Debating Social Change and the Jewish Nation: The Polish-Jewish Weekly Ewa on Jewish Families and Birth Control (1928–1933)

The objectives of the debates on birth control and thus of the concepts of family planning had changed in East Central Europe after World War I as a result of the founding of nation states for the respective dominant national groups. The focus shifted to stabilizing the ethnic majority and strengthening it. But how did the minority societies react to this and, above all, to incidence of birth control in their respective national societies?

“Conceptualizing family planning” in a historical perspective, therefore, means examining in a highly concentrated way the interrelationship of changing family values, subjectivities, and notions of values and norms, ¹ since this concept focuses on the treatment of sexuality and reproduction as well as notions of family, femininity, and masculinity. Since such a “practice of the self” ² involves caring for oneself, the topic is said to have a mobilizing function for women in the sense of Health Feminism: through this, processes of female self-empowerment can be made visible. An analysis of these discourses also allows not only to recognize mutual influences and transfers, but also to work out the respective differentia specifica that resulted from the understanding of the family as the core of the (respective) nation. It is important to note that discussions about birth control and, accordingly, about a modern image of women and families, can be seen as a reflection of the reception and adaptation of transnational discourses and values, respectively. When family planning is considered as a transnational and transcultural conception of values and norms, numerous preferences emerge against the background of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies ³ and of national conflicts. A particular example of the national coloration of the transnationally effective discourses on birth control is the Polish-Jewish women's weekly Ewa. In the late 1920s, when a nationwide marriage and abortion law was already being negotiated under the conditions of an authoritarian regime in Poland, Ewa took up these debates in order to sketch a specific Polish-Jewish image of the family. The journal also embraced birth control as a national challenge, but did so under a Zionist banner. ⁴ These discourses thus reveal an underlying shift in norms and values.

Starting from the premise that conceptions of what families should look like (including the question whether or to what extent birth control should be practiced), were shaped by the need for national self-assertion in conflicting ethno-spaces such as were found in interwar Poland, I would like to focus this paper on a gap in the extensive research on birth control in Poland in the late 1920s compared to other states in East Central Europe and come to a revised evaluation of Ewa's influence. These works, as well as the studies on Ewa's particular role, are characterized by the fact that the discourses around birth control in that period have been analyzed mainly from the perspective of medical history and the history of ideas, ⁵ while the transcultural influences on discourses with a nationalizing goal and their influence on family images in multi-ethnic contexts have not been sufficiently explored.

As a methodological-conceptual impulse for my reflections, I see Antony Smith's considerations that ethno-spaces became “intrinsic part[s] of the character, history and destiny of the culture community, to be […] defended at all costs lest the personality of the ethnic or regional community be impugned.” ⁶ Taking them up in a constructivist sense, I understand “ethno-space” as a specific public space, an arena, for negotiating one's own national identities, in which different ethnic publics compete for attention and interpretive power. In such arenas, according to my basic hypothesis, particular images of women and families as well as norms and values were also negotiated. This means that the development of family concepts takes place in the form of a confrontation with one's own society and with other ones. In such a process, it is fundamentally necessary, on the one hand, to convey references to the commonalities and identity of the community and, on the other hand, to demand (democratically-motivated) female participation as well as a (left-wing) liberal right of choice. Hence, birth control debates revolved around women's (and their men's) self-determined approach to sexuality. Ultimately, the understanding of one's own right to decide about one's own body and thus about one's own reproductivity, also derives from these discourses. Therefore, according to another basic premise of my contribution, the understanding of the family as the smallest unit of the nation is a specific manifestation and building block of the particularly shaped “ethno-space.” Birth control (better: the enormous practices of birth control within all spheres of society) thus became a national challenge for all national groups. Within the respective ethno-spaces of the Polish Second Republic, the left-liberal intelligentsia as “an interpreter, par excellence” ⁷ played a significant pioneering role with regard to this topic, while also giving it national tints.

Ewa, as a weekly journal for the “intelligent woman” published by enlightened women from a small group of the Jewish intelligentsia, was a paradigmatic example of a socially constructed, specifically shaped ethno-space, in which ethnic-religious ideas were negotiated just as much as changes in moral concepts, and the norms and values resulting from political-social modernization. Ewa thus represented the attitudes of the progressive female Polish-Jewish intelligentsia. It advocated birth control in order to mobilize women, not only in an emancipative-feminist sense, but also in a national, Zionist sense. Its goal was thus to shape a specifically female identity and thereby to contribute to the formation of a modern Jewish nation in Poland. Building on a content analysis of Ewa's 1928–1933 volumes, I will pursue this thesis in three steps: in order to trace transfers and specific adaptations, I will first provide an introductory contextualization and embedding in the European and all-Polish debates, through which birth control as a topic was nationalized. Subsequently, I will show which ideal of family and woman Ewa conveyed, thereby outlining the incipient change of norms and values in the Polish-Jewish minority. Finally, as a specific expression of this change, birth control and related demands for an autonomous decision-making right on the part of women will be discussed, thereby illustrating in a special way this pioneering role and, at the same time, the transmission and adaptation of Western European-North Atlantic thought, and consequently, transnational transfers.

