Unsung Jewish Feminists in the U.K.

Intrepid Pioneers, the second book by Isabelle Seddon second book, reads like a roster of women who would have made great guests at Lilith salon—from the grandes dames of 19th century British Jewry, to women who were born in the charity homes those aristocratic ladies had founded and funded.

Seddon’s eight chapters focus on the professions and arenas of public life in which women, challenging deep-seated religious and gender discrimination, influenced both the local and national scene in the U.K.: campaigners, “agony aunts” [advice columnists on this side of the pond], politicians, media figures, lawyers, doctors, scientists and religious figures.

As you might expect, the first Jewish “feminists” in Great Britain came from the community’s moneyed elite. The earliest figures Seddon mentions were actively volunteering back in the 1600s. Taking advantage of their own social and economic status, these women began to take a serious interest in providing education for the less privileged in the Jewish community.

Seddon fast forwards to the early 1800s, when middle- and upper-class girls were usually educated at home or in private schools; poor ones had to be lucky to attend a trade school that prepared them to become domestic servants. The book highlights mid-19th-century female leaders like Lady Louise Rothschild and her peers, who established the first independent Jewish women’s philanthropic associations. Rather than promoting individual acts of benevolence, these groups developed an organizational approach to assisting the indigent, fostering independence through thrift and self-help.

In 1885, Constance Rothschild Battersea founded the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, which worked closely with Christian groups to combat “white slavery”—the trafficking of women for the purpose of sex. Meanwhile, Lady Louisa Goldsmid and Fanny Hertz played a prominent part in the movement for women’s education, a movement that faced gender barriers for another hundred years and more; for example, women were not allowed to graduate as full members of Cambridge University until 1948, when the phrase “women scientists” was still considered a contradiction in terms.

Each section’s introduction addresses the historic and social climate in which its “pioneering women”functioned, as Seddon traces the changing status of women in the general and the Jewish communities. A number of these pieces, such as Seddon’s extensive notes on the “35’s,” the grass-roots women’s movement to free Soviet Jewry, sometimes get bogged down in details; like much of the book, they would have benefitted from fastidious editing. However, they provide important background on the often double-barreled barriers that her heroines faced in virtually every generation.

Besides detailing their manifold accomplishments, Seddon discusses at length each woman’s relationships—frequently conflicted and/or ambiguous—with her Jewish background, her outsider identity.

Seddon gives pride of place to what she calls the “campaigners.” Unlike earlier Jewish activists, most of whom came to prominence thanks to their family connections, the Jewish women who became involved in the UK’s feminist movement in the 1890–1914 period were largely from poor or middle-class backgrounds, the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. Among other things, they established the Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage (JLWS), the world’s only Jewish women’s organization devoted exclusively to earning women’s right to vote in the nation and in the synagogue.

Sometimes, American Jewish women got there first, like in the birth of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. According to recent Nobel Prize winner Dr. Claudia Goldin, the 1970s in particular were a “revolutionary” period in the U.S.A., when women began to marry later, making major strides in higher education and in the labor market. This revolution came to the U.K. later, and less pervasively. Nevertheless, this book will open eyes on both sides of the Atlantic to how many of their Jewish foremothers and sisters in Britain blazed the way in virtually every profession. It is especially fascinating to see how many of them parlayed their expertise into media prominence in print, on TV, or online.

Between the lines, Intrepid Pioneers traces the evolution and assimilation of Britain’s Jewish community. While the vast majority of the women featured here credited the Jewish values and environment of their youth for their success in the public arena, most rejected their parents’ version of Jewishness, in some cases blaming the sense of “otherness” they almost invariably experienced.

Emily Maitlis, for example, BBC’s glamorous news presenter known for “her brilliant demolition of Prince Andrew,” was brought up “culturally Jewish” in the small Jewish community of Sheffield, where she attended a local public school before attending Cambridge.

She continues to maintain close ties to Judaism while married to a Catholic who was brought up hunting, shooting, and playing polo. Maitlis declares, “I don’t hide my Judaism. I don’t shout it…I get more misogyny than antisemitism.” At the same time, she admits that she finds it hard to deal with her Judaism and feels guilty that she’s not bringing up her sons “to be practicing Jewish boys.”

Jewish values and tradition, otherness, guilt, and pride, superimposed with gender and class discrimination—these might well summarize Intrepid Pioneers’ insights into Britain’s Jewish history in the last 150 years or so. Although it is a very well-deserved and perhaps overdue celebration of super-achieving women who climbed over, through, and beyond barriers, one can’t help but wonder whether this book may at some point be considered a kind of eulogy for the Jewish communities from which its heroes sprang.

For now, however, it is an inspirational and engrossing read for those on both sides of the Atlantic—and a good reason to look forward to its forthcoming sequel on Jewish women in the arts in Britain, Creating A Storm, which will be released in January, 2025.

Barbara Gingold, a founding mother of Lilith, is a wordsmith, photographer, and garden designer in Jerusalem.