Week of April 21

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April 21, 1993

Yiddish theater impresario Dora Wasserman receives Order of Canada

April 22, 1912

Wage Earners' League for Woman Suffrage holds first mass rally

April 24, 1980

Barbara Tuchman delivers Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

April 25, 1846

First meeting of The United Order of True Sisters

April 26, 1978

"New York Times" profiles entrepreneur Lillian Vernon

April 27, 1944

Helene Deutsch publishes first volume of "The Psychology of Women"

 

April 21, 1993

Yiddish theater impresario Dora Wasserman receives Order of Canada

Yiddish theater producer and advocate Dora Wasserman received the Order of Canada, the highest honor bestowed on civilians by the Canadian government, on April 21, 1993.

Born in Ukraine in 1920 [some sources say 1919], Wasserman studied at Moscow's Yiddish Art Theatre and acted with the Kiev State Theatre and Kazakhstan State Theatre before Stalinist repression closed down most Yiddish theatres in the Soviet Union. In 1950, she fled the U.S.S.R. with her husband and two young daughters. After stints in Poland and a displaced persons camp in Vienna, Austria, Wasserman and her family arrived in Montreal, where she would spend the rest of her life.

In Montreal, Wasserman at first taught drama to Jewish schoolchildren, many of them Yiddish-speaking refugees like her, and performed as a singer, pianist, and guitarist. After six years, she formed the Yiddish Drama Group, an adult amateur ensemble that later became the Yiddish Theatre and then was renamed the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre. The Group's first production, The Innkeeper, was staged in 1957.

Although her troupe was not made up of professional actors, Wasserman insisted on a high level of both performance and dedication and was rewarded with the loyalty of her actors and the high praise of critics and fans. The more than 70 plays she directed over four decades earned her the title of grande dame of the Yiddish theatre.

Among the Yiddish Theatre's productions were classics by well-known Yiddish writers like Sholom Aleichem and Sholem Asch; modern works translated into Yiddish for her company, like Montreal playwright Michel Tremblay's classic Les Belles Soeurs (the Sisters-in-Law); and new works written especially for her troupe. The most successful of these was A Bintel Brief, based on immigrants' letters to the advice column of the Jewish Daily Forward. Tremblay called her production of Les Belles Soeurs the best interpretation in any foreign language.

Wasserman's theatre reached an audience beyond the population of native Yiddish-speakers, which grew smaller with each passing decade. She believed that, "if [a play] is good, you will feel it. You don't need to understand the language on the stage." Still by providing supertitles in English and French, the Theatre's works became accessible to a wide audience in Quebec, and on tours in Israel, the United States, Austria, and Russia. In addition, Wasserman traveled frequently to Jewish schools to lead extracurricular programs designed to instill a love of both theatre and Yiddish. These programs reached some 3,000 students each year.

In 1973, the troupe moved to the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal, where it is now the only permanent resident Yiddish theatre in North America. It is also one of only four Yiddish theatres in the world – the others are in New York, Warsaw, and Tel Aviv. Wasserman passed leadership of the theatre to her daughter, Bryna Wasserman, in 1996, after a disabling stroke. The elder Wasserman died in 2003. Her headstone in a Montreal cemetery reads, "with love and magic, Dora founded the miracle of Yiddish Theatre in Montreal, a bridge to the Jewish people's continuity."

Sources: Lilith, 19:4 (December 31, 1994); The Forward, December 26, 2003; New York Jewish Week, December 26, 2003; Canadian Jewish News, January 1, 2004, November 11, 2004; www.saidyebronfman.org/yiddish/yit_home.html; www.folksbiene.org; www.gg.ca/honours/nat-ord/oc/index_e.asp.

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April 22, 1912

Wage Earners' League for Woman Suffrage holds first mass rally

The year-old Wage Earners' League for Woman Suffrage held its first mass rally on April 22, 1912, at New York's Cooper Union's Great Hall of the People. Founded by the young veteran organizers Clara Lemlich, Rose Schneiderman, and three others, the League sought to encourage working women to join the political process as well as to agitate for the right to vote. Lemlich, a shirtwaist maker, became the League's vice president.

Drawing on their background in the Socialist movement, the founders of the Wage Earners' League emphasized the special concerns of working women. They argued in speeches and pamphlets that women needed the vote in order to secure basic human rights like safe working conditions. In doing so, League leaders came into conflict with both Socialist men and middle-class women. The men who counted on female allies in Socialist causes bluntly suggested that suffrage activists return to their kitchens. Middle-class women showed their class bias in suggesting that their wealth and education made them more capable activists than these working women. Wary of having their specific concerns sidestepped, League members agreed that any woman could join their group, but that only workers could vote, ensuring that working women would remain in control of the League's agenda and tactics.

