Chapter 1. American Jewess and Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Gender Images. Contributions of an Ethnic Magazine to a New Woman-in-the-Making

In the 1890s, for the first time, Jewish women in America openly broached the topic of their social roles and vulnerabilities, in relation to both Jewish traditions and mainstream American values. American Jewess, the first English-language magazine specifically devoted to Jewish American women, represents a unique source of information offering relevant perspectives on this issue. In what follows, I will analyze the magazine’s gender images in order to see to what extent they corresponded or responded to those foregrounded in the mainstream press, in leading magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. On one hand, I will examine the visual images featured on the magazine’s cover and frontispiece, in order to trace their specific features. On the other hand, I will correlate these with the typical article content in the journal which was trying to foreground a harmonious link between gender, Jewish ethnicity and mainstream American values while simultaneously marking the transition to new womanhood.  

American Jewess and 1890s Mainstream Magazines—An Overview

Founded in Chicago and initially edited by a promoter of women’s emancipation, immigrant Rosa Sonneschein[1], till the summer of 1898, American Jewess was a ten-cent monthly magazine[2] which offered the first sustained critique, by Jewish American women, of gender inequities in Jewish worship and general American social life. Its declared aim was to address “social, religious, and literary subjects,” yet, starting with its sixth issue, the order of its interests changed to “religious, social, and literary subjects.” One could argue that these choices showed how the editors soon became aware that the reformation of religious aspects of Jewish existence should be given primary focus in democratic America, even more so than social issues which were significantly better addressed in the US than in Eastern Europe, the place of birth or ancestry for most of the magazine’s readers. The kindred aims of gaining “religious recognition and social equality” were indicated in the lengthy but extremely revelatory “Salutatory” from the first issue, one which emphasized the need of Jewish American women to internalize the modern ideas already characterizing mainstream American women’s life and to apply these new ideas not only to their social life but also to the rather un-modernized, gender imbalanced Judaic faith they had brought over from Europe, one which kept them in a vulnerable position of submission to men’s views:

 

Forced exclusiveness, infinite persecution, and the natural timidity created by those unfortunate conditions, kept the mind of the Oriental and, to a great extent also, the Occidental Jewess in bondage. But no matter how numerous and serious the causes may have been in the past which forced women, and especially the Jewess, to remain in obscurity, they exist no longer. To-day no power bars the American Jewess from stepping out into the broad arena of modern thought. The prejudice against woman is destroyed, now let us annihilate what prejudice still exists against the Jewess. To accomplish this the American Jewess must help herself. By word and deed she must demand religious recognition and social equality. The initiatory step in this direction is taken by the appearance of this journal. As soon as the American Jewess reveals her inner life, others will find her to be exactly what they themselves are. The columns of this magazine are therefore devoted to Jewish women in particular, and to all others who actively participate in the questions pulsating and throbbing in our national, social and religious life. For the American Jewess is imbued with the same high aspirations and progress as her sisters of other faiths; resistlessly the spirit of the time keeps us moving as well as them. (“Salutatory” unpaged)  

 

The magazine represented the interests of the prosperous, acculturated middle-class Jewish American women, and at its height had a circulation of 31,000. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, the institution which has digitized and offered free online access to the eight volumes of American Jewess, its “title reflected an emerging belief that this group constituted a new entity in Jewish life: women who did not experience the religious and national aspects of their identity as in conflict with each other.”[3] Put differently, for these women, their Jewish ethnic and American national identities were not clashing but harmoniously coalesced to form a new identity-in-the-making. My chapter attempts to trace the contours making up this new image of a woman beyond vulnerability, as well as the degree to which it emulated or challenged the models of the American mainstream press at the time.

In this sense, standing for the emergence of a new identity of cultured American Jewish women, American Jewess offered an evocative range of features that included demands for synagogue membership for women; the role of women in charity organizations; health, household and fashion tips; early expressions of American Zionism; short fiction; reflections on the propriety of women riding bicycles or using technology. In addition, women’s images that appeared in the magazine contributed to the creation of a normative idea of the right woman, one whose main features I will delineate in what follows. These inclusions proved the magazine’s pioneering role in the United States as a publication whose primary aim was to guide less knowledgeable readers towards the acquisition of values that managed to make the transition from tradition to modernity.

In this sense, in the nineteenth century, the typical American magazines such as Atlantic, Harper’s, Century, Scribner’s would sell for 35 cents an issue and publish literary pieces destined for a small, elite audience made up of urban, well-educated and affluent mainstream readers.[4] By the turn-of-the-century, especially following the ever larger wave of immigration from Eastern Europe and the rapid pace of urbanization, magazines started to address broader audiences represented by immigrants, women, lower classes, decreasing their prices to ten cents per issue while they became less dependent on sales-figures and increasingly based on advertising-figures (Gruber Garvey 4). As a result, the subjects they covered changed to include practical advice (especially on housekeeping, fashion, or health), world news, human interest stories, fictions by respected authors and reproduction of fine works. The major aim behind featuring these topics was to instruct the ignorant readers on the importance of upward social and economic mobility and the “aesthetic of imitation” via culture and consumption (Kitch 7). Considering this, one could be tempted to catalogue these magazines as manipulative tools in the hands of well-educated middle to upper-class Americans since their articles seemed to favor immigrants’ and lower classes’ assimilation to the dominant values of American society. American Jewess would bring further issues into discussion, though, since it was edited and run by Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the US whose aim was to balance imitation of mainstream ways with alternative projects for leading one’s life in the new location.