The Nationalization of Birth Control Debates Since 1900

Because “wilfully influencing fertility” ⁸ is one of the longest practiced interventions in terms of human biological processes, whether through contraception or abortion, one can find discourses and practices to influence it throughout history. What was new at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, was that birth control became increasingly medicalized and, above all, politicized, not least since the 1870s when the “quiet revolution” of demographic change became increasingly visible in European societies: ⁹ the emerging public discourses about it also resulted in bio-politically motivated interventions on the part of the state into the intimate sphere of couples, for instance through (penal) legislation. The discourses on the catchword “birth control” developed dynamically under the close mutual influence of social change, modernization, and secularization processes on the one hand, and technical-scientific innovations and transfer processes on the other, and always against the background of (emerging) various ideological attitudes and the women's movement in the Euro-Atlantic area since the last third of the nineteenth century. These processes also changed the image of family, so that increasingly the “bourgeois family” of the nineteenth century became a guiding concept for society as a whole. Research that followed Edward Shorter's seminal study ¹⁰ some 30 years ago has shown that birth control was practiced by broad sections of the population even before the European-wide debates on birth control began.

An important frame of reference for the discourses was the writing of Thomas Robert Malthus, ¹¹ which was promoted widespread throughout Europe. The physician George Drysdale had further developed these ideas into neo-Malthusianism and derived proposals for contraception. ¹² Thus, the writings based on the neo-Malthusian ideas emerged all over Europe and tried to find a “way out of poverty” and an “easing of the life of […] mothers.” ¹³ “Contraception” therefore, by the end of the nineteenth century, “was no longer merely part of a moral-moral discourse, but was at the center of a population-political debate conducted with verve and concerned with the preservation of wealth and the ability to defend oneself—that is, with power.” ¹⁴ Via reference to birth control, the relationship between family and nation was also reconfigured: ¹⁵ The family was presented as the core of the nation and thereby politicized. Already before World War I, a broad spectrum of corresponding attitudes had developed, varying cum grano salis from the dependence of the strength of the nation on the number of its members (and thus the number of children to be born) to a focus on the quality of the nation—the own nation was always the point of reference in debates about birth control. The stances oscillated thus between these two poles: representatives of the (monarchial) state emphasized that the number of children determined the strength of the nation, while the followers of neo-Malthusian and eugenicist attitudes considered the quality of the nation, its physical and mental health for crucial. The “privately practiced matter of course” ¹⁶ was, according to the statement of the social democratic eugenicist and social physician Alfred Grotjahn, thus already in 1914 “no longer a private matter, but a cultural, national and eugenic matter” ¹⁷ and hence a political matter. All discourses reflected the prevailing and changing social values and norms like no other publicly negotiated topic from private life, and can therefore be seen as an expression of mental modernization. As a result, women now felt empowered to position themselves publicly.

This trend to politicizing birth control was received in the multi-ethnic borderlands of the empires on the one hand by noticing the (translated) writings and activities of the representatives of the sexual reform movement that emerged in the German Empire after 1900, ¹⁸ and on the other hand by being affected by the respective population policy legislation and its consequences. The core messages in the political discourses on birth control were ultimately the same with regard to the various ethnic groups, but were nationally “colored” by the respective actors. In doing so, they focused on specific ways of changing understandings of morality, social norms, and order, contributing to specific concepts of one’s own nation, and creating a difference from other groups. ¹⁹

In divided Poland, these were initially the representatives of the moral reform ²⁰ (reforma obyczajowa) movement, who in their writings not only advocated the abolition of prostitution, but also propagated marital purity and therefore abstinence as a method of birth control. ²¹ With their writings, they created a specific public space of communication by interweaving these demands with Polish-national arguments and by prioritizing patriotism. The discourses on birth control thus created their own communication space. Here, the nation was negotiated through this specific focus.

The events of World War I, the subsequent establishment of nation states in East Central Europe that were de facto multi-ethnic, and the introduction of women's suffrage allowed the debates about birth control and thus about modern family images to fade into the background without meeting women's demands for the greatest possible emancipation. The catchword, the “new woman,” was one of the central concepts of European discourses on images of femininity and changing attitudes to sexuality after World War I. Tightly connected to the image of more independent women, but also to ideological streams, “conscious motherhood” bandied about almost everywhere in interwar Europe, since it was as a conceptual reflection of the changing relationship to birth control. The model and point of references were, on the one hand, the German sexual reform movement and the mass movement arising from its commitment, which was unparalleled throughout Europe and, on the other hand, the release of abortion for political reasons in the young Soviet Union. An important trigger for the discourses was the widespread publication of advice literature, whose central works, such as those of Theodoor Van Der Velde, ²² were translated into numerous European languages, including Polish and Yiddish in the 1930s.

