientation. As Hyman says, “it was clearly a book with a mission... we felt it was going to tell a story that hadn’t been widely recognized.” Taking on such a broad and weighty subject might have been daunting for two young graduate students and an older woman returning to school for her BA, but they were empowered by feminism: “We said: ‘well we can do this and began to work.’” The Jewish Woman in America, Hyman notes, “is the only book for which I received fan letters, often from housewives who said ‘I get up early to read this book, it’s been so important to me, and thank you for writing it.’”

The Jewish Woman in America, published when Hyman was still a graduate student, was the first of three ambitious collaborative projects that have punctuated her career. Each of these projects has redefined the horizons of our knowledge about Jewish women’s history. In 1997, Hyman co-edited (with Deborah Dash Moore) Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, a comprehensive work which offered unprecedented access to information on a broad range of American Jewish women's achievements and contributions. This work has proven invaluable to those attempting to expand public knowledge about American Jewish women, serving as a central resource, for example, in the creation of the Jewish Women's Archive's This Week in History feature. The most recent of Hyman’s encyclopedic efforts is the recently launched CD-ROM, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia, sponsored by the Jewish Women’s Archive. The CD-ROM, equivalent to a four-volume printed work, was co-edited by Hebrew University historian Dalia Ofer. Drawing on Jewish Studies scholars from around the world, the new encyclopedia, with its coverage of as many regions and eras of Jewish history as was possible, has once again reframed our knowledge of Jewish and Jewish women’s history.

Hyman’s individual scholarly work has focused upon both Jewish women’s history and the history of French Jews. Among her books are The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1991), and Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (1995). In 2002, she edited My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, a memoir by Puah Rakovska. Hyman teaches at Yale University, where she is the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History, a position she had held since 1986.

See also: This Week in History for March 14, 1972

Sources: New York Times, April 20, 1976; www.yale.edu/religiousstudies/facultypages/cvph.html; www.hds.harvard.edu/wsrp/people/Advisory/hyman.htm; Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution: jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA039; JWA interview, February 8, 2007.

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