In order to prove this, I have chosen Ladies’ Home Journal, a well-known mainstream magazine of the times, as a point of comparison for assessing the gender images promoted in American Jewess. The rationale for my choice is that Ladies’ Home Journal was one of the most respected American journals of the 1890s, and simultaneously part of the penny press, selling at ten cents per issue. Women’s studies scholar Helen Damon-Moore has indicated how Ladies’ Home Journal was founded in 1883 by Cyrus Curtis and Lisa Knapp Curtis as a newspaper supplement for women,[5] but it soon became the largest-selling magazine in the United States, with over one million in paid circulation by 1903 and one in five American women reading it by 1910 (Damon-Moore 1).  It soon marked the passage from the Victorian era to modernity since its inside pages focused on the latest fashion, decorations and consumer products, while the overall tone was conservative, its editor from 1890 to 1900, Edward Bok, representing the voice of the minister and school-teacher, holding forth on morality and manners (Scanlon 4; Kitch 18). This happened at a time when women were searching to expand their activities, and US mass media allowed them to do so as long as they did not impinge upon men’s status quo in the family, by mainly having women become consumers of products they and their mothers had used to produce earlier and which continued to keep the women related to the domestic sphere and the welfare of the family and the home. In this way, “female readers gained some autonomy and control of the family strings, and male readers retained their privileged status,” especially their much-coveted position of remaining family providers and retaining power over the public, economic sphere (Damon-Moore 12). This type of mass media representation largely made women be “responsible for love,” in keeping with the traditional nineteenth century ideal and, at the same time, in the new economic context of America, it became important that women consume in order to “help family members use the right products in the right way” (Damon-Moore 187). In the interim, men were “responsible for providing well,” by giving up part of their control over women’s amount of spending, earning money both for the necessities and luxuries a family would have. As Damon-Moore relevantly notes, this polarized representation promoted by a women’s magazine from late nineteenth century US broadly helped to maintain traditional gender roles, since “[e]mphasizing women’s exclusive responsibility for loving and encouraging their ever-expanding consumption masked women’s economic dependence on men, and their subordinate position in the gender hierarchy. Emphasizing breadwinning and supporting women’s consumption in turn masked men’s emotional dependence on women; it also allowed men to undervalue the services they received from women in the home” (187). In this way, Ladies’ Home Journal promoted the idea that men’s life was centered around “the paid work cycle” (Damon-Moore 170), one implying their major function as breadwinners, while women’s existence revolved around the family life cycle, one defined by the life stages represented by pre-marriage, marriage, children-bearing and rearing, life after children have grown and the husband dies.

As to the target audience of Ladies’ Home Journal, it was made up of “white, native-born, middle-class women, who lived with the uncertain legacies of the nineteenth century women’s rights movement and who tried to find a comfortable role in the rapidly changing world of the expanding middle class” (Kitch 2001, 18). I will first examine in what way the cover images of American Jewess corresponded to or diverged from the patterns established by Ladies’ Home Journal and how this affected the image of women promoted by the magazine.

 

Cover Images

Today, magazine and journal covers represent a key selling device. After all, the cover is the first element to catch readers’ eyes, and one which publishers try to make as attractive as possible. Historically, however, as indicated by the already-mentioned media scholar Carolyn Kitch, “[most] magazines did not vary their cover designs until the 1890s, when the cover became a selling tool” (4). At that time, female images dominated the media, conveying ideas about “women’s natures and roles” as well as “societal values” (Kitch 6).

In an excellent study of the 1897 “American Woman,” a yearlong series of six cover and frontispiece drawings by Alice Barber Stephens from Ladies’ Home Journal, the same Carolyn Kitch shows how these illustrations depicted women’s transition from Victorian times to the modern era, “defin[ing] the first-generation New Woman as both a proper homemaker and a modern shopper” (13), or at least offering an alternative to the Cult of True Womanhood by foregrounding what Helen Damon-Moore calls “the ideology of real Womanhood,” one which suggested that women’s attributes also included the development of their “intelligence,” “physical fitness,” economic “self-sufficiency” and “careful marriage choice,” while keeping all these new attributes within the domestic sphere so as not to vent the general public’s opprobrium (Damon-Moore 39).

As far as the illustrations were concerned, they used the Victorian convention of fine art, formal, framed tableaux presenting slices of life in a theatrical sense. The physical appearance of all the women portrayed in the 1897 issues of Ladies’ Home Journal was the same: “Victorian images, showing women in corseted, neck-to-floor-dresses, with serious expressions on their faces” (Kitch 13). Yet, these images were not simply traditional but transitional. The new American women portrayed therein did not follow from looks but from the setting of scenes, both inside and outside the homes, making women the rulers of the societal sphere by placing them in familial, social and commercial surroundings. The illustrations basically showed two ways for turn-of-the-century women to enter the public sphere—either as clerks, selling things in department stores, or as customers-consumers, yet in a reassuring way, keeping their propriety in the dress and church-like stained-glass windows of the public places they frequented. Kitch concludes that Stephens’ drawings broadened women’s place in American society beyond the narrowly vulnerable position of being exclusively associated with the domestic sphere: “While some of them portrayed ideal womanhood in terms of class status defined by possessions—a message that would become even clearer in future visual types of the American woman—these works showed the True Woman give way to a New Woman. The illustrations’ younger female characters in particular appeared in transitional settings that prepared them to leave the home and go out into the world” (36).

