Female, Jewish, and Educated presents a collective biography of Jewish women who attended universities in Germany or Austria before the Nazi era. To what extent could middle-class Jewish women in the early decades of the twentieth century combine family and careers, or did they feel compelled to choose between the two? What impact did anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and gender discrimination, on the other, having in shaping the personal and professional choices of educated Jewish women? Harriet Freidenreich analyses the lives of 460 Central European Jewish university women, focusing on their family backgrounds, university experiences, professional careers, and decisions about marriage and children, as well as the ways in which their education helped mould their personal, political, feminist and Jewish identities. Freidenreich evaluates the role of discrimination and anti-Semitism in shaping the professional careers of female Jewish teachers, academics, physicians, and lawyers in the four decades preceding world War II and assesses the effects of Nazism, the Holocaust, and emigration on the lives of the younger cohort of the group of women studied.
The life stories of the women profiled reveal the courage, character, and resourcefulness with which they confronted challenges still faced by women today.