The summer of her seventeenth birthday found Jennie Franklin enjoying a merry whirlwind of social activities with her circle of friends in Chicago. But on August 23, 1890, Jennie marked the day itself by solemnly writing in her diary, “It is high time for me to definitely shape my career and awaken to the duties of a woman.” Some of the “duties of a woman” seemed obvious to a middle-class adolescent Jewish girl at the turn of the twentieth century, and Jennie dutifully fulfilled them. She graduated from high school, helped out in the faltering family business, frequented public lectures,...

On a spring day in 1911, suffragists in New York enjoyed an entertaining break from their serious but often frustrating activism. Prominent women dressed in the fashions of decades past presented earlier arguments for and against women’s enfranchisement. One notable speaker, wearing a hoop skirt in style fifty years ago, took an anti-suffrage position as befit her old-fashioned lack of enlightenment. This tall, elegant woman was Maud Nathan, whom the audience recognized as one of the most renowned activists in the United States and abroad. The satire was strengthened by the fact that everyone in the audience surely knew that...

In January 1917, a woman described by aNew York Timesreporter as “poorly clad” joined nearly a hundred others in applauding the lawyer Jonah Goldstein during his defense of Ethel Byrne, on trial for her role in the pathbreaking birth control clinic her sister Margaret Sanger had opened in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the past October. Goldstein argued that women did not seek to eliminate childbearing but to make motherhood voluntary and within women’s control. Thirty-five-year-old Rose Heiman Halpern, with six children from ages sixteen months to ten years and a husband who earned seventeen dollars a week, did not have...

In 1924, the National Council of Jewish Women’s (NCJW) national president rebuked Minneapolis section president Fanny Brin for attending a Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) meeting in Washington, D.C. Brin, also the national chair of NCJW’s Committee on Peace and Arbitration, responded that she had gone as an active WILPF member rather than in any official NCJW capacity. She and a growing number of other NCJW members firmly believed NCJW should in fact affiliate with WILPF in order to demonstrate Jewish women’s serious commitment to peace.² She saw no contradiction between her leadership roles in Jewish and...

In April 1929, the police raided the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB) in New York, then under Dr. Hannah Mayer Stone’s direction. An anonymous tip had resulted in an undercover sting operation. Posing as a patient, Mary McNamara, a policewoman, gave a family and medical history, underwent a physical exam, and was prescribed a diaphragm and shown how to use it. The “patient” returned to the clinic for her follow-up appointment with Stone and then came back a few days later with a team that confiscated medical supplies and patient records. Stone and four other doctors and nurses were...

In 1937, Rebecca Hourwich Reyher joined the “Flying Caravan” of delegates sent to South America by the People’s Mandate Committee (PMC). The purpose of this delegation was to arouse sentiment for a petition demanding that governments renounce war and to secure ratification of treaties approved at the Inter-American Court for the Maintenance of Peace that had met in Buenos Aires the previous December. There was a great deal of publicity for the PMC delegation, greeted everywhere with shouts of “Viva la Paz!” During the Rio de Janeiro stop, Reyher and the other delegates addressed the Women’s Club and called on...

When Fanny Brin rose from her seat of honor at the Speakers’ Table and stepped up to the podium at the closing session of the Woman’s Centennial Congress in November 1940, she stood there as a representative of American women. Her longtime colleague and friend Carrie Chapman Catt had convened the Woman’s Centennial Congress to assess “how far women have progressed in the past century and how today they may best continue this forward movement.” Hundreds of women, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, Pearl Buck, and foreign dignitaries, convened at the Hotel Commodore in New York to hear reports on...