Jewish women remembering their bodies: A feminist ethnography in Toledo, Ohio.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the lives of fifty-four Jewish women and their memories of sexuality and fertility between the 1920s and 1940s. Presented as an intergenerational conversation among Jewish women living in Toledo, Ohio, this dissertation presents Jewish women as historical subjects breaking a history of silences around sex and the Jewish body. While growing up, informants described being kept in the dark about their bodies and sexuality. Informants did not understand what was happening the first time they experienced menstruation and were slapped on the cheeks by their mothers. The resulting shock and confusion initiated Jewish women into a pattern of silence and shame over sexuality and its expression. During adolescence, daughters understood without being explicitly told to guard their reputations. Informants described the culture of staring at bulging stomachs at quickly arranged weddings and the gossip around Jewish women who conceived too close to their wedding night. The silence and shame surrounding sexuality resulted in a lack of information and understanding about their body, negatively impacting informants' sexual and reproductive lives. With little understanding of their body, informants who married were largely underwhelmed by their sexual relationships, portraying them as nothing more than a day's work. Also, with no knowledge as to how their menstrual cycles affected their ability to conceive, infertile informants had no choice but to place tremendous trust in the medical community in hopes of conceiving. Doctors, however, thrusted the blame for infertility back on the women: women's bodies were the problem. Informants experiencing infertility ultimately believed that their bodies had failed them and reconciled that childlessness was their fate. Other informants were determined to control their fertility by having fewer children than their parents, both to improve their own quality of life, and to conform to more modern American values. Many viewed their own parent's lack of control over their fertility with disdain, and both mothers and daughters were embarrassed to be pregnant alongside one another. However, even with the availability of contraception, informants struggled with unwanted pregnancies, although, unlike their mothers, they generally did not choose to have abortions.