From the Editor
Taking the microphone, the woman asked, “Don’t you think feminism’s work has been done?” She went on. “Women are treated so much better on the job than we used to be, and equal pay is pretty much a reality everywhere, so why continue to pit women and men against one another?”
Whoosh! I’d just finished a talk at a Jewish women’s group, and the pointed questions came from one of the attendees. (I’ll pause here and tell you that sometimes when I get a challenging question that feels a little bit contrarian, as this one did, I like to give the room a chance to hold the situation, and let people in the audience respond first. And so it happened.) A thirtysomething woman jumped right in. “I feel much less safe than my mother did!” We have plenty of reasons to feel concerned as Jews in this fraught moment, but she was talking about feeling unsafe as a woman. “Since Roe was knocked down I worry all the time over losing control over my own body. Even my ability to make medical choices!” And she went on to remind everyone present, as their coffee grew cold at their luncheon tables, about how #MeToo allegations come up anew just about every week, how exploited some women feel at work, especially in lower-wage jobs, but also in many professions.
As the insults and slurs against women candidates and leaders made abundantly clear this election season in the U.S. (I write this in the weeks before the election), we have considerable work ahead of us. Contrary to the aspirational attitude of that first questioner at the mic, I don’t at all feel the work of feminism is over, nor that it was complete a generation or two ago, and that now we can stop talking about misogyny as an issue. Feminism is not now nor has it ever been about pitting women against men, of course, but about making sure that gender equality and wage parity and equality and economic fairness and bodily autonomy and reproductive justice are guaranteed by law and enforced by trustworthy legislators and courts.
Attitudes, as so many of us know from recent fraught conversations, can be harder to change than laws. Which is why we’ve foregrounded in these pages two articles that shine light on mid-twentieth-century bias against women thinkers in the academy and writers in the rarified atmosphere on the New York (mostly Jewish) intellectual scene. Familiar prejudices are revisited here—women as sex objects, women as triflingly shallow intellects, women whose work is less worthy of being read than that of their male counterparts. These insulting biases seem so familiar, even to readers who weren’t alive in the 1960s and 1970s, because they have yet to be expunged. High school students in advanced literature classes are still assigned far fewer women writers than male writers. And so it still goes in many fields. And although the Jewish women confronting arch-sexist Norman Mailer with wit and outrage at a notorious Town Hall event those many decades ago (see “Write Like a Man,” page 12), the prejudices still feel familiar in 2024. You’ll see the original raised fist inside a women’s symbol used as a visual reference point in the two pieces here on recent literary history. The image is used because the anger that inspired it still fuels discussions today.
On our cover you see Rachel Goldberg-Polin in a personal moment, not at a microphone as she has had to be so frequently this past year. For all these months she has shown her feelings of anguish and anger without being swept under by either. She has shown us how to get through this world in the face of horror and grief, and despite the agony of watching decisions by others affect the fate of her beloved son. Hersh, as you know, was abducted, taken hostage, and killed by Hamas as rescue was near. Lilith is bringing you again (see page 5) the extraordinary poem Rachel Goldberg-Polin wrote, with words that turn her heart also to the feelings of mothers in Gaza. May we leave behind what bitterness of the past year we can part from, and may we all know more sweetness in the months of 5785 that lie ahead.
