Sandra Myers
Wayward Women

Sandra Myers - Wayward Women

- Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining me. Hope everybody’s well, and I hope you enjoyed today’s presentation. We try to lighten things up a little bit. I know that Trudy and the rest of my colleagues have been concentrating quite heavily on what’s been going on around the world. So this is a little bit more dilettante perhaps, shall we say. Basically, I’m going to speak about wayward women. You can see in front of you the statue of Licoricia of Westminster. I don’t know how many of who you have heard of, Winchester, how many of you have heard of her, but I will come on to speak about her as we progress. So the idea of wayward women really is one of the biblical view from the idea of Adam and Eve. Basically that Eve was wayward. She led Adam astray. He was expelled from the Garden of Eden and et cetera, et cetera. I’m going to use it in quite a different way today. I’m looking at wayward as women who have defied convention, basically, that have gone against the mainstream, that have made their own mark on our society. Now, I’m going to look at four ladies starting from the 17th century, and if I have time, I’ll come up until the 21st century, 20th, 21st century. So the presence and contribution of women to history. Generally, women have either been marginalised, overlooked, or even totally erased. And one of the ladies about whom I should be speaking was very instrumental in the suffragette and the anti abolitionist movement in America who was virtually totally erased from the movement, and I’ll tell you why when I get to it. So if any of you have read Jane Austen, in her “Northanger Abbey,” Henry Tilney, who is the pastor, he says to Catherine Morland, his wife, “Oh yes, I’m fond of history,” and she replies, “Oh, I wish I were to, I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me, the quarrels of popes and kings with wars or pestilence in every page.”

Here’s the crunch line. “The men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all. It’s very tiresome.” So I must imagine that that probably reflects Jane Austen’s own view of the lack of history of women. So why have we got the dominance of male perspective in the values and history writing? A long time, obviously, for a long time, history has been written by men, for men and about men. And I apologise to any men who are listening, I’m not a feminist, but this is actually the reality. And those women who were important in history were often seen, you know, the queens, the warriors, the activists, were often portrayed as exceptions. Also, historically, there has been lack of opportunity for women in education and public life. Until the beginning of the 20th century most women, not all, most women faced legal, they faced social, they faced cultural barriers that prevented them from receiving little formal education, prevented them from owning property, prevented them from voting, holding public office, or in actual fact, pursuing careers, effectively limiting their ability to participate in public life. And added to that, compounding this, the female literacy rate in many parts of the world was considerably lower than that of men’s. It’s well worth reading the life story of Maryanne Evans. She had little formal education after she was 16. You may all know her a little bit more as George Eliot, the author, authoress, in actual fact, she was a Victorian English poet, she was a journalist, and she was a translator. And why she chose the name of George Eliot?

Well, two reasons probably. First of all, she believed that the stereotype of female writing was lighthearted and just limited to romance. And she wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. She had written as a journalist, she’d done scientific reviews. She was an exceedingly bright woman, notwithstanding her education had been limited. She was also, of course, in a rather, not probably acceptable liaison with a man at that time, because he was already married to another woman and she actually lived with him. So I also think perhaps she wanted to shield her own private life from public scrutiny. So where do we go..? Excuse me, sorry. Jewish women were faced with all of the above, and much of it compounded by Jewish law and culture. So we really had a double whammy, so to speak, because the mainstay of Jewish life was the Torah, which was the intellectual inheritance denied to women historically. Jewish women have historically faced discrimination and oppression within their own communities as well as the wider society. The Jewish law based on the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic tradition, has assigned women different roles and obligations from men. Not to say that they were inferior, but very different. And in fact, the men’s mourning prayer, if any of you understand and have read this, they say, they thank the Lord for not having made them a woman. You can interpret that in whichever way you want to. Would it be a sort of male chauvinistic way, or would it mean that it would allow them to devote their attentions to studying and the Torah without the digression of women and children and keeping the home? So, you can take that whichever way you want.