The April 22, 1912, Cooper Union rally brought together thousands of cheering women to listen to arguments for women's suffrage. The location was symbolic; Cooper Union was the site of the rally that had kicked off the "Uprising of the 20,000," one of the first and most influential strikes of industrial garment workers, just three years before. Despite a large and enthusiastic turnout at the rally, the League dissolved soon afterward. Lacking a full-time organizer and a steady source of funding, the League ceased to be active. Schneiderman went on a speaking tour for another suffrage organization; her colleagues likewise turned their energies to other groups. Ultimately, the fight for suffrage would depend on alliances across class and gender lines.

See also: This Week in History, November 22, 1909.

Sources: Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995); New York Times, April 23, 1912.

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April 24, 1980

Barbara Tuchman delivers Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

Barbara Tuchman, who was born in 1912, never earned a graduate degree in history, but her best-selling books made history come alive for millions of readers and earned two Pulitzer Prizes for their author.

Raised in a privileged New York family, Tuchman traveled extensively with her parents before attending Radcliffe College, where she studied history and literature. After her graduation, she wrote about the Spanish Civil War for The Nation, and then worked at the Office of War Information during World War II, traveling in Asia. These reporting stints sparked Tuchman's interest in the history of war.

Tuchman's first book, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (1956), expressed strong sympathy for Zionism. She is best known, however, for two books that won Pulitzer Prizes: The Guns of August (1962), about the First World War, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 (1972). The Guns of August was later made into a movie of the same name.

Although her relationships with professional historians were sometimes strained, Tuchman did garner recognition, serving as the president of the Society of American Historians (1970-1973), and as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1979).

Tuchman was the first woman invited to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. An invitation to give the Jefferson Lecture is the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. In her lecture, presented on April 24, 1980, Tuchman took "Mankind's Better Moments" as her title and theme, reflecting her general optimism about the human condition. Tuchman repeated the lecture in London a week later, the first time that a Jefferson Lecture had been repeated abroad, marking her international renown as a writer. Tuchman published her last book, The First Salute, just a year before her death in 1989.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1414-1416; New York Times, February 28, 1980, April 25, 1980; www.neh.gov/whoweare/jefflect.html.

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April 25, 1846

First meeting of The United Order of True Sisters

Organized at Temple Emanu-El in New York City, the United Order of True Sisters (UOTS) held its first meeting on April 25, 1846. Conceived as a female counterpart to the male Jewish B'nai B'rith organization (founded in 1843), but functioning separately, UOTS claims to be the first independent national women's organization in the United States.

Some of the Order's goals resembled those of earlier Jewish women's mutual aid and charitable societies. The Sisters sought "refinement of the heart and mind and moral improvement," and paid regular dues to be used for burial fees and material aid to members struck by illness or sudden poverty.

Unlike earlier charitable women's organizations, however, the UOTS also had explicitly political goals. In the words of the group's 1864 constitution, the Order sought "particularly the development of free, independent and well-considered action of its members. The women are to expand their activities, without neglecting their obligations as housekeepers, in such a manner, that if necessary they can participate in public meetings and discussions." The structure of the lodge, with secret passwords, degrees of membership, and closely-guarded rituals, mirrored the organization of men's fraternal organizations like B'nai B'rith, the Masons, and the Odd Fellows.

The members of UOTS were mostly middle-class German-Jewish women, as evidenced by the fact that meetings at most lodges were conducted in German until the end of the First World War. Many members were wives of B'nai B'rith members. The UOTS provided these women a place to exercise their leadership abilities and develop a role in the public sphere, without being subject to the authority of men. Although most probably did not fear material want, the system of mutual aid provided an unusual degree of security and independence.

Initiated under the leadership of Henriette Bruckman, and founded with just ten other members, the original lodge counted over 100 members by 1851. In the same year, the UOTS established a Grand Lodge as an umbrella organization to connect lodges in different cities and to centralize authority. By the mid-1860s, lodges existed in Philadelphia, New Haven, and Albany as well as New York. Active in public life from the beginning, the UOTS established its own newspaper, Der Vereinsote, in 1884.

Today, the UOTS continues to maintain chapters across the country, although its focus has changed and is no longer identified as an exclusively Jewish organization. Since 1947, the main activities of the Order have been raising money for cancer research and providing support to cancer patients. The most recent chapter was formed in Suffolk County, New York, in 1978.

Sources: Cornelia Wilheim, "The Independent Order of True Sisters: Friendship, Fraternity, and a Model of Modernity for Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Womanhood," American Jewish Archives Journal 54:1 (2002), http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/aja/journal/PDF/Article54v1-Wilhelm.pdf; http://www.uots.org; http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/aja/FindingAids/uots.htm.

