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Marriage or Profession? Marriage and Profession? Marriage Patterns Among Highly Successful Women of Jewish Descent and Other Women in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German-Speaking Central Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker Open the ORCID record for Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker [Opens in a new window]  and
Jason Ulysses Rose
Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker
Affiliation:
Indiana University, South Bend and Western Michigan University
Jason Ulysses Rose
Affiliation:
Indiana University, South Bend and Western Michigan University
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Abstract

This study analyzes the marriage patterns of five hundred highly successful women in modern German-speaking Central Europe. Among the women at the very top of their professions, women of Jewish descent were more likely than non-Jewish women to marry while they pursued their careers. The results of our quantitative study—67.6 percent of women of Jewish descent married versus 51.6 percent of non-Jewish women—provide a unique body of data that complements and contributes to other research that identifies distinctive aspects of Central European Jewish life patterns: the high number of Jewish women university students, the importance of women of Jewish descent in a number of fields, and Jewish families as early adopters of a modern family form with a small number of children and intensive investment in each child.

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Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 703 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association

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Footnotes

Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker would like to thank the undergraduate researchers who assisted in gathering data for this project, including Maddie Kindig, Brandon German, Abagail Hill, Nathan Fritz, Sarah Bull, Sydney Rohr, and her coauthor, Jason Rose, who began working on this project when he was an undergraduate at Indiana University, South Bend. In addition, she would like to thank Eric Kurlander, Elizabeth Drummond, and Heikki Lempa for stimulating ideas and conversations about how best to work with undergraduates in research projects, as well as Deborah Hertz and Lisa Silverman for sharing their knowledge about the history of central European Jewish women. Margaret Lavinia Anderson spurred a rethinking of the article that helped clarify important points and made comments on many specific aspects. The two peer-reviewers’ comments led to important changes. Finally, the author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Maureen Kennedy at the Indiana University, South Bend library as well as the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Leo Baeck Institute, Indiana University New Frontiers program (now renamed as the Indiana University Presidential Arts and Humanities Program), and the Indiana University, South Bend faculty summer fellowship program for financial support that made the research for this article possible.

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64 Dissertations by Aeleah Soine and Martina Cucchiara shed light on the work of these important and too often unheralded women. See Aeleah Soine, “From Nursing Sisters to a Sisterhood of Nurses: German Nurses and Transnational Professionalization, 1836–1918,” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2009); Martina Cucchiara, “‘Bitter Times’: Catholic Sisters in Hitler's Germany and under Allied Occupation, 1933–1949” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2011).