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Sacrificing the Career or the Family? Orthodox Jewish Women between Secular Work and the Sacred Home

Author(s): Longman, Chia

Date: 2008

Topics: Main Topic: Other, Haredi / Strictly Orthodox Jews, Jewish Women, Work, Interviews, Jewish Community

Abstract: This article addresses the question of women’s agency in traditionalistreligion, through a study of self-narratives by women in the Orthodox Jewishcommunity of Antwerp, Belgium. Women who study or work outside the bound-aries of their community were interviewed about their experiences in negotiatinggender ideologies by moving in and between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ spacesof higher education, work and home. Various subject positions emerged in termsof either rejecting, separating or reconciling dominant community norms regard-ing women’s proper role with personal trajectories of self-realization and individ-ual autonomy. On the one hand, the results confirm the possibility of women’sagency within religious-traditionalist settings and in that sense subscribe to somerecent feminist theoretical challenges to secularism. However, it is argued that theyounger generation faces more restrictions in negotiating religious and seculargender-role expectations in the Antwerp context. Their prospects depend on thedynamic between global fundamentalist tendencies and local liberal state policiesof multicultural accommodation.