It’s very much the latter, that seems to have been the modern interpretation, but we don’t know what the idea was before that. Also, women have historically lacked recognition and appreciation in their achievements and diversity to various parts of history, to science, to politics, to social justice, to education. And I think they’ve been very undervalued by historians who’ve mostly focused on male figures. I mean, Rosalyn Franklin, for example, is a current, sort of modern prime example who was instrumental in discovering DNA and she was totally written out of the recognition because her two partners, Watson and Crick both received the Nobel Prize for their work. Although sadly, of course, Rosalind had already passed away at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer. This was in 1958. Historically, women participated in all aspects of, I’m talking about in ancient times, in Hellenistic times, but I’m coming up into mediaeval times, which is why this picture of Licoricia of Winchester is on the screen. Now, who was she? She was active around 1234. She was the daughter of Isaac. She was widowed very young, left with three sons and a daughter. She was by the standards of those days, highly educated. And she was an English Jewish money lender. She was possibly and probably the most important Jewish woman in mediaeval England. She operated openly at court. It was Henry III who was the king at that time. And she was very well thought of, very honestly thought of. Her first husband… I’m sorry, her second husband was David of Oxford, who she married in 1242, and he was one of the richest Jews in England at the time. His death duties, three quarters of his death duties, which were appropriated by the crown, actually went to the building of a chapel in Westminster Abbey.

So every time, for those of you who live in the UK, or for those of you who visit the UK, when you visit Westminster Abbey, we built it, not the women physically, but the Jewish money went to building the chapel in Westminster Abbey. She was murdered, very sadly, in 1277, she was found stabbed, possibly during a robbery, together with her maid. Nobody was ever charged with her murder, and her riches went to the crown. This statue was erected in February, 2022 in Winchester, and in fact, our current king, then-Prince Charles was supposed to unveil it, but in actual fact, he had COVID at the time, so he didn’t actually go. So if anybody is interested in reading a little bit more about the Jewish women who had power in mediaeval England as money lenders, there are a few books that have been written, and I would be very happy to provide you with the book list subsequently, which I will give to either to Lauren or to Judy, and I’m sure it would be circulated. So talking about widows, the widow, the concept of a widow, obviously, was not an anomaly. Historical records and the response to literature from Northern Europe of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries provide other examples of self-sufficient and active widows. There are also records of poor widows, but to a much lesser extent. Through marriage, mediaeval women could and did engage in business dealings. And widows relative to the percentage of the adult female population were the most active female group in finance and money lending of that time. Being a widow, and I will come onto this, actually freed a lot of women from their obligations, because Jewish women, and to a large extent Christian women, were under the control of their fathers, and when they were married, they were under the control of their husbands.

So widows were neither under the control of their father, nor under the control of their husband. So they were no longer subject to their authority and very much free agents. So this brings me very nicely onto my first subject, my first lady. This is a lady by the name of Gluckel of Hameln. Her dates are up there. Now, this isn’t actually a photograph of Gluckel, not a portrait of her, but actually of her great-granddaughter, Bertha Pappenheim who is dressed in the clothes of the day of Gluckel. I’m sure a lot of you in America particularly would’ve heard of Bertha Pappenheim. She was extremely well known, and I will come on and speak about her just very briefly. Why Gluckel was unique? She actually wrote her memoirs. They consisted of seven books, which she started to write when she was widowed. Her husband died in 16, I think, 1689, something like that. And a few years later, she began writing her memoirs, which were in fact and have become an incomparable social and historical document, and one of the greatest literary achievements of Ashkenazi prose in Yiddish or Hebrew, at least until the close of the 18th century. It’s the only known pre-modern Yiddish memoirs written by a woman. Now, why did she start to write it, and what did she include in it? She started to write it by her own admission because she was terribly lonely. Her mental state was very low. She was very lonely at night. So she decided to write this for her children, of which she actually had 14, I think 12 survived until adulthood and six weren’t married by the time her husband passed away.

So she was faced with the prospect of finding them not only husbands, but, but finding dowries as well. These diaries are incredibly detailed, and I would thoroughly recommend anybody, if you have the time, obviously, in the inclination to read the book, because it is absolutely breathtaking. In her observations, she meticulously describes a record of her life, events that occurred in the local Jewish communities, and not only in her own community, but she travelled outside of Germany. As I say, she was born in Hameln, although she wouldn’t have been known as Gluckel of Hameln at that time. She would’ve been known as Gluckel, the daughter of her father, because that was how the women were known then. She travelled… Let me get back, okay. She was, as I said, totally unique. She was an equal and active partner in all her husband’s business decisions. Now, I don’t know how many of us or you could actually say that. He mostly traded in jewellery and precious stones. Not much money trading, but he travelled to the fairs all around Europe, which was the fashion of the day. And that’s where the Jews, of course, all had their contacts because there were Jews in every corner of Europe at these fairs, and most of them knew each other, some intermarried, some were parts of their families. She reveals that her husband took business advice from no one but her. I think that was probably right, and no one else did anything, he didn’t do any business transactions without her knowledge. Her role, apart from bringing up her 14 children and I said, one died just after birth, I think one child died when she was about three. She interviewed agents who worked for her husband. She considered potential business partners.