 

Figure 1.  American Jewess Cover, October, 1895.  Courtesy of Jewish Women’s Archive, American Jewess Open-Access Digitization Project (<http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amjewess/about.html>)

 

In comparison, the first ten issues of American Jewess, from April 1895 through February 1896, featured the illustration of one and the same cover image: a classical-looking, statue-like woman’s figure playing the harp, while the sides of the page contained two torches, suggesting woman’s image as an ideal of a Jewish prophetess (Figure 1). In this respect, in its greeting of this new magazine, Star Savings from St. Louis noted on March 31, 1895: “[t]he title cover is very handsome, showing a fine picture of a Princess of Judah, typical in beauty of person and costume, playing on a harp of the ancient style.”[6] Undoubtedly, this editing choice suggested the important role of Jewish women for Judaism. I would argue that it was also connected with the fact that America and American progress had traditionally been depicted as a woman in the form of a classical goddess (Kitch 6), standing for the US as a champion of ideal forces and not merely materialism, as most famously suggested by the Statue of Liberty which was brought from France to the United States in 1886, and embodied the Roman goddess of freedom holding the torch of hope and liberty. Seen in this light, the magazine’s first cover promoted a gendered image that harmonized Judaic and American traditions: it implied the need to increase Jewish American women’s role in Judaism and it showed how she corresponded to patriotic values of the US, thereby suggesting the magazine’s upholding of traditional values of “True Womanhood” promoted by the mainstream journals.

One can better grasp the double-edged function of these covers if one considers the two feature articles in the inaugural issue of American Jewess; they established the emancipatory image which the American Jewess would stand for in point of Judaism and woman’s condition. These articles were Emil G. Hirsch’s “The Modern Jewess” and Adolph Moses’s “The Position of Woman in America,” both authors being well-known rabbis and representatives of radical Reform Judaism. The former, Emil G. Hirsch, was born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in 1851; he came to the US in 1866 and was a rabbi of the Sinai Congregation of Chicago from 1880 until his death in 1923, while simultaneously teaching rabbinic literature at the University of Chicago and being involved in philanthropic work (Martin 66-68). The latter, Adolphe Moses, was born in Poland in 1840, and came to the US in 1870, becoming a radical reform rabbi at Congregation Adath Israel of Louisville, Kentucky, and working with Emil Hirsch, whose ideas he shared, between 1880 and 1882, as co-editors of the German-language journal on Jewish interests from Milwaukee, Der Zeitgeist (Sarna 57). Hirsch in particular put forth a man-grounded and morally-centered view of religion that rejected a theistic, mystical and emotionally-based view of faith, as reflected both in his sermons and articles, including the one from American Jewess. In his view, the main doctrine of true religion was represented by “the power of man to achieve individual righteousness and social justice” (Martin 71). Thus, the unique mission of Judaism according to him was that of proclaiming an ethical view of the universe and human beings by regulating human life and conduct according to moral ideals.  In his article from American Jewess, Hirsch similarly focused on endemic issues of Jewish existence, and forcefully showed how Jewish women had suffered a “double restriction” on noting: “she shared the fate of every adherent of Judaism [openly subject to discrimination in the Old World], but in addition she was under the despotism of home Orientalism, sanctioned by unyielding religious rigorism,” even if some of these women were seen as prophetesses or well-known for wisdom and learning (Emil Hirsch 11, my emphases). In keeping with his ideas that revelation can only be achieved by reason and moral conduct, Hirsch held that Jewish American women’s role was to help Judaism in America turn away from Eastward, out-fashioned values and reform the religious home. He also exposed the mistaken mainstream prejudices related to American Jewesses’ physical and moral inferior status as a result of their background in Eastern Europe, which he wanted people to discard: “Often is the Jewish woman held by prejudice to be under the spell of Eastern fancies. Upon this mistaken judgment rests the ascription to her of a love for fineries, gems, and loud colors. But a more serious purpose runs through the modern woman’s life, and the Jewess has sacrificed with no greater zest than her non-Jewish sister at the shrine of frivolity” (Emil Hirsch 11). Thus, not only did Hirsch refer to American Jewish women’s fundamental reformatory role in overcoming religious pressures coming from an internalized patriarchal framework that subordinated women to men, but also to their need to bring down moral and physical-related pressures coming from a fake hierarchization of women distinguishing between morally and physically superior Western women and inferior Eastern women.

