Jewish women have played a significant role in all aspects of the American feminist movement. Whether agitating for the reform of marriage and property laws, woman suffrage, birth control, improved conditions for working women, the Equal Rights Amendment, or a myriad of other causes aimed at fostering equal opportunities for women, they lent their support to and often pioneered campaigns for women’s rights.

Yet the relationship between Jewish women and feminism has been complex. Despite the energetic contributions of individual Jewish women and of Jewish women’s groups to these movements, not all Jewish women’s organizations enthusiastically supported the goals of equality or enhanced political rights for women, at least initially. Nor did American feminists acknowledge the substantial contributions of Jewish women to their cause. Feminists, moreover, only rarely spoke out in defense of Jews when they were under attack in the United States or abroad; women’s rights proponents and their allies themselves frequently espoused antisemitic, anti-immigrant or anti-Zionist views. Notwithstanding feminists’ failures to publicly support or acknowledge Jewish issues, Jewish women have been among the most passionate supporters of feminist goals throughout the long and continuing struggle for women’s rights.

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Yet the failure to credit Jews for their significant contributions to the women’s rights movement, and the glossing over of antisemitism within the movement itself, was more than a political tactic. In the late nineteenth century, the women’s rights movement was characterized by deeply held anti-Judaic and antisemitic attitudes. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the key theoretician of the woman’s movement and longtime president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, introduced a resolution at the 1885 convention of the association that noted that “dogmas incorporated in the religious creeds derived from Judaism” were “contrary to the law of God as revealed in nature and the precepts of Christ.” The measure did not pass, largely because members did not want to address the issues of women’s role in religion, but it indicated the lack of concern for Jewish women’s sensibilities as well as the social acceptability of anti-Jewish and antisemitic perspectives.

Anna Howard Shaw, who followed Stanton as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (formed when Stanton’s organization merged with the rival American Woman Suffrage Association), also exhibited anti-Jewish attitudes, despite her personal friendship with Jewish suffragists. One of the first ordained female ministers, Shaw contrasted what she considered to be Judaism’s negative attitudes toward women with Christianity’s positive ones.

The anti-Jewish strain of Christian-based feminist thought emerged most clearly in the first volume of Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. This 1895 tract is laden with criticism of the Jewish God, the Jewish people (“devious,” “petty,” and “immoral”) and the Pentateuch itself (“a long painful record of war, corruption, rapine, and lust”). In the work, Stanton identified “contempt for women” as a “Jewish dispensation”—a “serpent all through history” that reproduced itself in all subsequent religions. “As long as the Pentateuch is read and accepted as the Word of God,” she wrote, a “proper respect for all womankind” would be impossible. In 1896, NAWSA voted to reject Stanton’s Bible, declaring itself a “nonsectarian” association. Although the vote signaled a decline in anti-Jewish feeling among second-generation reformers, many of whom feared alienating potential Jewish members, the Christian orientation of the movement continued, as did some members’ antisemitism.

Carrie Chapman Catt, third president of NAWSA, did not exhibit the anti-Jewish, anti–Old Testament hostility of her predecessors, but she nonetheless alienated some Jewish women with her anti-immigrant rhetoric and the claim that the “ignorant foreign vote” was a grave threat to democracy. Catt’s activism on behalf of the international woman suffrage movement also worked against her identification with issues of concern to Jews, whom she viewed as a relatively narrow nationality-based interest group.

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While suffrage, labor reforms, and reproductive rights were issues pursued by individuals rather than by Jewish women’s organizations, the campaign against enforced prostitution (“white slavery”) became a major focus of the efforts of the National Council of Jewish Women. NCJW’s model programs involved rescue homes, friendly visitors, employment guidance, and a worldwide campaign of prevention. Its success in this work gave the organization an entrée into all levels of the secular women’s movement.