She drew up the partnership agreements. She kept the business accounts and all this at the same time as rearing her children, educating them, and looking for suitable marriage partners as well as, as I said before, dowries for her children. Her husband died heavily in debt, although they were wealthy people. And after her year of mourning, she had cleared all these debts. She’d sold, she auctioned his possessions, she cleared her debts, and her life returned to normal, although as a widow, and she took over control of his family business. Her father… Now, this wasn’t unusual for women of her social standing and of her place of birth. Middle European and German women especially worked very often alongside their husbands. In fact, her mother had worked and her grandmother had worked, which probably was 50 or 60 years before, which is quite contrary to what one would’ve thought would be the norm. Her father was a successful diamond trader and also a parnas, a leader in the Jewish community. Her mother was also involved in her father’s business, as I said. And her grandmother, who was Mate , was widowed by the plague in 1638. Once again, a widow. So she was fairly independent. She was fairly wealthy. She was, in fact, robbed of her husband’s jewels and his gold chains. But she started a business making gold and silver, making lace from gold and silver thread, which became very profitable. She employed people, and that was how she made her living. Gluckel talks throughout, each of her seven books has a different title, and I really would urge you to read it. I’m not going into the content of all of the books, but I’ll give you just a little bit of a feel of the beginning. She had a very brief childhood, a very brief girlhood, but she was unique in that her father, she received both a secular and a religious education.

Now, one doesn’t know how far this went, but to give her any sort of education as a girl, in that time of her family, I think she had six or seven brothers and sisters, was quite modern, quite far seen by her father. He clearly was a very important man. She was very proud to say that he was one of the first Jews that was allowed to resettle in Hamburg when previously the Jews had been expelled to Altona in 1650. I think it’s now part of Greater Hamburg, but I think it was quite suburban at that time. She was betrothed to her husband when she was 12 years old, so her girlhood didn’t last very long. He was 14 when they were betrothed, although they didn’t marry until two years later. That wasn’t unusual because it gave Orthodox Jewish parents the opportunity to find a partner for their daughters and sons that was to their liking. It also gave the young bride and groom opportunity to produce many children. Gluckel and Hayyim did their fair due. They had 14. And I expect to survive 14 childbirths in that time you must have been a pretty strong person. Also, of course, they were guided through their first few years of marriage by their in-laws and then by their parents. For the first year of marriage, she lived with her husband’s parents, and for the second year of her marriage, she lived with her own parents and actually had one of her children while her mother was still bearing children. The general Christian community at that time didn’t marry until they were 18, because most of the Christian assets of the Christian families were either in land or in businesses, shops and that sort of thing, which wasn’t easily transferable.

So how did her diaries survive when they were written in the 16? She wrote them for 30 years, pretty much until she died. She, unfortunately, did remarry, which was a complete disaster. He managed, the husband managed to lose all her money. He died not at a very… I think her first husband died when he was about 42, and her second husband died probably when he was in his late 40s. I presume that that wasn’t so unusual at that time. But she lived for another 30 years after her first husband died. So she lived into her 70s. So the original diaries were actually lost, but her eldest son had made a translation. He had made a copy of them, I’m sorry, he didn’t make a translation. He made a copy of her diaries, and that was used to create the first printed edition, which was entitled “Zikhroynes,” which is Yiddish for memoirs. It was edited by somebody by the name of David Kaufmann and published in 1896, which was a good, what, 170 years, probably, after she died, which is quite a long time. Her great-granddaughter, who I mentioned before, Bertha Pappenheim, also published the first German translation in 1910, which was republished in 1913, and that edition eventually became the basis, the first edition, translated by Martin Lowenthal in 1932 and in various subsequent editions. The memoirs were written in, what, I don’t, they weren’t written in modern Yiddish, they were written very much in the Yiddish style of mediaeval Germany, which was very much like Daitsch.