If Hirsch highlighted the problematic issues American Jewesses needed to amend, Adolph Moses foregrounded the main characteristics of the modern woman emergent in the US which he placed in contrast to the backward condition of women in Europe by using the Enlightenment and mission rhetoric of mainstream America, appropriating in his discourse such terms as  “unalienable rights” from “The Declaration of Independence” and “manifest destiny” from John O’Sullivan’s 1839 inspiring article for the development of American exceptionalism, “The Great Nation of Futurity.” On the bases of these opportunities inherent in US culture, Moses concluded,

 

There is a spirit of self-reliance in the American woman, a capacity for self-help, a firmness of purpose, a grasp of the practical affairs of life, which make her contrast with the shrinking, timid and helpless women of the Old World. At the same time there is in the American woman an idealism, a deep religious sense, an almost mystic yearning after spiritual illumination, an aspiration after the higher attainments, an ambition to be abreast with the culture of the time, and in best touch with the best thought of the ages. Along with these qualities there goes a keen and helpful sympathy for human suffering, a sense of horror and of responsibility at the sight of physical deterioration, of mental deformity and moral degradation, a sleepless desire to leave the world better, wiser and happier than she found it. (Moses 18-19, my emphases)

 

Following Emil Hirsch’s and Adolph Moses’ above insights, the image of women promoted by the magazine was a transitional one from traditional Judaic practice to the modern era, with the woman presented as both domestic mistress and public reformer, both responsible consumer and producer. In light of this, one can interpret the cover image that dominated the first quarter of the magazine’s issues as a perfect illustration of the symbiosis between the continuity of relevant past values and reform. Continuity is suggested by the woman’s physical appearance, that of the classical Jewess, and by the action she performs, that of playing the harp, in keeping with women’s traditional role as preservers of piety and purity. Women’s reformative role gets superimposed upon this thanks to the burning torches also included on the cover, symbols of the revolutionary spirit of emancipation. The American Jewess therefore stood for the woman who could harmonize the continuation of relevant Judaic traditions as indicated in her prophetess look with change brought about by the social progress and emancipation which America alone offered women.

It is equally worth analyzing the covers of American Jewess in relation to the times’ conventions of magazine covers. On this margin, Carolyn Kitch relevantly notes: “Though photography was beginning to appear regularly in turn-of-the-century newspapers, the majority of magazines continued to use illustration on their covers because they were dealing in ideals rather than reality” (4-5). Nevertheless, focusing on the role of alternative media of ethno-racial others, especially that of African Americans in the magazine Crisis founded in 1910 by W.E.B. DuBois and Oswald Garrison Villard, Kitch foregrounds an important distinguishing trait of minority-run magazines in contrast to mainstream journals—the tendency to combine illustration and photography. She relevantly explains:

 

Though common inside magazines by the 1910s, photographs rarely appeared on covers. To middle-class Americans in the late nineteenth century and the Progressive Era, illustrations implied ideals, whereas photographs connoted a realism that was even more real than that of urban painters like Sloan. A photograph was presumably not a representation of reality, but reality itself, the “truth.” Therefore, the Crisis’ use of photos on its covers can be seen as a form of documentation. (Kitch 95, my emphases)

 

In this sense, the unchanged cover image of the first ten issues from American Jewess represented an alternative to the mainstream magazine technique favoring illustration only, as in Alice Barber Stephens’ oil-and-painting drawings for Ladies’ Home Journal. Instead, American Jewess combined illustration and photography, an alternative that can be seen as another feature of transition from tradition to modernity. For its first ten issues, the magazine did not use the dominant pattern of drawn illustrations but a real picture at its center. Yet, at this early stage, its function was similar to that of drawn illustrations, it was meant to represent an ideal rather than stand for one single woman; it was the image of emancipated Jewish American women. This feature of meaning was preserved by adding to the actual picture the drawn column-looking torches at the sides, as well as by the choice not to vary the cover design for ten consecutive issues, nor to indicate the name of the actual woman portrayed. Thus, the role of the pictured woman was not meant to embody the flesh-and-blood uniqueness of a person but to represent the uniqueness of a new type—the emergent New Woman. The choice of using a photo alongside illustrations was meant to harmonize the real with the ideal. What it suggested was that the ideal of the new woman could gradually become real in the US for Jewish women.

Nevertheless, if one analyzes the subsequent issues of American Jewess, one discovers that there gradually occurred a shift in point of the ratio balance between photographs and illustrations. If the already-discussed first ten issues using one and the same image foregrounded illustration-related aims, starting with issue 11 of American Jewess from March 1896, changing photographs of individual, named women were given center stage. Women’s pictures now changed with almost every new issue, and the portrayed person’s name was usually provided, the depicted women usually representing popular models of women’s emancipation, literary might, diplomatic and Zionist activism, who also contributed to the magazine proper. Thus, eight of the available issues of the magazine contain individual photos of Emma Wolf (March 1896)—a popular writer of literature; Mrs. Oscar S. Straus (May 1896), jointly involved with her  husband in American diplomacy; “Mrs. Rebekah Kohut, President N.Y. Section of NCJW”[7] (November 1896); “Mrs. M.B. Schwab, Cleveland O. President of largest Section of the CJW” (December 1896); “Miss Rose Sommerfield, President Baltimore Section, CJW” (January 1897); Minnie Seligman (March 1898)—theater actress; Jeanne Franko (April 1898)—a violinist; Mrs. Richard Gottheil (August 1899)—the wife of the president of the Federation of American Zionism.  Some of these women contributed to the magazine with articles (e.g. Emma Wolf with her short story, “One-Eye, Two-Eye, Three-Eye” in the March 1896 issue), others were dedicated special articles (e.g. the article “Minnie Seligman” dedicated to the actress of the same name in the March 1898 issue, 265-266, or “A Popular Violin Virtuoso” presenting Jeanne Franko in the April 1898 issue, 41).