In re-established Poland, however, the debates began comparatively late, namely toward the end of the 1920s, when a new marriage and criminal law unifying the various former partition territories was discussed. The abortion law was part of these legislative initiatives. Left-liberal circles of the intelligentsia brought the question of “conscious motherhood” to the fore in the debates about it. This occurred not least against the background of an economic and social crisis and the increasingly assertive authoritarianism of Sanacja rule under Józef Piłsudski. The Polish-Jewish women's weekly Ewa took up these debates from its perspective and usually linked them to current events, when, for example the physician Herman Rubinraut reported on the establishment of a counseling center from a eugenic perspective. ²³

Negotiating the New Jewish Women and Family

The Polish-language weekly Ewa was published by Paulina Appenszlakowa and Iza Wagmanowa in Warsaw between 1928 and 1933. Its publication was discontinued for financial reasons in the wake of the general Polish economic crisis in 1933. ²⁴ According to its self-representation, Ewa was the only Jewish women's magazine in that period. Ewa's development must be seen in relation to Nasz Przegląd (Our Review), which was published by Appenszlakowa's husband, Jakub Appenszlak. ²⁵ This very environment, which according to Chone Shmeruk can be characterized as part of a (transculturally shaped) polysystem ²⁶ and thus as a part of a modern trilingual culture (Yiddish as a mother tongue / mame loshn—Hebrew as the language of religious practice—Polish as the language of the majority society). This cultural environment developed its own approach to the (re)configuration and preservation of a Jewish identity in the new Polish state. ²⁷ Although the vast majority of Jews in interwar Poland still spoke Yiddish, ²⁸ the use of Polish demonstrated loyalty to the state, as Jerzy Tomaszawski stated in his seminal study on national minorities in the Second Republic, ²⁹ and can be interpreted at the same time as a demonstration of modernity and “sophistication.” Overall, the representatives of the Polish-Jewish orientation remained in a minority position within Polish Jewry. For this very reason, Ewa's intensive discussions of birth control and the future development of the Jewish family, which can be interpreted as social discourses of modernization, indicate that traditional family images and values were changing and being renegotiated, just as was the case with Jewish environments in Poland.

Conceived as a feminist weekly for Jewish women, Ewa represented overall emancipatory objectives and Zionist ³⁰ attitudes, reported mainly on the lives of Jewish women in Poland, Palestine, ³¹ and the European women's movements, ³² but also included commentaries on current issues of the Jews and especially Jewish women as well as the women's question in Poland. ³³ In addition to medical topics, ³⁴ the weekly also regularly reported on new fashion trends and reviewed mainly feminist literature such as the works of Sigrid Undset. ³⁵ What becomes clear here is a certain gendered “division of labor” in the commentaries and reports: it was primarily men such as Tadeusz-Boy-Żeleński and Herman Rubinraut who advocated birth control with medical “authority” and expertise, while the magazine's own female journalists ³⁶ endorsed socio-political activism and thus supported female self-empowerment to take a stand for oneself. Just as the Polish-Jewish press as a whole aimed at promoting building a homeland in Palestine and was, at the same time, an expression of Jewish Polishness (polskość), ³⁷ Ewa reflected this stance from a female perspective. Ewa thus formed a specific part of an ethno-space in which particularly female concerns were negotiated.

It was therefore important to Ewa above all to “take care of the education of mothers in order to awaken and use their strength and energy […] for the realization of the national, social and natural ideal.” ³⁸ The journal was thus concerned with sensitizing and mobilizing its readers for “national and social-feminist (społeczno-feministyczne) emancipation.” Paulina Appenszlakowa, for example, in her programmatic commentary in the first issue of Ewa, demanded that

Women must become accustomed to a life within the framework of societies, take an interest in social work, and show them [men, HHK] to what extent they can stand for such useful work. […] The gathering of the scattered forces, the centering of the women's movement within the framework of the general national organization - under the standard of the common slogan of liberation – is a burning question. ³⁹

Even 3 years later, Ewa wondered why women would still remain silent regarding the ongoing debates on abortion rights, which was paraphrased as a “population issue” (kwestia populacyjna) in the title, and hereby tried to mobilize its readers. ⁴⁰

