This article examines the Fair Intellectual Club, founded in Edinburgh in 1717, as one of the earliest examples of female intellectual sociability in eighteenth-century Britain. Situating the club within the Scottish Enlightenment, it argues that this association functioned as an alternative site of knowledge production for women excluded from universities, while redefining leisure as a purposeful and morally grounded space for intellectual activity. Drawing on the club's published Account (1720) and the Edinburgh Miscellany, the study shows how members promoted rational conversation, mutual improvement, and methodical sociability as a means of cultivating knowledge. In doing so, the club challenges traditional historiography that frames Enlightenment sociability as predominantly male and public, instead revealing how women actively participated in intellectual life through semi-private and self-organized institutions. Engaging with Jurgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere, the article demonstrates that such spaces complicate rigid distinctions between public and private, and highlights the importance of extra-institutional intellectual practices. The Fair Intellectual Club thus emerges as a significant, though understudied, experiment in female intellectual organization, anticipating later developments such as the Bluestocking circles and contributing to a broader reassessment of women's roles in Enlightenment knowledge production.
When Bertha Pappenheim's father fell ill 1881, she began to suffer from intense despair accompanied by somatic symptoms. Her condition was diagnosed and treated, but not cured, by Josef Breuer as a case of hysteria. In 1888 Pappenheim began to engage in social work and made it the basis of various theories about and attempts at social therapy, including the revival of interest in Old Yiddish literary texts as offers of female validation. While active work did away with Pappenheim's somatic symptoms, it could never alleviate her profound "aloneliness" that may have begun when she was excluding from studying, like her brother, with her father. The essay traces Pappenheim's "aloneliness" and her attempt to cure it in her engagement with Old Yiddish texts and her exchange of letters with Martin Buber.
This article examines how Jewish women writers in nineteenth-century Hebrew periodicals employed sophisticated linguistic strategies to assert their voices within a male-dominated discourse. Through analysis of articles by four women writers published between 1863 and 1895, the study reveals how they utilized complex echoing techniques to challenge both traditional rabbinic and maskilic (Jewish enlightenment) attitudes toward women's education and public participation. Drawing on Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and contemporary pragmatic approaches, the analysis identifies two distinct categories of echoes: single-source and multiple-source. The findings demonstrate how these writers developed nuanced methods of marking and unmarking textual sources to create layered meanings accessible to culturally knowledgeable readers. By strategically deploying biblical and Talmudic references alongside contemporary maskilic discourse, these women crafted a subversive critical voice while maintaining their legitimacy within traditional Jewish discourse. This study contributes to our understanding of how marginalized writers can appropriate established linguistic and cultural resources to challenge the very frameworks that seek to exclude them, while simultaneously creating solidarity among like-minded readers through shared interpretive practices.
This article examines The Jewish Woman, a magazine published by the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) from 1921 to 1931, focusing on the editorial role and personal ambition of Estelle M. Sternberger. As Executive Secretary of the NCJW, Sternberger used the magazine as a unifying medium for Jewish women, divided across religious, social, and geographical lines. Through editorials, articles, and various reports, The Jewish Woman became a tool for Sternberger to articulate Jewish women's voices and shape their public representations. Under Sternberger's editorial hand, The Jewish Woman became an enduring record of Jewish women's lives and aspirations in the 1920s. This study frames Sternberger as a significant figure in early American Jewish journalism, analyzing her editorial choices and repositioning the magazine within the broader scope of periodical studies and American Jewish women's history.
This article reconsiders women's position in the Eastern European haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) in the second half of the nineteenth century. It questions current tendencies to think about women's participation in haskalah literary developments primarily in terms of the sparse quantity of Hebrew writing they published. Moving beyond considerations of women's inclusion or exclusion in these textual spheres, this article instead reframes haskalah literary production as a dynamic multilingual network that involved women. Women's cultural agency impacted numerous realms of modernizing Jewish societies, and women wrote works that grappled with novel challenges to Jewish identities and norms in numerous languages. Articles and works of fiction by men frequently addressed women's broader socio-cultural activities, and women responded in letters that were published in the same periodicals (in Hebrew, Yiddish, and non-Jewish languages). Women also contributed to haskalah literary developments through translations and literary criticism, which were important practices for this nascent literature. Thus, despite the small size of the corpus of women's haskalah writings, these writings' very existence demonstrates that women were part of the "publics" that haskalah presses produced, and that they participated in the formation of haskalah literary and public spheres.
Many Jewish women were writing during the 1800s, yet so often scholars and critics defer to discussing canonical writers of the period. In an effort to highlight the underexplored, in this essay I examine the diary of Emma Mordecai (1812-1906) and Harriet Lane Levy's (1866-1950) memoir 920 O'Farrell Street. These works showcase the lives of two Jewish women whose experiences are so vastly different due to circumstances such as their political ideals and their location. The differences are not just found in their location, or politics, however, but the way that Levy is free from fear concerning her race and religion while Mordecai need always keep it front of mind. A difference of only a decade or two and being on opposite ends of the country allowed Levy to be free of the same types of worries that Mordecai needed to govern her life by. While Mordecai and Levy are not "representative" of Jewish women, taken together, they may represent the complexity with which Jewish American writers navigate being Jewish, American, women, and writers during and after the Civil War.