Additionally, one cover of American Jewess used the photo of an unnamed younger girl. The July 1896 issue presented the photo of one “Miss– (Snapshot in Long Branch),” a smiling teenage girl carrying her bonnet filled with either flowers or fruit; her face was slightly tilted, her arms leaning on a branch. The image she portrayed was that of the young Jewish American girl’s proficient role as land worker.

In point of physical appearance, the above-mentioned covers from American Jewess featuring well-known figures followed the pattern characteristic of the 1897 issues of Ladies’ Home Journal, that of middle-aged Victorian women in corseted, neck-to-floor dresses, with serious expressions on their faces. A slight exception occurred in the case of the last-mentioned photo of the anonymous teenage girl who was more comfortably dressed and smiling. The age gap between her and the other women suggested that the new woman’s more independent and relaxed appearance was announced as an emergent characteristic feature for the new generation. In the case of Ladies’ Home Journal, Kitch has noted that “the illustrations’ younger female characters in particular appeared in transitional settings that prepared them to leave the home and go out in the world” (Kitch 36). Similarly, the covers from American Jewess particularly presented illustrations of younger Jewish American women as transitional figures, not in point of setting this time, but of physical appearance—they had more relaxed facial expressions, more comfortable dresses, and were simultaneously priding themselves on being both consumers and producers. In comparison to the mainstream Ladies’ Home Journal, American Jewess thereby pioneered a more progressive image of women, one foregrounding intrinsic rather than merely external freedom-geared changes and one which would become dominant in mainstream American magazines only in the 1920s. 

Additionally, the cover of the October 1897 issue contained the photo of a man, Dr. Max Nordau, the well-known Hungarian-Jewish Zionist leader and co-founder, with Theodore Herzl, of the World Zionist Organization. The choice to include photos of respectable Jewish men at the side of those of women suggests how these images functioned as a form of documentation recording Jewish American women’s position as similar to that of mainstream women and modern Jewish men, challenging anyone who might have seen them as inferior. Thus, the photos of orators, actresses, literary writers, or young girls picking land’s fruits showed the achievement of the group in various fields and put down existent stereotypes of the type decried by Emil Hirsch, namely the inferior Oriental ways of Jews.

 

Frontispiece Images

Other visual images were featured on magazines’ frontispieces. This was the name given to a magazine’s second cover, usually bearing its logo and date and which “readers were encouraged to cut out and hang in their homes as art” (Kitch 17). American Jewess made no exception. Its forty-three available frontispiece images could be divided into four categories: five New Year images; ten photos of well-known figures of charity, Zionism, and literature; six photos of monuments or natural outside settings; twenty-two images of women in nature, of which fifteen featured women only, four - women and children, one - women and men, and two - children.

The New Year images could be themselves divided into two categories: three of them celebrated the Jewish New Year in the corresponding issues of the magazine (October 1895, September 1896, September 1898), and two of them focused on the Gentile calendar’s New Year (January 1896, January 1897). Religious practice versus promotion of entertainment could be considered as the distinguishing mark between these images.

The titles of the Jewish New Year issues read “Yom Kippur Worship,” “Jeremiah Preaching against the High Priests and the People,” “Yom Kippur Eve in a Jewish Home before Going to Shul.” The first illustration offered a view inside a Reform synagogue. That is the case since the rabbi was drawn while preaching to a mixed congregation of men and women in pulpits and galleries, following the mixed male and female hats one can distinguish in the picture, unlike Orthodox synagogues where women’s location was strictly limited to the galleries, having no right to mix with men. As such, by putting forth Reform Judaism, the magazine suggested the possibility of women’s religious emancipation in the synagogue. The second illustration presented prophet Jeremiah preaching against people’s sins and priests’ use of idolatry, announcing the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem because of such promiscuous behavior, and upholding people’s moral improvement, in accordance with the prophet’s function as defined by The Jewish Encyclopedia. Undoubtedly, the choice of this scene was made in view of sustaining the necessity for moral commitment; it must have been equally chosen following the known encounter between Jeremiah and a mourning woman as he returned to Jerusalem, after the destruction of the Second Temple. The woman was weeping over her dead husband and children, and as such standing for Jeremiah’s and Jews’ own mother, Zion. In that, the Jewish woman was presented as having a similar guiding function to that of Jeremiah, lovingly trying to pick up the portions of dead Jewish bodies while simultaneously lamenting that moral warnings had not been heeded by most of her fellows. Most importantly, the final image of a Jewish family before going to synagogue stressed woman’s important role in promoting religion in the home; the photo offers a mirror image of the rabbi blessing one child on the left-hand side, and the mother blessing another child on the right-hand side. Meanwhile, the husband is in the middle of the picture, passively waiting alongside two other children as his wife and the rabbi prepare the offspring for Yom Kippur. By conjoining the well-known religious role of the rabbi with a similar function of the wife-mother, this image held the fundamental role of women in promoting Judaism in the family. The rabbi’s guiding role in the Jewish community was paralleled in the case of the family by the woman, sanctioning the prevalent ideas of Reform Judaism sustained in the already-discussed articles of Emil G. Hirsch or Adolphe Moses, according to whom the role of religion was to promote ethical behavior and therefore be equally practiced by men and women.

