The Whole Wide World, Without Limits

The Whole Wide World, Without Limits

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Often perceived as being removed from the rough-and-tumble world of male politics, women involved in relief during World War I and the 1920s found themselves grappling daily with questions of ideology, nationalism, and political statehood. Participation in large-scale relief work provided Jewish women with a firm sense of their own capabilities and contributed to their heightened sense of gender consciousness. Their experience provides powerful evidence that women activists in the post-suffrage period sustained a notable degree of separation from men even as they propounded gender equality, thereby facilitating American Jewish womenas entrance into the public realm without their having to sacrifice commitment to either Jewish or womenas issues. Gendered and separatist strategies enabled women to bring their concerns into the public sphere, affect the course of American Jewish history, and shape modern American Jewish identity. qThe Whole Wide World, Without Limitsq explores the international relief activities of three American Jewish organizations during this period: the National Council of Jewish Women, Hadassah (the Womenas Zionist Organization of America), and the Workmenas Circle. Women in all three organizations vigorously raised money for Jews in the war zones and continued to help them after the armistice. Author Mary McCune demonstrates the significance of the work of each group while analyzing the interactions between class, ethnicity, religion, and gender consciousness, both inside the Jewish community and in the broader American context. McCune looks at a wide variety of Jewish womenaZionists and anti-Zionists, religious and secular, capitalists and socialists, wealthy and working-classaand sheds light on the myriad ways that personal identity shapes public activism. More importantly, this book reveals how womenas charity work and their use of gendered strategies exerted influence over seemingly unrelated political events.A cartoon showed him bounding across a crowd of women, grasping the hands of two women in his own large hands ... the organized women, would spoil their wives along with their happy homes, and thereby we would 163 Feminization ofanbsp;...

Title:The Whole Wide World, Without Limits
Author:Mary McCune
Publisher:Wayne State University Press - 2005-01-01

