disdain for this domestic Christian woman. Both she and the savage wife are depicted as entirely dependent on their husbands, unable to care for their children or to support them financially on their own. The two women are thus contrasted with the pious Jew’s Jewish wife: an independent, wise, and resourceful woman, who supports her children financially after the incarceration of their father, and who, even after losing her husband and children, continues to find solace in business and financial success. Interestingly, in a reversal of traditional gender roles, which is characteristic of the entire story, the Jewish woman’s economic prowess is also contrasted with the pious Jew’s financial ineptness.134
Significantly, this kind of resourceful widowhood was embraced by Glikl herself, who, in spite of losing her husband and three of her children, continued to run the family business on her own for many years. In fact, even though Glikl did eventually remarry, ten years after the death of her first husband, she was to view this decision as a woeful mistake. As she stresses in her memoirs, contrary to what could be expected, her dependence on a husband led not to financial relief but to ruin. Furthermore, after the death of her second husband, which left her with almost nothing of her former fortune, Glikl was forced to resort to a second kind of dependent widowhood, which she perceived as most deplorable—a widow in a multigenerational household, dependent on her children.135 The travails brought about by her second marriage are portrayed by Glikl as a form of divine punishment inflicted on her for her decision to become financially dependent on a husband: “The blessed lord laughed at my thoughts and plans, and had already long decided on my doom to repay me for my sins in relying on people. For I should not have thought of marrying again” (G. Tur., 500; G. Abr., 151).
In her memoirs, then, Glikl constructs an image of the ideal woman, or widow, as one who manages to uphold a respectable household after her husband’s demise, without resorting to dependence on others, such as her children or a second husband. In this sense, she presents an understanding of feminine virtue quite different from the sorts of chaste, maternal, or domestic virtue commonly ascribed to women in eighteenth-century novels, conduct books, and other writings.136 However, it appears that Glikl was not alone in pursuing this ideal. In fact, many of her contemporaries, both Jewish and Christian, appear to have shared this ideal of independence and made every effort “to be independent of material and financial intergender and/or intergenerational transfers.”137 Thus, for instance, in her reading of Eliza Haywood’s 1724 The Rash Resolve, Toni Bowers demonstrates how the author constructed “a vision of powerful, enabling, and independent motherhood.”138 Haywood confronts her readers with a single mother who succeeds in upholding a respectable household, notwithstanding the absence of her child’s father. When, however, toward the end of the tale, the absent father reappears, the heroine dies of shock and heartbreak. In both Haywood’s tale and Glikl’s memoirs, the appearance of a dominant male figure on the scene, in the form of an estranged father or a second husband, results in ruin.
Traces of early modern women’s ideal of independence are also found in other Jewish sources. Thus, for instance, an early seventeenth-century Jewish folktale tells of a Jewish woman who wished to remain single in order to continue her life as a businesswoman.139 Other writers commended their mothers, grandmothers, or other family women for managing to uphold their own after the deaths of their husbands. The aforementioned Bohemian memoirist, for instance, speaks highly of his grandmother, who “remained a widow with three sons and two little daughters [but] was an eshet ḥayil [a woman of valour], energetic, and clever and supported her family comfortably.”140
As Glikl’s memoirs demonstrate, the ideal of resourceful widowhood also required that widows remain independent of their children. And indeed, a second rare text by an early modern Ashkenazi woman bears further witness to parents’ reluctance to turn to the aid of their children. I am referring to the sixteenth-century women’s guidebook Meneket Rivkah, written by Rivkah bat Meir Tiktiner. Tiktiner relates a story about an old widower of some means who decides to move into his son’s household. At first, the relationship between the man and his son and daughter-in-law is friendly, and yet the moment the old man bequeaths his wealth to his son, the young couple begins to abuse him, to the extent that he is resorted to sleeping naked under the stairwell and eating scraps off the kitchen table.141 The story is repeated in other sixteenth-and seventeenth-century sources, and is just one of a wide variety of stories which express the exceeding suspicion of parents toward the gratefulness and reliability of their children. Similar doubts are frequently voiced in Glikl’s memoirs, for instance in the story of the infanticidal bird, which ends with the following moral: “[We see] the difference: how parents toil for their children and with what great devotion they raise them, while they, if they had the trouble with their parents as their parents do with them, would soon tire” (G. Tur., 32; G. Abr. 9).142
Glikl’s solution to the problem of the unreliability of children and spouses is to offer her readers an image of a woman who is independent and resourceful, and does not rely on the aid of others for her happiness or success. But Glikl does more than justify the authority and adequacy of the independent women/widow as head of the household. In presenting her ideal woman as “no good at housework,” and contrasting her sophistication with the image of the simple Christian housewife, Glikl demonstrates an intriguing disdain for domesticity, not only in widowhood but also in marriage. We find hints of this attitude, which values professional success over domestic bliss, throughout Glikl’s autobiographical text. As explained by Turniansky: “Though Glikl is constantly busy with pregnancies and labor [during the period described in the memoirs], these are not the only subject of her written memoirs, nor are they their central theme.”143 In fact, the greater part of the memoirs deals with matters relating to Glikl’s professional life as a businesswoman: her financial success and the subsequent financial travails brought about by her second husband; her business partners and their deeds and misdeeds and other such matters. Throughout the memoirs, Glikl prides herself on her financial conduct, both during her first husband’s lifetime and even more so after his demise. Other women are also commended by Glikl, not only for their piety, modesty, or chastity, but also for their success as businesswomen. Thus, for example, one woman is presented as “a chaste and resourceful woman, very well versed in trade [who] practically kept her family afloat” (G. Tur., 62). Another woman is described as “unprecedented in her integrity and piety, and especially in her being an eshet ḥayil who managed her own trade and provided for her husband and children bountifully” (G. Tur., 312). For Glikl, then, a woman’s worth is a function of her resourcefulness, wit, and intelligence, and not, as may perhaps be expected, of her domestic virtues.
This understanding of woman as financial agent differs greatly from later representations of true womanhood as being achieved through maternity and domesticity, but it appears to have been shared, at least to some extent, by Glikl’s contemporaries. The anonymous Bohemian memoirist commends his mother who “showed her ability in supporting the family by her own efforts, and started to manufacture brandy out of oats.… This was hard labor, but she succeeded. In the meantime my father pursued his studies.”144 One eighteenth-century responsum (a rabbinic reply to a question concerning Jewish law) by the great Jewish scholar Yeḥezkel Landau went as far as to accuse married women who refrained from work of being a cause of their husbands’ deaths. Landau explained: “A woman who is confined to her home, and is kept by her husband, her luck is such that she causes her husbands’ deaths, so that she may live in poverty. And this holds true for regular women. But in a women who is an eshet ḥayil we find that even after the deaths of her husbands she succeeds in commerce and manages to support herself adequately, and so it clear that her luck does not cause her poverty, and therefore her husbands’ deaths are not caused by her.”145 Rabbi Jacob Emden, for his part, praised his first wife, who worked in loans, and berated his second wife, who, though a descendant of a family of merchants, was financially incompetent.146 As befitting a rabbi of his stature, Emden’s primary concern was that the financial incompetence of his second wife would not allow him to leave matters of business to her and concentrate on his studies. Significantly, Emden’s view differs from Glikl’s in that, for him, a woman’s financial ability is to be commended only to the extent that it enables her husband to devote himself to his religious duties.147 However, as shown by historian