East European Jewish Women in Their Quest for a Dowry in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture The Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship Admission: Free Watch the video

Late nineteenth-century East European Jewry witnessed how various modernizing forces affected the most intimate spheres of Jewish life – family, sexuality, and household – and reconfigured women’s roles. Scholars have conventionally associated modernization with a shift from earlier and arranged unions toward later romantic marriages. Indeed, Jewish women increasingly attended secular high schools and universities, engaged in political, social, and cultural endeavors, took up gainful employment, and migrated. Yet, the economic reality dictated the marriage market for the masses of Jewish women from the working poor, turning marriage into a financial tool to improve woman’s fate.

This talk by Aleksandra Jakubczak will illuminate the link between the changing economy and Jewish courtship and marriage by situating it within the broader context of Jewish women’s responses to the promise of modernization on the one hand and the economic challenges accompanying it on the other. The increasing economic hardship faced by East European Jews at the turn of the century pushed Jewish women into the labor market and migratory routes. However, for some women, gainful employment and mobility did not necessarily mean emancipation from the traditional Jewish structures that had shaped their lives. Drawing on Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish newspapers, brochures, court cases, and police reports, this lecture will show how East European Jewish women used their gainful employment, including in the sex industry, and migration to strike a good marriage deal and not to live independent lives.

About the Speaker

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. Since 2022, she has worked as a chief historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and, in 2023, she received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled (Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, between 1870 and 1939, looked at Jewish women selling and organizing sex to examine how Eastern European Jewish women experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration. Her research has been supported by YIVO, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Israeli Council for Higher Education, American Academy for Jewish Research, among others. She was the 2022-2023 recipient of the The Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship at the YIVO Institute. In the academic year 2023-2024, she is affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University, where she works on a monograph based on her dissertation.