Women in Vienna 1900'

Alison Rose. Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Vienna. Jewish History,
Life, and Culture Series. Austin University of Texas Press, 2008.
xi + 314 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-292-71861-6.

Reviewed by Megan Brandow-Faller (Georgetown University)
Published on HABSBURG (November, 2009)
Commissioned by Jonathan Kwan

Between Shtetl and Salon: Jewish Women in Vienna 1900

Alison Rose's pioneering monograph _Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle
Vienna _charts new territory on the familiar waters of Vienna 1900.
Since the publication of Carl Schorske's compelling series of
cultural historical essays (_Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and
Culture _[1980]), a model that attributed an efflorescence of modern
art, literature, and science in the Austrian capital circa 1890-1914
to the disillusioned sons of liberalism, historians have revised and
expanded aspects of the Schorskean "failure of liberalism" paradigm.
A number of recent works have corrected Schorske's neglect of the
distinctly Jewish character of Viennese modernism, highlighting the
prevalence of Jewish patronage of modern art, contributions to
literature, philosophy, and psychology, and even proposing that
notions of Jewish enlightenment, or _Haskalah_, stamped the general
character of the Viennese fin de siècle.[1] Yet, aside from a few
general works, Rose's groundbreaking publication represents the first
full-length study dedicated to a gendered analysis of Viennese Jewry
circa 1900.[2] Basing her work on collections of personal papers,
memoirs, pamphlets, and oral histories housed in American, Austrian,
and Israeli repositories, Rose seeks to "reintegrate Jewish women
into the history of turn of the century Vienna in order to
demonstrate their importance as cultural creators" (p. 2). With
distinguished track records as salonières and business associates,
Jewish women harnessed the flexibility in Talmudic law and
traditional and reform Judaism to pursue a variety of religious,
cultural, and intellectual pursuits propelling Viennese modernism.

Rose reveals how Jews and women navigated similar challenges in the
late nineteenth-century struggle for emancipation, in their otherness
vis-Ã -vis mainstream culture, and in the emergence of a group
consciousness. Further linking the parallel development of
Austro-Hungarian Jewish emancipation and the women's movement were
deep-seated stereotypes of the femininity and physical weakness of
male Jews, effectively deconstructed throughout the book via
contemporary religious, literary, and scientific discourse. Embedded
in "the perceived Judaization and feminization of Viennese culture,"
discursive linkage of Jews and women ran rampant in late imperial
Austria (p. 3). Jewish women, therefore, doubly represented a bête
noire to Austria's traditional social order: both as progressively
educated women, potential bluestockings and "hysterical
hermaphrodites," and as Jews in a climate of rising anti-Semitism.
Yet the author maintains that Jewish women's social activism and
progressive self-identities not only challenge Schorske's and Peter
Hánák's notion of the liberal retreat from politics but also
necessitate the revision of theories of Jewish identity, including
Marsha Rozenblit's persuasive tripartite thesis, which posits that
Habsburg-treu Austrian Jews navigated concurrent identities as Jews,
Austrians, andGermans/Czechs. Modifying Rozenblit's model, Rose
proposes the idea of a "quadpartite identity for Austrian Jewish
women" (p. 220). However, while gender embodies an important factor
in attuning group identity, the absence of equally "useful"
categories, such as class and education, strikes a dissonant chord. A
more complex polygonal formula factoring in these and other identity
determinants presents a richer solution, for adding gender as a
discreet category unmitigated by further qualifiers runs the risk of
essentialization.

