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Women’s and Gender Studies

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Florence Levin Denmark

Florence Levin Denmark helped found the field of women’s psychology and built crucial support for it in academic circles.

Natalie Zemon Davis

Natalie Zemon Davis was a pioneering historian of early modern Europe, gender, and religious and cultural life. Focusing primarily on ordinary historical actors and marginal groups, Davis earned a reputation as a scholar who culls the archives to uncover fascinating stories of everyday life.

Annette Daum

A deeply religious feminist, Annette Daum dedicated her life to two causes: interfaith dialogue and feminism. Among other leadership positions, she coordinated interreligious affairs at the Union of American Hebrew congregations, edited the journal Interreligious Currents, and organized various task forces focused on gender equality and Jewish-Christian feminist dialogue.

Rose Laub Coser

Sociologist Rose Laub Coser redefined major concepts in role theory—the idea that our actions are largely dictated by our roles in society—and applied them to expectations of women’s roles in the family and the workplace.

Hélène Cixous

Jewish-Algerian-French writer Hélène Cixous published her first book in 1967 and approximately her eighty-seventh in February 2021. This “life writing” comprises poetic fiction and autobiography, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, and theatrical works. Cixous explores the myriad contradictions and consequences of loss and exile, of “being Jewish” and “being a woman.”

Phyllis Chesler

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is a feminist, best-selling author, and scholar whose career spans more than five decades and 20 books. An early and radical second wave feminist, she has focused on topics such as feminism, women’s rights globally and domestically, Islamic gender apartheid, academic freedom, Judaism, anti-Semitism, and freedom of speech.

May Brodbeck

May Brodbeck, whose career in the sciences ran the gamut from teaching high school chemistry to exploring fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of human consciousness, was among the foremost American-born philosophers of science.

Jessie Bernard

Sociologist Jessie Bernard’s feminist epiphany came at age 67 in 1969, but her earlier work anticipated feminist theory by discussing the differences between men’s and women’s experiences and arguing that quantitative studies did not accurately represent women’s stories.

Evelyn Torton Beck

Evelyn (Evi) Torton Beck is a multi-faceted scholar, analyst, activist, feminist, dancer, Jew, and lesbian who has enriched each discipline she engaged. She wrote the iconic Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, as well as articles on Franz Kafka, Frieda Kahlo, and the transformative power of the sacred circle dance. Under Beck’s leadership, the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, became world-renowned.

Bathsheba: Bible

Bathsheba is the married woman whom King David takes in adultery and who, though initially passive, becomes the pivotal figure in his downfall. The king has Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, slain in battle and then takes her as a wife. While her first child, conceived in adultery, dies, the second, Solomon, becomes heir to the throne as a consequence of Bathsheba’s maneuverings.

Ba'alot Teshuvah: Jewish Women Who Become Orthodox

During the past half century or so, some Jewish women resisted trends toward secularism and feminist ideology and became strictly Orthodox. Despite feminist ideology that views the strict observance of religion as repressive, research since the 1980s has consistently found that the women find fulfillment in the traditional roles of wife and mother, relish the warmth of Orthodox communities, and feel intellectually stimulated by new learning.

Dora Askowith

Dora Askowith, author, historian, and college educator, believed that a knowledge of Jewish women’s history would serve as a catalyst for organization, activism, and moral leadership. She taught women at Hunter College for a total of forty-five years and wrote that she was anxious to teach college students Jewish history because they were “poorly versed in the history of their own faith.”

Academia in Israel

In recent years, attention has been drawn to the persistent gender inequality in Israeli academia. Although some positive change occurred in the position of women faculty in Israeli academia during the 1990s, questions remain about why there are so few faculty members and why progress has been so slow.

A Shout-Out to Dr. Gerda Lerner

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman

“Women’s history is women’s right – an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long-range vision.” So Dr.

Sisterhood, Interrupted: a review

Judith Rosenbaum

Full disclosure: I kind of wish I had written this book. Over the years, as I’ve read basically every history or memoir of the women’s movement, I’ve often thought that I’d like to write a popular account, one that would capture the passion and power of the second wave for the next generation, and also convey the relationship of the third wave to its predecessors.

Where are the Jewesses?

Judith Rosenbaum

I recently returned from the National Women’s Studies Association conference, an annual event that brings together scholars, administrators, writers, students, and activists. I’ve been going to this conference for a few years now, and I always enjoy it. I consider myself an “escaped academic” of sorts (i.e., someone with a PhD who has chosen not to work in the academic system), and most academic conferences either bore me or give me the heebie jeebies, but NWSA is the one that fires me up.

Making Space for Anti-Feminists . . .

Michelle Cove

What do you think about NEW, Network of Enlightened Women? If you haven’t heard of it, they’re a group of conservative female college students, founded in 1994 by UVA student Karen Agness. They are “dedicated to fostering the education and leadership skills of conservative university women.” What does that mean? It means they think the Vagina Monologues “glorifies” rape; feel that women’s studies “unfairly paints men as evil” and “ignores differences between the sexes,” and have a major problem with modern feminism.

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