When the women´s suffrage movement began in the last decades of the nineteenth century it was the beginning of the emancipation. In England Jewish women were both active in the suffrage movement – even as suffragettes - and formed the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage. And after World War I, when many European women gained their rights to vote, the English-Jewish women started a Women´s International Zionist Organization; WIZO. In Germany and Czechoslovakia too. But not in Sweden. Why? Jewesses in Stockholm are hard to discover among the Swedish women´s suffrage movement and they waited until the early 1930´s before organizing in a Jewish Women´s club; Judiska Kvinnoklubben (JKK) and a couple of years later in WIZO. My hypothesis is that Jewish women were made invisible in both the suffrage movement and the Jewish community. The subordination of women in Jewish community and their exclusion from religious leadership in congregational life was reflected by the patriarchal structures in Jewish community - as well in Swedish society - and patriarchal theology. It constructed the identity of Jewish women as primarily wives and mothers with the special mitzva of charity, instead of having leadership positions. But the women´s suffrage challenged that. The aim of this study is to analyze in what way Jewish women in Stockholm were involved in the Swedish suffrage movement and what importance it had for their future organizing (1931-1936). To achieve this, I use a method of content analysis with a gender perspective and a theory of social constructionism with an intersectional perspective. The result shows that there is a connection between the two female leader figures (in JKK and WIZO) and the suffrage movement. And by examining the context of how JKK and WIZO were established the analysis shows that Jewish women in Stockholm were inspired by how the suffrage movement was organized, when they began their own Jewish organizing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-475685 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | von Knorring, Petra |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Religionshistoria |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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