Scrutinizing not only Jewish women's practical involvement in
education, philanthropy, religion, psychology, and culture, but also
representations of Jewish women by the scholarly rabbinic community
and elite lay leadership, Rose employs a dualistic methodology
balanced between discourse and practice. Occasionally, however, the
reader wishes that the author had sacrificed more of her otherwise
fascinating analyses of Zionist texts and literature written by
Jewish men for sources penned by her female historical subjects. Not
the "New Woman" of the Jewish _Bürgertum_, striving for women's
emancipation and cultural assimilation, but traditional Jewish
matrons of the working and upper classes, dedicated to family,
community, and Judaic spirituality, interest Rose. Rose unfolds the
story of her Jewish women-- wives, mothers, community and religious
activists, and psychological and literary figures--in the span of six
concise chapters. Beginning with the "Childhood and Youth of Jewish
Girls," Rose portrays the sense of alienation and difference
surrounding Viennese Jewish girlhood. Biographical and anecdotal
evidence provides a rich mosaic of Jewish girls growing up with
Easter eggs, Christmas trees, and rosary-touting nannies, and the
ensuing cultural and religious confusion experienced by such girls at
home and school. While controversial among the Viennese rabbinical
elite, a variety of apologetically derived rituals--above all, the
introduction of girls' confirmation in lieu of the bar
mitzvah--carved out a greater space for women in Judaism than that
prescribed by Talmudic law. Along with Rose's fourth chapter on
Zionist women, the second chapter, "Community, Spirituality, and
Philanthropy," constitutes the book's strong suit. Making a
convincing case for Viennese particularity, Rose argues that neither
the Western European model positing Jewish women's continuance of
traditional religious practice in the home nor the Eastern European
pattern in which Jewish women, secure of their ethnic distinctness
through ghettoization, became increasingly secular, adequately
describes Vienna's situation as a crossroads between East and West,
modernity and tradition, the native and exotic. Instead, with minimal
religious practice in the home and little social isolation, Viennese
Jews "retained Jewish distinctiveness primarily in education, social,
and political patterns, and were reminded of their identity by
anti-Semitism" (p. 43). A variety of Judaic prayer groups, charitable
leagues, and hospital-visiting societies, although partially
influenced by modern European values, expressed a specifically Jewish
womanly ideal privileging family, religion, and community.

Chapter 3, "University and Political Involvement," presents a great
disappointment to readers, not only in its preemptory discussion of
late nineteenth-century educational reforms but also in its omission
of non-Jewish leagues and schools in which Jewish men and women
constituted a driving force. Vienna's Athenäum, an association of
(largely Jewish) university professors offering university-caliber
lectures to women, constitutes only one such example. Along with her
brief survey of women's education in chapter 1, Rose presents the
story of women's educational reforms in a slightly misleading manner.
For instance, the non-specialist would gather from chapter 3 that the
University of Vienna's "faculty of philosophy opened to women in
1897" and the evangelical faculty did not admit women "until 1923"
(p. 88). In fact, the Philosophical Faculty opened to Austrian women
as non-matriculating auditors as early as 1878 and the evangelical
faculty admitted women in the 1920/21 academic year. While women
lacked full rights of matriculation until 1897, Austria nonetheless
excelled ahead of its supposedly more progressive Western European
neighbors in admitting women, if provisionally, to university
studies. Rose addresses the progressive aspects of Austrian women's
education obliquely, stating that "the examinations leading to the
Matura had been available to women since 1872" (p. 94). The ensuing
series of decrees fully accrediting women's undergraduate and
doctoral studies, which were of no small importance to Jewish women
given their relative overrepresentation in higher education, are
glossed over too quickly. That the bulk of the author's case studies
of Jewish academic women fall in typically masculine fields of
medicine, science, and law downplay female students' strength in
modern philology (particularly French and English), literature, and
art history. While Rose is to be applauded for bringing attention to
female academics in such "unfeminine" fields to light, a
clarification that the majority of female university students
initially pursued concentrations in traditionally feminine subjects,
such as language, literature, and art, would have been welcome.

As a counterpoint to the third chapter's female academics and
activists, chapter 5 details how Zionism offered Jewish daughters,
wives, and mothers alternate paths to the New Society's promise of
gender symmetry. In an innovative gendered analysis of Theodor
Herzl's and other Zionists' landmark works, Rose reveals that
"Zionist leaders used Jewish women as scapegoats, blaming them for
assimilation, for the lack of support for the Zionist movement, and
for the moral deficiencies of Diaspora Jewry" (p. 139). Salvation
from unnatural gender orderings resulting from Diaspora life (that
is, the overbearing matrons of Eastern Europe and the West's
self-centered, bejeweled, and materialistic dames) could be found in
the New Society, wherein virtuous wives and mothers ("Estet Hayil")
would be re-feminized by centering their lives around family and
home. Likewise, emasculated, henpecked men would recapture their
virility by working the land. Rose's fifth chapter on women as
practitioners and subjects of medicine and psychoanalysis also
confronts such sexualized stereotypes of Jews, including sexual
voracity, mental and physical unfitness, and reversal of masculine
and feminine gender traits. From Freudian theories on women's
masculinity complex to self hating Jews, including misogynist
philosopher Otto Weininger, Jewish psychologists and theorists
"challenged the racial basis of negative stereotypes of the male Jew,
while embracing negative stereotypes of women and Jewish women" (p.
179).