After the achievement of woman suffrage in 1920, the NCJW joined other women’s groups to form the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a nonpartisan group that pressed for legislation on women’s issues. In the 1920s, the NCJW found itself in disagreement with mainstream feminists about the Cable Act, presented to President Harding for signing in 1922 by Maud Wood Park, who had led the clubwomen’s lobbying effort for the bill. The act declared that foreign-born women could no longer become citizens by marriage to naturalized or American-born men but had to take out citizenship papers in their own right. While American feminists rejoiced at the acknowledgment that every woman was an independent human being, NCJW leaders feared that the Cable Act would separate women from their husbands and children and bar them from receiving mothers’ pensions or obtaining public employment, health benefits, and other services. They also had grave misgivings about whether immigrant women would have equal access to citizenship training with immigrant men. Secular feminists’ failure to denounce German antisemitism in the 1930s, and their minimal support of the NCJW’s program of rescuing refugees from fascism, reflected the continuing gap between the Jewish women’s groups and the broader feminist movement.

Like many other women’s groups, the NCJW opposed the proposed Equal Rights Amendment from its inception in 1923 through the 1960s. The council believed that the vote already guaranteed equality to middle-class women and preferred protective legislation as a means of alleviating the burdens of their working-class sisters. Throughout its existence, the NCJW had been firm in its support of the gendered division of functions, and despite many of its own members’ public activism, remained convinced of the primacy of the domestic realm for women. In 1962, the council somewhat reluctantly joined President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 Commission on the Status of Women, fearing that the commission’s true purpose was to promote the ERA. Yet participation in the commission gave the NCJW broad insights into the pervasive problems of sex discrimination in employment, legal inequalities, and lack of child care, among other issues. By 1970, the NCJW had become an enthusiastic supporter of the ERA and other reforms to promote women’s equality.

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Born Bettye Goldstein in 1921, Friedan enjoyed a relatively happy childhood in Peoria, but as a member of one of the few Jewish families in the city, she eventually experienced a great deal of social ostracism. Although her father owned the finest jewelry store in the community—the “Tiffany’s of the Midwest,” according to Friedan—people who associated with him in business would not associate with him elsewhere. The family was not allowed into the Peoria country club, for which her mother blamed her husband rather than the community. Friedan herself, the only Jewish girl in her high school, was not invited to join the sorority. She grew up feeling “marginal,” with “the sense of being an outsider, apart, special, not like the others.” “Ever since I was a little girl,” she acknowledged, “I remember my father telling me that I had a passion for justice. But I think it was really a passion against injustice which originated from my feelings of the injustice of antisemitism.” In combination with her later outrage at women’s false contentment in their domestic roles, Friedan’s experience of childhood “marginality” influenced her to write The Feminine Mystique.

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Despite the contributions of Jewish women to the movement, second-wave feminism, like the earlier women’s rights movement, did not generally acknowledge the contributions of Jewish participants. In certain venues, including the first two United Nations International Women’s Decade Conferences, feminism came into painful conflict with antisemitism and anti-Zionism. In 1975, at the first International Women’s conference in Mexico City, third-world delegates attacked Israeli representatives as “racists” and inserted a plank calling for the elimination of Zionism “along with colonialism and apartheid” into the conference’s final declaration. Although Bella Abzug, chairing the United States delegation, organized congresswomen and other women leaders, Jews and non-Jews, to lobby the UN General Assembly to reject the Declaration of Mexico, her efforts proved unavailing. Abzug believed that the resolution of the conference thus helped set the stage for the adoption of the General Assembly resolution the following year declaring that “Zionism is racism.”

Although Jewish women hoped that there would not be a repetition of the blatant anti-Zionism at the second UN Women’s Conference, which took place five years later in Copenhagen, “Copenhagen was even worse,” Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote, with “Jewish women of every nationality … isolated, excoriated, and tyrannized,” not only by third-world delegates but by their American co-nationals. Two years after Copenhagen, Pogrebin wrote an eleven-page article on antisemitism in the women’s movement for Ms. Citing “antisemitism and sexism” as the “twin oppressions” of women, the article described the prevalence of antisemitism on the radical left as well as the political right, within the black community, and among Christian feminists who blamed Jewish monotheism for the extinction of goddess cults and the death of Jesus. In 1985, the third and largest UN Women's Conference took place in Nairobi. According to many Jewish attendees, antisemitism was used less as a political tool at the Nairobi events than at the two prior UN Women's conferences.

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