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April 26, 1978

"New York Times" profiles entrepreneur Lillian Vernon

In a New York Times profile published on April 26, 1978, Lillian Vernon was described as "the first lady of mail order catalogues," a designation she had earned through more than two decades of entrepreneurship and steady growth of her eponymous business.

Born Lilly Menasche in Leipzig, Germany, in 1927, Lillian Vernon fled with her family first to Amsterdam and then to New York to escape Hitler. In the U.S., her father manufactured leather goods, which would become the base of Vernon's first foray into mail-order.

Married and pregnant, Vernon began the business that would become Lillian Vernon, Inc., in 1951. She took $495 of her wedding gift money to place an advertisement for personalized belts and handbags in Seventeen magazine. Her father's company manufactured the belts and bags, and Vernon embossed, packaged, and shipped them. The ad brought in over $32,000 worth of sales, and Vernon's company was born. She mailed her first catalogue two years later.

Taking monogramming as its trademark, and catering mainly to women, Lillian Vernon mail-order grew rapidly, generating $200,000 in sales in 1956, the year Vernon opened her first manufacturing plant. By 1990, sales had risen to $238 million, and the mailing list had grown to 17 million names.

After pioneering her successful mail-order business, Vernon continued to keep the company at the forefront of commercial changes. She began opening retail outlets in 1985, and went online a decade later. Hers was also the first woman-owned business to be listed on the American Stock Exchange. The company continues to introduce new catalogs regularly, and now produces special lines of items for children, teens, and gardening, as well as its traditional products for the home.

Vernon has used her wealth to support over 500 charities, and has been recognized by, among others, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, which awarded her its National Hero Award. She has also received the NAACP Medal of Honor, and has been inducted into the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame and the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1997, she was named one of 50 leading women entrepreneurs by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners. Though she no longer embossed items herself, Vernon was active as the CEO of her company and as its main spokesperson until 2006.

Sources: www.harrywalker.com/speakers_template.cfm?Spea_ID=224&SubcatID=195; www.lillianvernon.com; New York Times, April 26, 1978, May 24, 1998; Jeannette Oppedisano, Historical Encyclopedia of Women Entrepreneurs: 1776 to the Present (Westport, CT, 2000); Lillian Vernon, An Eye for Winners: How I Built One of America's Greatest Direct-Mail Businesses (New York, 1996).

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April 27, 1944

Helene Deutsch publishes first volume of "The Psychology of Women"

Born in Poland and trained in psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, Helene Deutsch immigrated to Boston in 1935, where she joined the faculty of the newly established Boston Psychoanalytic Training Institute. Already established as an important psychoanalyst in Vienna, Deutsch found further success in the United States.

In Vienna, Deutsch had been the first woman analyst to be analyzed by Freud, and then became the first woman to head a psychoanalysis clinic, when in 1924 she took the helm of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute. There, she trained students and also published several important articles and a book, Psychoanalysis of the Neuroses (1930).

In Boston, Deutsch continued to train students and to write. From 1939 to 1941, she also served as president of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. On April 27, 1944, she published the first volume of The Psychology of Women, a two-volume work that explained her theory of women's psychological development. While adhering in large part to classical Freudian theory, Deutsch's book also drew from her own clinical experience. Among other things, she argued that women were trapped by a conflict between motherliness and eroticism, and wrote that the three essential traits of femininity are narcissism, passivity, and masochism.

At its publication, The Psychology of Women was the most comprehensive treatment of that subject, and it remained so for several decades. However, Deutsch's work became increasingly controversial as the modern feminist movement gained adherents. Feminists who blamed Freud for providing a rationale for the subjugation of women similarly blamed Deutsch for perpetuating an equation of femininity with passivity and masculinity with action. Feminist writer Susan Brownmiller called Deutsch "a pioneer, but a traitor to her sex." Deutsch rejected these criticisms, arguing that her views of women were actually positive.

In her personal life, Deutsch was an activist for many causes dear to feminists. She was, for instance, an outspoken supporter of legalized abortion. In Europe, she had worked to organize women workers and picketed the University of Vienna law school in protest of its ban on women students. She believed that her use of Freudian theory helped liberate women to choose their own paths. However, her more lasting contribution is probably in the field of borderline personality disorders, where she defined the "as if" personality. Deutsch died in Cambridge, MA, in 1982.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, p. 329-331; New York Times, April 27, 1944, July 30, 1978, April 1, 1982; Paul Roazen, Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst's Life (Garden City, NY, 1985).

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