In Eveleen Mason's Hiero-Salem (1889), a little-known American utopian novel, feminist politics are undergirded by a religion focused on Divine Motherhood. While this connection between "God as a mother", and feminist social vision, is not unique among literary utopias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mason's is unusual for drawing on esoteric religion to ground its socio-political ethic - a mystical mode of spirituality that could often be obscure and otherworldly. Here it is shown that Mason's "revelation" of divine motherhood entails a politics of women's emancipation and public leadership, and the reconfiguring of society as a feminist co-operative. Moreover, Hiero-Salem models a strikingly diverse utopian community in terms of race, ethnicity, national background and religious practice, which contrasts with the white supremacy and nativism assumed in most white American women's feminist utopian texts of the period - albeit with limitations. Mason's feminism and multi-culturalism are grounded in the esoteric religious principle of uniting differences (gendered, racial etc) to create the ideal humanity in which the divine is realised. Mason's novel is here reclaimed as a meaningful contribution to the utopian genre, and to late-nineteenth-century debates on religion, feminism, and modern American nationhood.
This article explores Babette Deutsch's contributions to American modernist poetry, particularly through her use of cultural brokerage to introduce Jewish themes and foreign forms into a predominantly Anglo-American literary tradition. By employing Japanese poetic forms, such as haiku, alongside Jewish narratives and symbols, Deutsch attempts to disrupt American literary insularity and challenge prevailing antisemitic and isolationist sentiments of her time. Through close readings of Honey out of the Rock and other works, this study illustrates how Deutsch adapts Japanese poetic techniques to preserve and valorize Jewish cultural memory. Furthermore, the article positions Deutsch within the broader transnationalist endeavours of the modernist movement, revealing her innovative synthesis of cultural forms as a response to the exclusionary tendencies of American poetry. Despite her literary accomplishments, Deutsch's work remains marginal in dominant narratives of American literary history, highlighting the challenges faced by artists seeking to bridge cultural divides amid prevailing nationalist and isolationist trends in the early twentieth-century United States.
Starting in the 1980s, Orthodox female scholars have adopted and adapted various genres to discuss the intricacies of Jewish tradition from halakhic perspectives. Earlier precedents of women writing (about) halakhah from the first half of the twentieth century are forgotten forebears of these books. One of them is Gella S & auml;nger, who authored the handbook Ishah El Ahotah. Published in German in 1927, it is a practical guide for observing Jewish law for women and girls. While it seems to have achieved some popularity just after its publication, it has fallen into oblivion, much like Gella S & auml;nger herself, remaining unacknowledged within halakhic history and the history of Jewish women writers. This is even though Gella S & auml;nger appears to be the first woman to have authored a handbook on Jewish law in a vernacular language. This article explores her rendering of halakhah and musings on her identity and agency as a woman writing (about) Jewish law and highlights the continuities and discontinuities of women's halakhic writings. Gella S & auml;nger, much like female authors writing (about) halakhah in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sought to look at Jewish law and tradition in light of previously neglected women's experiences within Jewish society.
Sarah Bas Tovim, the famous and elusive author of The Tkhine of the Gate of Unification and Tkhine of Three Gates (Sheloyshe Sheroim), has had a dramatic post-text afterlife as a myth, legend, literary fairy godmother, and, more recently, a proto-feminist and very real historical icon. Sarah's historical slipperiness has inspired derision, reinvention, and, conversely, careful historical substantiation. While more recent scholarship has placed her as a historical person with her own subjectivity, her silences are treated as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than part of a narrative and an opportunity for renewed understanding. By placing the reader of Sarah Bas Tovim's texts front and center, we see that Sarah's affective personhood and simultaneous slipperiness work to form affective communities across time. Fear and embarrassment introduce the reader to Sarah's present, constructs the borders of her new community, defines her relationship with God, while the obfuscating use of the personal pronoun fundamentally blurs the role of writer and reader in the tkhine. " Through Sarah's narrative representation, we are brought into close connection to her felt presence, where her unstable representations shift the idea of what it means to exist in a common community at all.
In The Cloven Foot (1879), Mary Elizabeth Braddon combines elements of sensation fiction with the intimate backstage view of the ballet theatre, transporting readers through both sensation and spectacle. Braddon's backstage view of the performers, crew, and management, calls attention to the commercial aspects of the theatre and dance world, and she emphasizes how theatres strove to attract audiences by providing a constant stream of amazing new entertainments for the viewing public. In the mid-Victorian ballet stage, Braddon may have found a useful mirror for her chosen genre of sensation fiction as she draws parallels between the viewing and reading audiences. By depicting how audiences demanded a constant flow of titillating entertainment, Braddon grapples with the sensation readers' appetite for ever more astonishing spectacle and gestures toward the challenge of keeping up with that demand. The treatment of the ballet dancer's body in The Cloven Foot allows Braddon to explore her own authorial relationship to sensation and spectacle. Aligning the reader with the theatrical spectator, Braddon invites considerations of how those consuming the text - written or performed - play a role in the exploitative spectacle and raises questions about the relationships among reader/viewer; author/performer; entertainment, and art.
