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The Drama of 1916: The American Jewish Community, Birth Control, and Two Yiddish Plays1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2013
Abstract
Jewish women played important roles in many aspects of the birth control movement, as activists, consumers, and distributors. Yet just as the legal system was not yet sure what to make of contraception, neither was the American Jewish community. While hundreds of thousands of Jewish women clearly limited their family size, both ambivalence toward birth control and pockets of outright opposition also persisted. This essay briefly examines the developments in the birth control movement during the pivotal year of 1916 in which Jewish women played important roles. The essay then turns to analysis of two Yiddish plays on the topic written that year. Neither play has ever before been translated in full. Because the Yiddish theater was a central American Jewish cultural institution, the production of plays on the subject of birth control in 1916 dramatized the importance of the issue within the American Jewish community. Though the plays quite possibly loom larger in retrospect than they did at the time and are notable more for content than literary merit, they nonetheless provide a critical lens through which to explore the complex relationship between American Jewry and the birth control movement.
- Type
- Essays
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 502 - 534
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2013
Footnotes
1
I would like to thank the members of the Philadelphia-area American Jewish Studies reading group, Riv-Ellen Prell, and the anonymous Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era readers for their comments on various versions of this article. I am especially grateful to Naomi S. Cohen for the beautifully rendered translations of the Yiddish plays, which survive in difficult-to-decipher handwritten manuscript form. Many thanks also to David M. Schlitt for research assistance. This research was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Birth Control or Race Suicide and A Woman's Duty in Birth Control translated by Naomi S. Cohen. All other Yiddish translations by the author unless otherwise noted.
References
2 “Mrs. Sanger Draws Crowd,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1916.
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4 On American Jewish women's birth control activism in the context of their engagement with the women's movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Klapper, Melissa R., Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (New York, 2013), ch. 2, 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 There is evidence of at least one other 1916 Yiddish play on the subject as well. See the poster for Di Groyse Frage (The Great Question) by Zalmen Libin, which premiered at Philadelphia's Arch Street Theater on September 14, 1916, in Sandrow, Nahma, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (New York, 1977), 153Google Scholar.
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35 Sandrow, Vagabond Stars, 110–114.
36 Ibid., 286.
37 Advertisement for BC, Forverts, July 16, 1916.
38 References are to the page numbers in the original manuscripts, which have been preserved in Cohen's translations.
39 It is also possible that the sin referred to here involves condom use, the form of contraception most widely available prior to the establishment of a network of birth control clinics a few years later, all of which dispensed diaphragms. Birth control activists promoted diaphragms at least in part because they allowed women to gain control of contraception. Within the Jewish community, diaphragms may also have been more palatable because they circumvented Biblical strictures against men “spilling their seed” (Genesis 38: 9–10), which made condom use extremely problematic in Jewish legal terms and taboo even to many non-observant Jews.
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48 “In Der Yidisher Teater-Velt” (“In the Yiddish Theater World”), Forverts, July 22, 1916.
49 “A Yarid Ibern Yidishn Teater Oyf der Provints” (“Much Ado About Yiddish Theater in the Provinces”), Varheit, July 22, 1916, trans. David M. Schlitt. See also note 5 above.
50 “A Dramaturg fun Yidishe Dules” (“A Playwright of Yiddish Poverty”), Varheit, July 26, 1916, trans. David M. Schlitt.
51 “Samuel B. Grossman,” 1:523, and “Harry Kalmanowitz,” 4:3,691 in Zylbercweig, Zalmen, Leksikon fun Yidishn Teater (Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre) (New York, 1931)Google Scholar.
52 The plays do not, for example, appear on the lists of Yiddish Art Theatre or Artef or Folksbeine Yiddish Theater productions in Lifson, The Yiddish Theatre in America, 567–94.
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54 First Report of the Detroit Mothers Clinic for Family Regulation, ca. 1928, folder 8, box 6, Margaret Sanger Research Bureau Records, MS 320, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
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