Throughout the twentieth century, American Jewish women have made history, challenging the political and cultural constraints facing women in every aspect of American life. From suffrage to birth control, from trade unionism to civil rights and feminism, from education to literature and the arts, Jewish women have been in the vanguard, leading key social movements and shaping cultural consciousness.

Interweaving social history with biographical portraits, The Journey Home profiles women ranging from Emma Goldman, Sophie Tucker, and Golda Meir to Bella Abzug, Gertrude Stein and Wendy Wasserstein, examining the political conflicts and personal tensions that have animated their lives as they made their mark on American society.

Fourteen essays challenge traditional notions of Jewish female identity presented in mass media images, films, narrative, and stories by portraying the American Jewish woman not only as subject but as shaper of American popular culture. Sometimes internalizing negative presentations but more often "talking back" to them, Jewish women created alternative images that became tools of rebellion, subverting and dismantling such stereotypes as the "Yiddishe Mama," the Jewish Mother, and the Jewish American Princess. Over the course of the century - and particularly as a consequence of feminism - Jewish female novelists, screenwriters, dramatists, entertainers, and grass-roots feminists were able to create new possibilities for the expression of Jewish women's voices.

A collection of twentieth-century stories by Jewish women, featuring some of the best short story writers in American fiction. From Anzia Yezierska and Edna Ferber to Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, these writers reveal a rich, vital, and innovative tradition.

This pathbreaking anthology is an illuminating look at the lives of ten influential twentieth-century American women and at the challenges experienced by the women who have written about them. Exploring the frequently complicated dialogue between writer and subject, the contributors uncover tools appropriate to writing women's biography and reveal, in often riveting accounts, how feminist scholarship led them to approach women's lives in unconventional ways.

Winner of the Susan Koppelman Award, 1993, Association of Popular Culture and American Culture

A biography of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of the Bank Street College of Education, writer, teacher, social reformer, and one of the first women to attempt to combine a consuming career with marriage and motherhood. Mitchell's personal struggles clarify the experiences of a lost generation of feminist endeavors.

Seventeen essays view education as a process of learning and teaching in its broadest sense, beginning with the self and reaching out collaboratively to others in society. They probe the roles of women as active agents of change, as conservators actively resisting change, or as objects and victims of change.