Madison — Usually when I speak on women’s issues, I stick to the subject and say little about myself as a person. Yet, inevitably, the first question following my speech goes something like: “You are obviously a dedicated feminist activist. How did you get this way?”
After many years of waving off the question with avoidance statements, I finally decided this was not fair to the questioner or to my audience. So I did some soul-searching and came up with the best answer I could muster: “Feminists are made, not born.”
Before I continue, we should have a mutual understanding of what a feminist is. According to the dictionary, a feminist is a person who believes in the equality of women — socially, politically, economically and in all ways that matter. In other words, women and men are not the same, but they are equal in value as human beings.
Please recognize that this has nothing to do with hating men, failing to shave one’s legs or burning one’s bra. I never engaged in any of these symbolic actions, although I will confess to having marched in the streets, carried banners and placards and shouted demanding phrases like: “What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? Now!”
You might guess a feminist was in the making from the day I was born. My parents named me Gene, but spelled it in the masculine style. No doubt I was supposed to have been a boy.
Boys are preferred in Jewish families for two reasons: They carry on the family name and they are allowed to say the Mourner’s Kaddish for their departed loved ones.
The first person to stimulate my feminism was a rabbi. The year was 1935. I was about 9 years old and attending religious school on Sunday mornings.
One Sunday, I learned in class that in order to perform a religious ceremony, there must be a quorum of worshippers known as a minyan, comprising at least ten men.
After class, I went to the rabbi’s office and asked, “Why don’t they count women in a minyan? I want to be a rabbi when I grow up. How can I be a rabbi if they won’t even count me in a minyan?”
“You can’t,” he said. “Women cannot be rabbis in the synagogue, but every woman can be a rabbi in her own home, in her own way.”
It was an easy answer to give a child, but I could see that my mother, who practiced her Judaism by lighting Sabbath candles every Friday evening, did not consider herself the equal of the rabbi in the synagogue. Nor did she think of herself as equal to my father, who prayed in the Conservative synagogue every Friday evening and Saturday morning.
My second early memory of women and Judaism was the time I attended High Holiday services with my Orthodox grandmother. We sat with all the other women and girls in the balcony, screened from view of the men by a thick wooden latticework. I could see my grandfather at the bimah, reading from the Torah.
“Grandma, I want to go downstairs and pray with Grandpa,” I said. “You cannot do that,” Grandma replied. “Women and girls cannot go there.” It was the first time I heard the phrases that have haunted me all my life: You cannot do that. You cannot go there.
When I asked her why, she said, “Because men are weak. Men have difficulty concentrating on their prayers when women are nearby to distract them.”
“But, Grandma,” I protested, “if men are the weak ones, why are women being punished? Let the men sit in the balcony, then we women can do our praying downstairs.”
According to my father, from there things went from worse to “worser.” My younger brother may have been the one to have a bar mitzvah ceremony, but I knew the Hebrew chants better than he did.
I would read the biblical stories and prayers extolling our God, the Father, and all the other biblical fathers, and I would ask: “Where were the mothers? If man is created in God’s image, in whose image is woman created? Perhaps it was man who created God in man’s image? What were the mothers doing while the forefathers were making all the rules?”
Eventually I could no longer endure reading the biblical stories and the synagogue prayers because of their exclusion of women, or their treatment of women as sub-human creatures. I stopped going to services. I continued to have a Jewish identity, but I became a secular, or non-observant, Jew.
In my later years, I have returned to my religious roots. Today I count myself among the growing ranks of Reconstructionist Jews. Like other New Age women, I have rediscovered my own spirituality.
But the women’s movement has taught me a significant lesson. It is possible to change laws, attitudes, behavior and institutions by working steadfastly on a vision of what a non-sexist, non-racist, fully democratic society would be like.
I am now helping to change the Jewish religious and community institutions so I can comfortably practice my Judaism and my feminism at the same time.
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