It was a mixture, obviously, of Hebrew, but it wasn’t modern, and it had to be re-translated and published. But I do seriously urge anybody who has any inclination to read it, because it’s just fascinating. She talks about the vicissitudes of her life. She talks about the difficulties of marrying her children to suitable partners. She talks about the wars. She talks about trading. Each book has a different theme, and it really has become the most important, the most important manuscript of her era that shows what life for, I won’t say normal people, of what women was like very much at that time. The other lady that I would like to speak about was somebody by the name of Ernestine Rose. I’m trying to do this in some sort of chronological… Can we have the picture of Ernestine Rose up? Okay. I’m trying to sort of do it a little bit in chronological order as we go through the years. I don’t know, I hope that many of our American listeners would’ve heard of Ernestine Rose. If they haven’t, I wouldn’t be surprised. She was born in Poland to a wealthy rabbi. We know nothing of her mother. We know she was the only child, and we know he educated her both in the Torah and in secular studies. There is a reference to the fact that her mother died when she was 16, but I’ll come on to say that, but we don’t know anything about the family. As I said, she was educated and she learned Hebrew. She very much questioned the justice of God when she was only five, and she actually said she’d already become a rebel by the time she was five, because she saw how her father, the rabbi, continuously fasted and didn’t know how a God could bring on such hardships to people.

She became an abolitionist. She became a woman suffragette, a suffragist, I think they call it. I don’t know what they called it then, but she started off, quite interestingly, she refused to marry the man her father had chosen for her. This put her in quite a lot of difficulty. She didn’t want, as I said, she didn’t want to marry him. When her mother died and she was 16, her mother left her money and the father wanted the dowry of the money to go to the man that he had chosen for her, whether she married him or not. And she actually took the case to court. She represented herself in court. I mean, you have to put her in the context of her time. It was actually quite a brave move by this lady. And she was obviously quite an extraordinary woman. She won her case. She didn’t have to marry him. And she actually left Poland and came West. She travelled firstly to Berlin, and then she went to Paris, then she came to England, and finally she went to New York where she began her political activities. By 1850, she was central to the women’s rights movement. She, as I said, she was very much anti-slavery. She was very much of free thought. But in the movement, she was the only foreigner, she was the only atheist, she became an atheist after she left, and she was the only Jew. So she wasn’t widely accepted as one of us, I would say, in that movement. But she was known as the queen of the platform. I’m going to go to . After her death, which was in 1892. She was completely forgotten, completely forgotten, written out of the civil rights, written out of the anti slavery, written out of the women’s rights movement because of her status as an immigrant.

It was said that she would come back into the fore in a hundred years time, which hopefully she has. And she began to have more recognition with the Black History Movement and the Civil Rights movements from the ‘60s and '70s. Now, what can I say about her? She was born in Poland, in the small town of Piotrkow Trybunalski, I can’t pronounce it, which historically had been the site of the Polish Supreme Court until it was partitioned in the early 19th century. Poland was divided up between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. But when she was born there, it was half Jewish and half Christian. The oppressive shtetl arose much later in the 19th century, leading to many of the Jews to immigrate to the United States. As I said, she was the only child of the rabbi, and all the Jewish papers from her city have been lost, so we don’t know her parents’ names, we don’t know their full names. But she liked to say, and this was her sort of byline, she was a rebel from the age of five. She was treated very much like a son, and as I said, she was taught Hebrew, she was taught the Torah by her father, which historically was forbidden to women, forbidden to girls. But by the time she was 12, she lost her faith in Judaism, although she continued to follow her practise. I mentioned that she didn’t want to marry the man that her father chose for her, and that really gave her very little opportunity to marry again, but she had to leave Poland. And she travelled, as I say, first to Berlin, which had a community of liberal Jews. She read in that time modern books instead of the Bible. And she encountered a lot of the Enlightenment principles. She then travelled to England and met somebody who she called her new father, which was a man by the name of Robert Owen.