In contrast, both issues celebrating the Gentile New Year calendar, and titled “Greeting,” used one and the same image of a Medieval-like woman announcer welcoming the New Year through a trumpet, wearing a coat-of-arms over her bosom and a Napoleonic hat on the head. The use of medieval court iconology for women’s poses was meant to present American women citizens as men’s equals in point of determination, strength and patriotism, hence bringing down the reductive binary ideas of strong manhood versus vulnerable/weak womanhood. Essentially, however, women’s strength was not set on battlefields, which remained a supreme masculine arena; their domination was to concentrate on the civil sphere like the setting in this case—that of entertaining culture.   

All in all, the images of the Jewish New Year and those of the Gentile New Year harmoniously linked the religious and civil emancipation of Jewish American women. As such, they could boost the renewal of both the Judaic community and the mainstream American society in which they simultaneously lived.

The ten frontispiece photos of well-known figures of charity, politics, Zionism, and literature featured the distinguished Rosa Sonneschein (March 1896, November 1898); the First Lady of President McKinley (December 1896); the Military Band of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum (December 1898); the late Baron Ferdinand James de Rothschild, well known for his charity work (January 1899); the late Baroness Clara de Hirsch herself opening charity houses in America (May 1899); Israel Zangwill, British Jewish author and Zionist (August 1899); medallions of four Educational Alliance officers, all male (August 1898); lady managers of Newark Hebrew Charity Fair meant to procure a building fund for a new orphan asylum (October 1896). Just as in the case of cover photos of public persons, the above-mentioned frontispiece photos of well-known figures of charity, politics, Zionism, and literature featured well-known public figures, both men and women. Jewish women were dressed similarly to mainstream respected women like the First Lady, in Victorian, corseted, neck-to-floor dresses, their hair carefully arranged, the same seriousness and determination imprinted on their faces. Moreover, they shared the same concerns with Jewish men in regards to education, society and charity, explaining the choice to also include Baron de Rothschild and Israel Zangwill as prominent male figures to portray at the side of women. As in the case of the cover images, these photos showed the achievement of the group in various fields. Such was the case, for example, of Miss Beatrice Maybaum, the second woman-lawyer to be admitted to the bar in the state of New York.[8] Meanwhile, most of the other women portrayed had a fundamental role in philanthropic work; for instance, from her home in Paris, Mrs. Clara de Hirsch had established her own “Home for Working Girls” in New York as an alternative to immigrant and poor Jewish young women’s ill-paid and severe “sweatshop work”[9]; Mrs. M. Weil was a trustee of Phoenix Club and Moses Montefiore Benefit Society, according to the American Jewish Congress directory of organizations; Mrs. D. Hirschberg was on the board of directors of The Associated Charities in 1896.

Overall, the setting was generally not obvious in these photos, most of them being close-ups of individual faces, no background discernible since the main interest of these pictures was to show the equal relevance of the intellectual and civic work performed by Jewish American women to that carried out by mainstream American women and well-known Jewish men. Additionally, another series of six frontispiece images favored settings in nature over images inside homes. Three of them are particularly relevant. They are photos of monuments, depicting the Principal Entrance to Shaw’s Garden in St. Louis (February 1896 issue), The Rejected (Heine) Lorelei Fountain (April 1896 issue), or the Millennium Statue at the Hungarian Exposition in Budapest (May 1896 issue).

These monument photos guided women towards an outside social framework and had a documentary function. Two of them celebrated the conjunction of leisure and learning. Shaw’s Garden in Saint Louis, also known as the Missouri Botanical Garden, is one of the top three botanical gardens in the world and was opened in 1859 by Henry Shaw, a native of Sheffield, England. His aim was not just to create a beautiful garden but one of the finest botanic gardens in the world, offering facilities for scientific research. The Millennium Statue from Budapest was inaugurated in 1896 and celebrated the one thousand’s anniversary of Hungarian ancestors finding a place to settle in the Carpathian basin, paying tribute to the Magyar tribes’ chieftains it depicts. It has been part of Budapest’s Heroes Square ever since and it symbolizes the need to delve into one’s past in order to responsibly build the present and future. Featuring such photos in a women’s magazine undoubtedly invited the female readers to spend their free time responsibly, not only by enjoying the scenery but also by improving their knowledge and learning about present science or past history. The third monument photo, The Rejected (Heine) Lorelei Fountain, was further indication of America’s functioning as a haven against anti-Semitism, offering protection against discrimination and prejudice just as women offered protection to the family. The fountain was completed in 1893 by the German American sculptor Ernst Herter; it had been commissioned by Princess Elizabeth of Austria, to be offered to the city of Dusseldorf, Germany, Heine's birthplace. Rejected by Dusseldorf because of anti-Semitic, nationalist, religious views, it was bought by Americans of German descent and offered to the City of New York and it later found a permanent location in the Bronx, in 1899. The marble fountain celebrates the poet’s revered lyric, “Die Lorelei”. This is the legend of a siren whose beauty and irresistible singing lured sailors to their deaths at the dangerous narrows of the Rhine River. On one hand, the inclusion of this photo in a Jewish American women’s magazine celebrated women’s mystery and dangerously tempting character. On the other hand, it promoted Jewish American women’s fundamental role to combat anti-Semitism by using the model of American democracy. In a nutshell, all these monument photos impelled American Jewesses to use leisure time responsibly, by a constant drive towards educational improvement and by the active struggle against ethnic-based discrimination.

