Abstract
‘One of the most corrosive assumptions of mainstream history is that it is only public events and lives which are important and meaningful,’ the historian Megan Doolittle has observed.¹ Indeed, Jewish women’s exclusion from the public domains of religious and civil life has been reflected in their near absence in the master narratives of the east European Jewish past. In his monumentalHistory of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Simon Dubnow was content to note that not a ‘single woman [attained] literary fame among the Jews of Poland and Lithuania’.² Moreover, attempts to highlight women’s achievements (as students, workers,