He was already famous, although he was born into the lower middle classes, he became the owner of a textile factory. She was allowed to speak in public. She began her speaking career in public with him. And then eventually she met a man by the name of William Rose, who was a silversmith who she married. And together they immigrated to New York where she lived until 1869. Excuse me, sorry. By 18… Hold on, I’ve lost. Oh, they live there till 1869. Sorry. By 1850, she had already become fundamental and integral to the early women’s rights movement, which had yearly conventions and attracted thousands of people. In these circles, as well as anti-slavery and free thought communities, she remained absolutely unique. She was the only foreigner, as a native born Americans were called, and the only atheist, as I said before. And of course, as I said, again, the only Jew. But despite all of this, she actually helped lead the new movement. She travelled from Maine, she travelled to South Carolina, and she travelled from the East Coast to Iowa sponsoring women’s rights. The outbreak of Civil War in America made things a little bit more difficult for her, and eventually, she and her husband returned to England. She died a while later, and she was in fact buried alongside her husband in Highgate Cemetery. So I don’t know how many of you know Highgate Cemetery, but it’s quite an impressive place to visit, if you are coming as a tourist, it’s where Karl Marx is buried and a lot of of very well known people. I said she was written out of history. She was forgotten totally.

In 1927, an article in the Jewish four declared that few had ever heard of her. She didn’t fit into any part of history for the first half of the 20th century. And in 1871, I mentioned the Boston investigator had predicted correctly that Ernestine Rose would be appreciated in about 100 years. The women’s and Black History movement, actually contributed to restoring her life and her prominence. She actually embodied female equality in both her everyday life and her political activism. She was a real true pioneer. She works for the ideas of racial equality, feminism, free thought, and internationalism. Although some of her causes succeeded, many remained to be won. People still fight over the right of free though, but an interesting, in 2012, I don’t know how relevant this would be now, 54% of Americans said they would vote for an atheist. As Rose herself said, “The world moves.” So I hoped you enjoyed that. I don’t how I’m going for time. I’ve still got some time. Okay. Can I have the next slide, please? Okay. This is a lady by the name of Hinde Bergner. I don’t know how many people have heard of her. She sadly perished as the date would give you some indication in the Holocaust. But her importance, once again, was that she wrote her diaries, rather like Anne Frank’s, which became world famous for different reasons and by different ways. She wrote about life in the Shtetl in Poland. She was born into a Hasidic family, and she was, I think, perhaps listeners from Israel may know her, or even listeners from Canada may know her, because she was the mother of one very well known artist who sadly committed suicide in his 20s, and also of a poet who settled in Canada eventually by the name of, , what was he? Hold on. Can’t remember what his surname was. I’m sure you would probably know him better than I did.

Okay. The artist, her son, who was the artist, his last name was Harari. He committed suicide at the age of 21. And then another son that she had, Zechariah was born in 1893. He changed his name to Melech Ravitch. He was the co-founder and the most prestigious Yiddish literary journal writer in Canada. He finished up living in Canada. Two of them went to live in Australia, and she and her husband remained in Radym for most of their lives. She and her husband were materially comfort, but he was forced to try his hand at different businesses. He was a liquor distiller. He had grain production type setting in order to remain financially solvent. During the Second World War, they spent three years in Vienna as refugees. But her husband died in 1939. She was left alone and she fled across the border to the Soviet Union. But after the German attack in 1941, her fate grew desperate. And in her last plea to her sons for help, she, it was delivered through the Red Cross, she said, “I am very weak. It will soon be too late.” And she’s believed to have died in the German extermination camp of Belzec in 1942. She too wrote her memoirs, which I mentioned, and if you have the time or inclination, you can read these. And it was really worth reading because it gives a totally different perspective on life, prosperous life, fairly prosperous life in Poland at that time, and the troubles that presented themselves to her. I’m going to go, and I’m sorry I rushed through that one, but I wanted to go onto my last lady who is probably a complete favourite of mine.

Her name is, as you can see, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Now, if you look at the photograph, you’ll see, I don’t know, what will you see? What do you see? Certainly not the person that, reflective of the land that she came from. She was a German Jewish refugee. She came to England with her family in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. Her father was Marcus Prawer who was a Polish Jewish lawyer. He fled to Germany from Poland to escape conscription, and he became a judge in Germany. But obviously, when the plight of Jews became desperate in Germany, they fled, and they fled. They fled to England. They came to the UK and they actually lived in Hendon. And why I chosen her, for two reasons. First of all, I went to the same school as her. She preceded me by many years. But she went to Hendon County, which at that time was one of the best state grammar schools in the UK. There were about a half a dozen up and down England and Hendon County, if I don’t mind saying so myself, was one of the best. She came, she spoke no English when she arrived. She came with her brother. Now, why am I picking her? Those of you who know their movies will know that she spent a large part of her career in collaboration with Merchant Ivory. She wrote several screenplays. She wrote several novels. She actually received two Oscars for “Heat and Dust,” and can’t remember what the other one was, I’ll tell you. Oh, “A Room with a View.” Oh, she wrote the screenplay for “A Room with a View,” “Howard’s End” and “The Remains of the Day.” She won an Academy Award for the best adapted screenplay for the movie of “A Room with a View.”

