One of Britain’s most successful post-World War II novelists, the author of some twenty novels, winner of the Booker Prize (1970) and the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Award (1990), Bernice Rubens was invariably described by interviewers as, to quote one from the London Evening Standard, “Exotically swarthy, gypsily beringed, small, plump … at one remove from the seemly, London-Library circuit of modern letters.”

Anna Rozental belonged to the generation of Bundists who had already been active in the founding phase of the party under the Russian Empire and who were highly respected as “veterans” in the Polish Bund of the interwar period. From her youth on, Rozental’s life was closely tied to the Jewish labor movement in Vilna, where she died in Soviet custody during World War II.

On February 24, 1912, a group of approximately thirty young women, who called themselves Bnoth Zion, or the Daughters of Zion, met together at the urging of Henrietta Szold with the intent of founding Hadassah. Gertrude Rosenblatt was one of those women, and on March 7, 1912, when the officers were elected, she became one of the first directors of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization.

A brilliant research physician, Ora Mendelsohn Rosen tragically died of cancer, the disease whose processes her researches in cell biology had helped to explain. A leading investigator of how hormones control the growth of cells, Rosen held the Abby Rockefeller Mauz Chair of Experimental Therapeutics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Sophia Moses Robison was the first to document the class, racial, and moral judgments that determined who would be labeled a “juvenile delinquent” and how variations in description distorted data accumulated on delinquency.

Driving along one of Israel’s inner roads in the upper Shomron plain, one passes two settlements with similar names—Givat Havivah and Lahavot Havivah. Both are named after Havivah Reik, one of the seven members of the “Parachutists’ Mission” who lost their lives during World War II while attempting to aid European Jewry under the Nazis.

Figuring among a precious few accounts left by a Jewish woman of a stay in the Old Yishuv in nineteenth-century Jerusalem, Flora Randegger's journal is also a record of a woman’s attempt to establish an educational project for Jews and especially for Jewish women in Palestine.

Referring to herself in her memoirs as a “revolutionary Jewish woman,” Puah Rakovsky included her personal struggle for autonomy together with her Zionist and feminst activism in her self-definition. She dedicated her long life to struggling for the empowerment of Jews, and particularly of Jewish women.

In 1988 Preston became the President of the National Council of Women and in 1991 she was elected Vice-President of the Board of Deputies. Her broad interests are reflected in her other voluntary sector involvements, including her position since 2000 as co-chair of the Inter Faith Network UK, an organization set up in 1987 to enable all major faith communities to come together to discuss issues of common concern, and her position since 1999 as Chair of Nightingale House, a residential care home for elderly Jewish men and women.

Jane Prince dedicated her life to furthering the economic, social, and educational opportunities of young people in Palestine and Israel through her involvement in the Women’s League for Palestine and its successor, the Women’s League for Israel, and with the American Friends of Hebrew University.

Like every other historical analysis of interwar Polish Jewry, the story of Jewish women is a story interrupted tragically by the destruction of Polish Jewry in the Holocaust. Many of the trends discussed above had just begun to make their mark on the nature of that three million strong community. Nevertheless, they are still deserving of scholarly attention. Unless and until the missing fifty-two percent of Polish Jews are factored into the historical narrative, that story will remain incomplete.

Women’s parties have played a major, though so far unacknowledged, role in the social and political history of Israel: they had a significant impact on women’s participation in power centers, political and others; they played a major part in the struggle for women’s right to vote and to be elected; they brought into focus the economic discrimination against women, who constitute half of the population in the labor market; they made feminist discourse about gender equality widely known and discussed.