Jane Barker's Galesia Trilogy tells the story of Galesia, a young woman who had not only studied simples and botany with her brother but also the anatomy scholarship of Thomas Willis and William Harvey and others. While Galesia goes on to establish a burgeoning medical practice in London, both her medical reading and practice have to be abandoned due to social constraints. Into this narrative of frustration and exclusion, Barker inserts "Anatomy", a poem ostensibly written by Galesia after reading her now-deceased brother's books. This essay argues Barker's poem uses common placing within a narrative of medical education to create an anatomy lecture for Galesia, one where she is explicitly made welcome in a scene of learning. Through collecting passages, Barker deploys in verse the metaphors, technical language, and Latin of anatomy texts, while also condensing and re-figuring their descriptions of processes. "Anatomy", then, demonstrates a professional competence not permitted in fiction rooted in the real world, one that is not ended by a mother's concern for chastity.
The article studies the spiritualist activity of the Norwegian pedagogue, school headmistress, women's right activist, and publicist Ragna Nielsen (1845-1924) from three overarching perspectives. The first one relates to the discourse on spiritualism and its relationship with the Nordic Modern Breakthrough. In her s & eacute;ances, Nielsen claimed to have communicated with a number of deceased Norwegian intellectuals of that time. Second, the article examines the cross-pollination between Nielsen's spiritualism and her commitment to the women's rights movement. Third, the article investigates Nielsen's use of spiritualism as a vehicle for self-promotion. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's writings in Specters of Marx (1993), here applied to a spiritualistic discourse, the article argues that Nielsen's spiritualism is a hauntological project that resurrected the Nordic Modern Breakthrough, a cultural, literary, and political movement with which she had a number of scores to settle. In addition, the article argues that Nielsen's spiritualism creates a peculiar semi-public sphere, in which the private environment of the s & eacute;ance is given a public dimension. As an example of women's writing, Nielsen's spiritualistic corpus challenges the Habermasian notion of a public sphere.
In the mid-nineteenth century, novels by Mathilde Fibiger (1830-1872), Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865), and Fredrika Runeberg (1807-1879) promoting women's rights became a starting-point for the subsequent women's movements in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, respectively. Lutheran arguments were ubiquitous on both sides of the conflict over women's emancipation. Anti-Catholicism was an integral part of the Nordic nationalist movements, embraced by these authors. Still Fibiger's Clara Raphael (1851) and Runeberg's Sigrid Liljeholm (1862) explicitly discuss Catholic forms of female religious authority, whereas Bremer ventured into an extended and personal investigation of the Catholic faith in her travelogue Two Years in Switzerland and Italy (1860/1861). I examine the tension between Lutheran nationalism and Catholic forms of female vocation underlying the arguments for women's emancipation in Fibiger's and Runeberg's novels. Bremer's travelogue provides a context for the approach to Catholicism in general, and a code to detect traces of Catholic female religious authority in Bremer's own emancipation novel Hertha (1856). Catholicism is rejected and yet appropriated to reimagine the Lutheran idea of women's vocation. The conflation of nationalist and religious discourse generates a double calling to women's emancipation, ultimately portrayed as a sacred mission.
This article examines how the Finnish women's rights movement perceived the relationship between fiction and religion from the late 1880s until the First World War. For this purpose, the women's press provides a good vantage point. The analysis shows that it was mainstream to award an ideological and pedagogical function to literature - literature was not purely perceived as art. Literature and authors had a duty to contribute to societal development and transformation. Good literature had to serve women's rights and society's progress. They were seen as dependent on high moral standards. Fiction had to defend women's interests - that is, absolute sexual morality - and women writers were expected to put themselves in the service of ideologically correct literature. Christianity, properly understood, was interpreted as a support to progress at all levels of society. Essential in assessing the morality of fiction was to pay attention to how things were described. "Dirty" things could be represented as long as it was done in the right spirit. Women were not alone in the service of progress. The contributions from male authorities with the same message were highly appreciated, and their publications used as a strategy. It was perceived as a joint effort to envision and gradually, realize a woman-friendly future.
In our article, we tackle nineteenth-century Finnish women writers' stance towards religious faith, considering both organized religion, and their personal search for spirituality. This century marks the birth of Finnish literature, first in Swedish, then in Finnish. It is the period of "national awakening" that culminated around the turn of the twentieth century, when various social movements entered into dialogue with the national project. Like in all national, social and women's movements around Europe, religion played an important role. We address this issue with cases from different decades, mapping the historical and political contexts, as well as various literary genres and poetics. The selected writers represent certain milestones in the history of women's writing in Finland: they begin with Finland's first women novelists, Charlotta Falkman (1795-1882) and Wendla Randelin (1823-1906), who both wrote in Swedish. Our next case study is Minna Canth (1844-1897), representing the first generation of authors writing in Finnish. Finally, we briefly discuss the socialist politician and writer Hilja P & auml;rssinen (1876-1935). We focus on women writers' discourses of faith in the process of creating female subjectivity, and opportunities for women's agency, amidst the rising national movement and women's emancipation.