She studied after studying in Henman County, after studying English there, she went on and studied English literature at Queen Mary College in London. In 1951, she married Cyrus Jhabvala, who was an Indian architect, and she spent the rest of her life in India. And her observations of Indian life are so emotive in the screenplays and the movies that she wrote. But her collaboration with Merchant Ivory was world famous. So I hope that you know about her. Her father sadly couldn’t adapt to English life. And in 1948, just a few years after the end of the war, he committed suicide. Having learned that 40 of his close relatives had in the concentration camps, which must have been the most terrible blow for her. Her brother Walter, became professor of German studies at Oxford. So between the two of them, they left quite an amazing mark on our education system. She won the Booker Prize for her novel “Heath and Dust.” And then she wrote “The Place of Peace” in New York. They finally… Oh, she didn’t live the rest of her life in India. I’m sorry I’m incorrect. She actually moved to the United States permanently in the 1980s, and the couple lived on the East Coast until she passed away in 2013, her husband passed away the following year.

She wrote an autobiographical essay “Myself in India,” which she found the great animal of poverty and backwardness but really, she remained very ill at ease with the society and the general life there. But she just had such a wonderful insight into people’s emotions and feelings. And I feel sort of a little bit of reflected glory ‘cause I went to the same school. Bit silly, really. But if you want to know the list of her books, go onto the internet and you can find a list of her achievements. I’ll give you some of them. She wrote “Howards End.” She adapted the screenplay, I’m sorry. “Jefferson in Paris,” “Surviving Picasso,” “Jane Austen in Manhattan,” “Autobiography of a Princess.” She wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare’s “Wallah,” “The Guru,” “The Householder.” That was a screenplay written by from one of her own novels. And I think she was quite an amazing lady. You know, the German Jewish community going right back to Gluckel produced an almost irreplaceable genre of women who used their life experiences to, almost teach and sort of almost guide the future, whether that’s a little bit sort of romantic, I don’t know. Now the last little presentation I want to give you is a little bit of a dilettante one on my part, because this is what happens when women finally got their voice. And I’m going to talk to you just very briefly about The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902. Now, I don’t know if any of you know anything about that. It was instigated by three Jewish housewives in New York when the price of kosher meat rocketed by 100%. The average wage there, I think was $10 a month, it was very, very low. And suddenly the women couldn’t afford to buy kosher meat. So what did they do? They used their voices and they boycotted the butcher shops. They burnt some of the meat. They were really quite radical.

One of the women actually was a recent emigre from Europe who spoke virtually no English, but she still managed to do it. It started off with just a few women, and it finished up to 500 women who joined this boycott. They finally managed to get the price of kosher meat reduced, because at that time, the meat was all controlled by the robber barons. I think there were six or seven different productions of them and importers of them who controlled the prices. So the women decided that they couldn’t afford to buy kosher meat, and if they couldn’t afford to buy kosher meat, they wouldn’t buy meat at all, and neither would anybody else. So the protest started on the Lower East Side, and then it spread to the Jewish communities in Harlem. It spread to the Bronx, it spread to Brooklyn, Newark, New Jersey, Boston, Massachusetts. And eventually the uproar worked. By mid-June of two years later, the kosher meat price dropped to 13 cents a pound from 20 cents. Now, I don’t have any comparison, but you must imagine that was probably nearly half, and the crisis subsided.

The story has been lost for many, many years, but a writer by the name, a freelance journalist by the name of Seligman, I can’t remember… Oh, Scott Seligman actually has unearthed this story, which I think is wonderful. And if you see what Jewish women can do, when they eventually found their voice, it’s quite substantial. And in fact, here in the UK we had the 35’s who were instrumental in bringing out a lot of the Refuseniks from Russia back in the day, in the '60s and '70s. So I think that we’ve made a fair old contribution to society, and hopefully it will continue. And I thank everybody for your time. Thank you for listening. I hope I didn’t offend anybody with my feminist views, although I’m not a feminist, but I do believe that women have an equal say or should have an equal say. If anybody has any questions, I’d be happy to answer 'em as best I can. If not, have a nice evening.