The final chapter on art and literature offers intriguing
deconstructions of the _Ghettogeschichte_'s virtuous female types,
characters pulling male protagonists back to Judaism after periods of
religious doubt. Yet, regrettably, the author omits the fine and
applied arts, a major avenue of Jewish women's creative expression.
In addition to serving as patrons of the Wiener Werkstätte and other
modernist endeavors, Jewish women played a major role as artists in
Austria's fin-de-siècle _Frauenkunst_ movement. While the author
references a predecessor league, the League of Viennese Women Artists
and Writers (1886), Jewish women's strong presence in Austria's
twentieth-century women artists leagues campaigning for women
artists' artistic, economic, and institutional parity is omitted
entirely. Also excluded is the Viennese Ladies' Academy (1897), a
private, later publicly incorporated state academy founded and funded
largely by Jews to provide women with professional artistic training.
Particularly in light of Steven Beller's arguments on Jews'
relatively minor numbers as visual artists, the leading role of
Jewish familial networks in such leagues and academies demands
further inquiry.[3]

Overall, the degree to which the author succeeds in her revisionist
aims remains compromised by her suppression of inter-confessional
leagues, associations, and groups in which Jewish women played major
roles. In "reinsert[ing] the Jewish woman into her proper place as a
pivotal figure both in the fin-de-siècle imagination and in the
everyday reality of Viennese society, politics, and culture," the
author's insistence on focusing exclusively on Jewish organizations
obscures Jewish women's tremendous contributions to the women's
movement (p. 5). By marginalizing the experiences of assimilated
Viennese Jewry, Rose has internalized her subjects' aversion to the
upper-middle-class Jewish woman, with her strong assimilationst and
emancipatory tendencies. While Rose correctly highlights that the
headlining voices of middle-class Austrian feminism (Marianne
Hainisch, Rosa Mayreder, and Marie Lang) were Gentiles, Jewish
women's presence in the rank and file of the Austrian women's
movement should not be underestimated. Jewish women played a major,
if not dominant, role in a variety of progressive leagues dedicated
to furthering women's educational, vocational, and intellectual
development. While Rose's focus resides primarily in women upholding
traditional Judaic religious and social practices, certainly the
identity of assimilated Jewish women--the women who contributed so
tremendously to a variety of progressive causes under the umbrella of
the women's movement--and the manner in which such women navigated
conflicting allegiances of Judaism, modernity, and feminism deserves
greater attention. Such women's unwavering allegiances to liberal
principles of _Bildung_, self-help, and self-improvement would have
only stoked the kindling of her arguments on the continued vitality
of Austrian liberalism_._ In addition, readers might find a seamless
presentation of material, rather than subchapters and subdivisions,
more effective. Despite such minor shortcomings, Rose's monograph on
Jewish women constitutes a groundbreaking contribution to the
continuing scholarly dialogue on Vienna 1900. In shifting the focus
of the conversation to gender, sexual, and religious identities, Rose
not only gives Jewish women their rightful place in the annals of
Viennese cultural history but also provides the field with new ways
to scrutinize the city's contested modernity.

Notes

[1]. James Shedel, _Art and Society: The New Art Movement in Vienna
1897-1914 _(Palo Alto: Society for the Promotion of Science, 1981);
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, _Wittgenstein's Vienna_ (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1973); and Steven Beller, _Vienna and the Jews: A
Cultural History_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

[2]. Two recent German-language works include Elisabeth Malleier,
_Jüdische Frauen in Wien, 1816-1938_ (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2003); and
Charlotte Kohn, ed., _Luftfrauen: Der Mythos einer jüdischen
Frauenidentität_,_ _BiografiA, vol. 2 (Vienna: Präsens Verlag,
2006).

[3]. "The number of Jews who were painters was relatively small, at
least around 1900," according to Beller. Beller, _Vienna and the
Jews_, 26, see also 219. While the numbers of male Jewish painters
may have been small, Jewish women comprised a significant minority,
as much as one-third, of female Austrian painters.

Citation: Megan Brandow-Faller. Review of Rose, Alison, _Jewish Women
in Fin de Siècle Vienna_. HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. November, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25176

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
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