Finally, the majority of frontispiece images, twenty-two in all, were dedicated to women’s presence in the midst of nature, most of them catching women in motion and not statically posing, as in the case of the mainstream magazines. Fifteen of these images only featured women, four - women and children, one - a woman and man alongside children in the background, and two - children only. As such, they meant to suggest that women’s sphere had started to be broadened, privileging outside social settings and mobility instead of domestic existence. These images, however, were drawn illustrations rather than photos, standing for an emergent, precautious transition to a broader hoped-for situation of Jewish American women rather than an already established state-of-facts. In this way, American Jewess followed mainstream magazines and evaded a revolutionary tone aggressively favoring a new woman image deeply involved in public life, by continuing to uphold the traditional image of motherhood. As proof of this, the only image whose title included the word woman appeared in an early issue of the journal, in July 1895. This was “The Eternal Woman—Mother and Child” (Figure 2) featuring the inside view of a mother carrying her baby in her arms, close to this one’s cot. However, the mother and child’s proximity to the window, a means of exiting the home, already suggested a more open view of motherhood. Furthermore, the other three illustrations depicting women and children which subsequently appeared in the magazine were set in nature and not inside the house; they implicitly suggested that the child-loving mother and her offspring could be involved in a broader public sphere. Importantly, all the children in these images were daughters, stressing the issue of intergenerational transmission of women’s new roles as land workers or charity organizers. Two of the illustrations, one titled “September” (Figure 3, September 1895), the other bearing no title (June 1898), presented mother and daughter jointly picking fruits; especially the latter illustration surprised the young daughter watching the mother and some older girls pick the field, therefore learning the trade first hand from the more experienced generation. The other illustration, titled “The First Lesson in Charity” from the December 1895 issue (Figure 4) conjoined a poem on that subject with the image of an elegantly-dressed high-class mother and her daughter helping a girl-beggar in front of their house, in snowy weather.

        

Figure 2. The Eternal Woman - Mother and Child

Figure 3. September, 1895.           

Figure 4. The First Lesson in Charity

Courtesy of Jewish Women’s Archive, American Jewess Open-Access Digitization Project (<http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amjewess/about.html>)

 

Additionally, the three drawings focusing on children presupposed a more relaxed, playful, carefree attitude that could be associated with the woman of the future alongside her responsible working and social roles. One of the drawings, “January” (from the January 1898 issue), had at its center the image of a young couple skating arm-in-arm while children slid on sleighs in the background. The other two images featured girls and boys playing as they learnt. All these images reversed the straightforward interpretation of the traditional image of women as caretakers of children. They suggested that women should not be only protective of their offspring but they should foster their own childlike side which fearlessly enjoys life, nature, freedom.

Finally, of the fifteen images that featured women, only one presented a domestic image, “November” from the November 1895 issue; it included three women carrying a turkey on a plate, undoubtedly for the celebration of Thanksgiving. In that, rather than the domestic function of women it was the patriotic strain which was highlighted.

All the rest of the illustrations of women presented them in nature and could be divided into three categories. Seven highlighted the harmony and exchanges between women and the natural world, presenting women as picking flowers, fruits or twigs from the field. The titles of these images further emphasized the harmonious continuity of women and nature, intertwining five titles of months with two titles that could apply to both women and the natural settings, “Midsummer Beauty” (July 1896 issue) featuring a woman carrying a basket of flowers and fruits and “Flower among Flowers” (August 1897 issue) depicting a woman in the midst of her garden.