Q&A and Comments:

• [Lauren] Sandra, we do have a few questions.

• Okay.

Q - [Lauren] The first, quite a few people were asking what you meant by your statement that you are not a feminist.

A - Okay. Not a feminist. That’s an interesting question. I think I am pretty much a traditional Jewish housewife. I still buy kosher meat. I still like to have my family for Friday night dinners and all the Jewish holidays. I have had a fair education. I don’t believe that women are in any way superior to men. I don’t mean that men are any way superior to women. I just think that we should all have equal opportunities and equal rights, and that’s what I see. I wouldn’t put women’s requirements particularly above anything that would be considered acceptable, put it that way. I wouldn’t burn my bra, as we used to do. I’m not one for demonstrating, although we did march with the Refuseniks. But I think that I’ve led too, not comfortable a life, I’ve led a life where I have been able to do pretty much what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve been educated, and I expect my children and my granddaughters, my daughters and my granddaughters to have the same advantages. I don’t see why being a feminist or not being a feminist should make any difference to that.

Q - [Lauren] There was a question about, what was the name of the memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln?

A - It was called… I got the book somewhere. It was just called “Gluckel of Hameln.” That’s what she called it. It was by her own name.

Q - [Lauren] And what was the Yiddish word for memoir that you mentioned?

A - Oh, okay. It was the zikhroynes. Shall I spell it in Yiddish or..? I’ll use English letters. It was Z-I-K-H-R-O-Y-N-E-S.

Q - [Lauren] Another question, does Pappenheim address the so-called cure by Freud/Breuer in her diaries?

A - Yes. Pappenheim. I haven’t read Pappenheim’s diaries, but she was known as Anne O. She was a subject of Breuer, yes. And very well researched. She was under the care, I think, of Freud at one time. She was quite a role model. She never married incidentally, but she believed in the universal motherhood to look after children. But she didn’t actually ever marry, but she had quite a serious, bad mental spell when she was under the care of Breuer, yes. I’m not a psychologist, so I honestly wouldn’t delve into those. But yes, she was known as Anna O, so she was quite well documented. Her life and her mental illness was quite well documented. Yeah.

Q - [Lauren] A couple of people asked how Gluckel was able to get a dowry for her children.

A - Oh, with great difficulty, very much with great difficulty. For her daughters, she used the money that her husband made. She was very affluent. She made money. She travelled all over. She could controlled his business until she married the second husband who managed to lose all her money. They worked, he sold his jewels, he sold his pearls. They travelled to all the fairs all around Europe, the Leipzig Fairs. And she was a very astute businesswoman. I mean, read her book. It’s absolutely fabulous. As I said, it comes in four parts, and it was meant as an ethical will more than anything else for her children, so they would know about her life, they would know about her parents’ life, they would know about her grandparents’ life, which is the reason. And she wrote it to alleviate her loneliness after her first husband died. But read the book. It’s absolutely fascinating.

Q - [Lauren] Another question was, was Hinde Bergner’s diary about life in the or before World War II?

A - No, it was before World War II. It was about her life in Poland with her husband and when her sons left. Her husband died in 1939. And it’s only assumed that from the date of her death that she died in the concentration camps, because there was no more record of her. But she wrote up until then. And I presume that her, either somebody kept her diaries or her sons had copies of it. She sent it to her sons. It was about life in Poland, you know, it was a prosperous life. The town that she grew up in had been the seat, not the seat of parliament, but the legal seat. It had been a very prosperous town. So it was basically about her own upbringing and her childhood and her education.

Q - [Lauren] Okay. There is another question. What is the Hebrew first name of Ernestine Rose?

A - Oh, gosh, I have no idea. But it wasn’t Ernestine. It wasn’t Ernestine. What was her Hebrew first name? I have no idea, to be honest. And I’m terribly sorry. I sincerely apologise, but she had, I think her second name was Esther, but it wouldn’t have been Earnestine because probably that was the anglicization of it. If I can find out, I’ll let you know when I give you the book list.

• [Lauren] Thank you. Well, many people have thanked you for the introduction to unusual and largely unknown women, and that’s it.

• Thank you. Thank you everybody for your attention. Have a good weekend and stay safe. And thank you, Lauren, for your help.