Science

Esther Rome

A coauthor of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a classic women’s resource book, Esther Rome came of age with the onset of the modern feminist movement and was a leader in shaping modern American notions of self-help and advocacy for women’s physical and mental health.

Judith Resnik

The second female American astronaut to travel into space, Judith Resnik is remembered for her death in the tragic Challenger explosion. Her career accomplishments include biomedical engineering with the National Institutes of Health, working for NASA as a specialist in spacecraft engineering, and operated a solar sail during her first space flight with the shuttle Discovery.

Lydia Rapoport

Lydia Rapoport was a social worker, professor, caseworker, and advocate of social change. Her contributions to crisis theory transformed how social workers and therapists handle crisis intervention.

Phoebe Yates Levy Pember

Phoebe Yates Levy Pember was a passionate Confederate and managed a hospital through the Civil War. Her memoir offers a window into daily life for acculturated Southern Jews and Jewish women in Christian high society in the South.

Anna Kaplan in the First Graduating Class of Hadassah School of Nursing, 1921

Nursing as a Female Profession in Palestine (1918-1948)

Nursing was a well-respected profession for Jewish women in Palestine, until doctors and nurses clashed about the proper level of education for nurses in the 1930s. Despite the challenges women faced in the medical field, they contributed greatly during times of war and violence before the founding of Israel.

Nursing in the United States

Early in the twentieth century, trained nursing was not considered a suitable profession for a young Jewish woman. Jewish quotas on admission to nursing school were maintained well into the twentieth century, and nursing education continued be characterized by Christian underpinnings as late as the 1950s, stunting the prominence of Jewish nurses.

Barbara Myerhoff

An award-winning anthropologist and feminist scholar, Barbara Myerhoff emphasized the importance of storytelling and studying one’s own community. Myerhoff’s work pioneered the study of elderly Jews and highlighted the role of women in religion, which had been previously neglected by the scholarly world.

Florence Zacks Melton

A philanthropist and visionary innovator and a lay leader for over fifty years, Florence Zacks Melton helped build institutions that improved the quality and broadened the scope of Jewish education throughout North America.

Paula E. Hyman

Distinguished historian Paula Hyman was engaged deeply in Jewish feminism and wrote extensively on the history of Jewish women in an effort to integrate their experience into the Jewish historical narrative. A role model for many, she challenged sacrosanct beliefs and stereotypes with vigor and knowledge and left behind a myriad of scholarly contributions and a profound vision for Jewish women.

Anna Braude Heller

A brilliant pediatrician used to working in difficult circumstances, Anna Braude Heller struggled to keep children’s hospitals open through both World War I and World War II, even as the Nazis occupied Poland and placed Jews in ghettos. Although she evaded deportation in 1943, she was killed shortly afterwards when German soldiers raided the Warsaw Ghetto.

Our Bodies Ourselves Collective circa 1970s

Health Activism, American Feminist

American women have been the “perennial health care reformers.” Women’s health activism has often coincided with other social reform movements. Since the late 1960s, Jewish women have helped create and sustain the women’s health movement through decades of substantial social, political, medical, and technological change.

Ruth Mosko Handler

Best known as the inventor of the Barbie doll, Ruth Mosko Handler combined her marketing genius with her husband Elliot Handler’s creative designs to form the toy company Mattel, Inc., in 1939. Her battles with cancer later in her career led her to create the company Nearly Me, which developed prosthetics for breast cancer survivors.

March 11, 2009

Women crunch numbers, too. Like Barbara Liskov.

Jordan Namerow

Think you can't survive without your computer? The Internet? The blogosphere? Me too. It's easy for me (and for many of us, I think) to forget about the brains, number crunching, and rigorous research that enable us to post blog entries, read the NY Times online, or shop for shoes with just the click of a mouse.

Topics: Technology

Margarete Zuelzer

Margarete Zuelzer’s life epitomizes both the successes and frustrations of women scientists in academia in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the first generation of women scientists in Germany and also one of the first to receive an appointment in a ministry of the Weimar Republic, she was forced to flee from Nazi Germany. Unable to find refuge, she was murdered in 1943.

Mayana Zatz

Mayana Zatz is one of the pioneers of human and medical genetics in Brazil. In 1981 she founded the Brazilian Muscular Dystrophy Association, to help the poorest population of patients. She has worked on the Zika congenital syndrome and on cancer and was very involved with the Brazilian Congress’s approval of a bill allowing human embryonic stem cell research.

Nurses and Doctors Treat a Child in the Ghetto, Bedzin, Poland

Women's Health in the Ghettos of Eastern Europe

Women in the ghettos of Eastern Europe often outnumbered men, but within ghetto populations, women generally had lower mortality rates than men, perhaps due to their ability to adapt to their surroundings and use of public health services. However, women suffered uniquely; many women did not menstruate, suffered from symptoms caused by hormone imbalances, and endured prohibitions against childbirth.

Martha Wollstein

Responding to the public health crisis of the early twentieth century with a declaration that the current generation of women physicians had “entered societies and laboratories for the benefit of all,” Martha Wollstein had an exemplary career in pathology and the experimental study of childhood diseases.

Nelly Wolffheim

Nelly Wolffheim spent her career developing and teaching a kindergarten curriculum based around Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic framework. She taught this curriculum, which encouraged children to express their sexual desires, to Jewish women teachers in Berlin. After escaping Germany for England in 1939, Wolffheim struggled to continue her research but began publishing her work again after the war.

Charlotte Wolff

A pioneering German-Jewish lesbian and feminist physician, Charlotte Wolff became interested in sexology, psychotherapy, and chirology while working as a physician in Berlin’s working-class neighborhoods. Soon after the Nazis came to power she fled to France and then to England, where she began researching and writing books on chirology. In the 1960s she turned her research to homosexuality and published a landmark study on lesbianism.

Ruth Westheimer

Ruth Westheimer, who lost her entire family in the Holocaust, served in the Haganah, and received her Ed.D. from Columbia University, was an unlikely candidate for the role of host of a cheerful talk show about sex. However, her celebration of human sexuality, derived from Orthodox Judaism, made her an influential and highly successful proponent of joyful, responsible sex from the 1980s into the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Erez Israel

Rosa Welt-Straus

Rosa Welt-Straus was a women’s rights activist who was active in the struggle for women’s suffrage in both New York and Mandatory Palestine. She helped form the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in New York and later became head of the Union of Hebrew Women in Palestine, which she went on to represent internationally.

Vera Weizmann

A Zionist and a physician, Vera Weizmann was a founding member of the WIZO. She accompanied and assisted her husband Chaim, the president of the Zionist Federation of Britain and first president of Israel, as he negotiated the founding of a Jewish state.

Gladys Davidson Weinberg, Athens ca. 1945