Three images presented women as comfortable users of newer or older technologies, enjoying themselves in a boat (“August Flowers” from August 1895 issue), a swing (n.t. May 1897 issue), or by riding a bike (n.t. June 1896 issue). Even if these images emphasized women’s caressing, elegant attitude to nature, they simultaneously suggested their possibility to handle devices as men would, and without losing respectability. Moreover, in the case of riding a bicycle, the illustration was accompanied by two articles inside the magazine that gave practical advice about preparing the bike for a safe ride, emphasizing its good effect on health. In this sense, media scholar Ellen Gruber Garvey has noted how the emergence of safe bicycles in the 1890s (i.e. bikes with equalized wheels and inflated tires) was very popular and became broadly portrayed in relation to women in the time’s magazines under one of two main forms. It was seen either positively, as an instance of women’s freedom and mobility heralded by women and feminists or, negatively, by conservatives, who attacked women’s bike riding as ruinous for their sexual health (Gruber Garvey 7, 13, 106-134). In the context of such controversies, American Jewess was among the pro-bicycle magazines that used medical discourses or rational appeals underscoring how bikes offered women access to mobility and allowed them to be directly associated with progressive advances of society.[10] Yet, while the bicycle was a sign of women’s autonomy and freedom from train schedules, for instance, women’s being dressed in long, hour-glass dresses was meant to uphold the traditional social order rather than women’s threatening role meant to erode gender distinctions. In line with this, another image presented a woman’s comfortable walking outside at night (n.t. February 1897); the emphasis here fell on the woman’s high-class elegant physical appearance in her hourglass dress and hat, suggesting that she did not lose respectability by walking alone at night, but merely showed her independence. Such an image would counteract many of the traditional ideas at the time according to which respectable women could not walk unaccompanied in the evening, that being a sign of loose morals most often reflected in a problematic physical appearance. In contrast, located near the streetlamp and a house’s stairs, so within a protective environment, the woman’s elegant and dignified presence outside the home at night seemed to have the potential to become acceptable, on a par with men’s errands.                                 

Additionally, another set of three images presented the case of young girls and teenagers. One young girl took care of puppies in the garden outside the house, therefore having broadened a girl’s sphere beyond the limits of the house to those of the garden (“March Winds” in March 1897 issue—Figure 5). Another slightly older girl naturally played with twigs and birds, having already broadened her horizon beyond the immediate limit of the yard (“September” in September 1897 issue—Figure 6). A third girl, this time a teenager, spread flowers around a field, having become a nurturer of the land and not only a consumer of its beauties (“May” from May 1898 issue—Figure 7). These younger women seemed to have most comfortably become one with the outside, natural and social world and their illustrations most audaciously brought down domestic traditional images of women dominating those times. Instead, they sustained how the social and natural spheres did not lead to women’s loss of respectability; on the contrary, they managed to promote it further as a form of self-reliance, independence, capacity for work and leisure. 

            

Figure 5.  March Winds                      

Figure 6. An April Day                

Figure 7. May

Courtesy of Jewish Women’s Archive, American Jewess Open-Access Digitization Project (<http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amjewess/about.html>)

 

Despite the above-suggested balance American Jewess tried to achieve between traditional and emancipated womanhood, its endeavor was short-lived and in August 1899 the magazine published its last issue. In the “Valedictory” from its last number, the editors explained the reasons for ceasing publication as mainly connected with financial problems, especially readers’ non-payment of subscription fees. However, they also indicated a further, more important problem, the middle and upper-class American Jews’ tendency to run away from Jewish issues in the attempt to be integrated in the American society, within the context of an emergent and soon rampant nativism in early twentieth century American society. Despite this defeat that the magazine assumed, within its five years of publication, it managed to essentially contribute to the creation of a new identity-in-the-making for American Jewesses, one that brought together past values with new ideas of modern subjectivity.

In this sense, in its “Salutatory,” American Jewess had established two main aims for its existence: that of ensuring American Jewesses’ religious recognition and social equality with men. My analysis of cover and frontispiece images, in correlation with some written ideas inside the magazine, proves they had made a huge step in that respect. Their images of American Jewesses emphasized the recognition of women’s fundamental religious role inside the family, on a par with that of rabbis in the synagogue, and sustaining the agenda of Reform Judaism of those years. They also established women’s passage towards social equality with men by becoming the leaders of non-domestic social and natural spheres in which they used leisure time and technology as responsibly as men. Jewish American women were simultaneously driven towards the need to foster their own and their children’s educational improvement and to actively fight against ethnic-based discrimination, poverty, and prejudice. In the interim, they did not flaunt their Jewish heritage or traditional respectability considered as an essential aspect of the right woman. Instead, they used these traditional values of the past in order to gradually ensure the broadening of women’s sphere towards self-reliance, independence, capacity for work and leisure, features that had so far been largely associated with men only.

Another feature of the magazine’s stepwise, sober-minded rather than aggressive strategy marking the transition from tradition to modernity was its technique to combine illustration (standing for ideal standards and values) with and photography (meant to present documentation and reality), a pioneering alternative technique proposed by this ethnic magazine to mainstream magazines that favored illustrations at the time. In this sense, the magazine suggested that the modern woman that the American Jewess should tend to be was one that combined pragmatism and idealism, self-reliance and responsibility.

Finally, the covers and frontispieces from American Jewess particularly presented illustrations of younger women as transitional figures, not only in point of setting (as mainstream magazines suggested) but also of physical appearance, especially in point of relaxed facial expressions and attitudes, more comfortable dresses, and non-static snapshots. Such changing traits were essential for allowing women to properly work or satisfactorily use technology. Moreover, the photos of orators, actresses, literary writers, young girls picking land’s fruits showed the achievement of the group in various fields and contributed to putting down existent stereotypes as to the inferior ways of Jews. Thus, American Jewess did not naively emulate the models of the mainstream press at the time and its normative regimes of vulnerability which upheld women’s physical weakness and intellectual inferiority; instead it appropriated and modified them in view of reforming Judaic values and gradually promoting progressive images of women in America that went beyond such normative, narrow views of vulnerability.