The readers were invited to participate by means of surveys and letters to the editor ⁴¹ and were involved in the debates, not least because it was important for the editors to take up the entire spectrum of the lifeworlds of middle-class “cultured” ⁴² women who considered themselves modern. ⁴³ At the same time, this modern interactive approach mobilized the readers to take a stand for themselves, which can be seen as an important emancipative act. For Ewa, this mobilization was not enough, as Appenszlakowa complained on the occasion of reporting on the Congress of Jewish Orthodox Women in Warsaw in May 1932. She pointed out that the “force of reaction” was strong, while “we representatives of progress and enlightenment” were only weakly organized. ⁴⁴ Overall, Ewa offered itself as a female sub-public of educated, “cultured” Jewish women acculturated toward the Polish language and reflected—as Katrin Steffen noted for the daily Nasz Przegląd—an “only seemingly paradoxical double sense of belonging […] that could make it possible to feel like a Zionist and a citizen of Poland at the same time.” ⁴⁵

One of its main concerns was thus to report on events and developments that concerned birth planning issues, both at home and abroad, ⁴⁶ for example, reporting on a lecture at the Eugenics Society on “Interruption of Pregnancy” ⁴⁷ or on “Birth Control – the buzzword of which is becoming more and more widespread.” ⁴⁸ Thus, the comments on birth control and changing family values, as well as the reports on the women's movement, must be read in this light: Ewa and especially its reports on birth planning were thus a specific burning glass for the change in norms and values within the Jewish community. ⁴⁹ Thus, Katrin Steffen can summarize with regard to Ewa's commitment that the weekly took up and negotiated the specific modernity experiences of Jewish women being twice excluded: as a woman and a Jew, while the women understood themselves as guardians of Jewish memory and traditions and, at the same time, strived to emancipate themselves at least partially and to free themselves from this function, but without being able to completely detach themselves from this assignment. ⁵⁰

The fact that Ewa, in contrast to the contemporary Polish ⁵¹ (Christian) and Yiddish-language ⁵² women's magazines, devoted a particularly large space in her columns to debates about birth control, shows how virulent and important this topic was to its editors. ⁵³

The Ideal of the “New” Jewish Woman and Family

The ideal of the “new woman,” which turned into a mass phenomenon throughout Europe in the 1920s, challenged Jewish traditions. Marriage was considered, as for example the detailed contribution of Heszel Farbstein emphasized to be the duty of every Jew and every Jewish woman. ⁵⁴ The woman was respected as the guardian and keeper of kashrut, the traditional laws of pure nutrition, and she was also obliged to nida, to physical and sexual purity, because she was the bearer of the (as numerous as possible) Jewish offspring. This tension was discussed by “P.A.” (Paulina Appenszlakowa), for example, in an article on domestic traditions, asking on the occasion of Passover whether the “ordinary normal, young and progressive family” should follow tradition or abandon them completely. ⁵⁵ Referring to the importance of the housewife with regard to the traditional festivities, Appenszlakowa argued that the domestic feasts in particular are an important aspect for the child's memory and thus for the emotional bond with the family. This would also shape their worldview, that is, their Jewish identity. ⁵⁶

However, it was important for her to postulate a Jewish feminism; and the well-known jurist Rafał Lemkin from Lviv was enlisted as an “authority” for this. ⁵⁷ In his article “The Jewish Woman and Feminism,” ⁵⁸ which is to be seen as a leitmotif for Ewa's concerns, he used the example of Jewish activists in German-speaking countries and highlighted the “significant” (poważne) participation of Jewish women in the general “liberation movement” of women there. However, he also emphasized that there had been a specific Jewish feminist movement, for which the Frankfurt-based founder of the Association of Jewish Women, Bertha Pappenheim, stood above all. He emphasized that this association aimed at national and social feminism (społeczno-feministyczne). Finally, he briefly referred to the participation of Dr. Felice Nossig and Dr. Lipszyc Balsigierowa, who had worked for the well-known women's publication Głos kobiet (Voice of Women). Summing up, Lemkin emphasized that it was not strange at all that Jewish women had taken an active part in the women's movement. After all, they would belong to a nation that had itself experienced much injustice and was struggling daily with the uphill battle for complete equality. His conclusion culminates in the statement that the Jewish woman would be “doubly handicapped from a legal point of view”: “as a Jew and as a woman. From this comes such an incredible sense of injustice, from this comes an almost unsurpassed zeal for the struggle for their rights. The struggle is twofold: for national and social-feminist equality.” ⁵⁹ In this respect, it was only logical that Ewa also repeatedly devoted itself to “independent,” that is, working and earning, women as a phenomenon of modernity, and discussed practical issues in terms of how these very women would strengthen the family incomes. ⁶⁰ Consequently, the question if societal and political engagement really endangered family life, ⁶¹ was included in the discussion of the “new” women, but it was finally denied through demanding participation, for example, on local level.

At the same time, Ewa discussed the problem of high divorce rates, for which the “independent” woman was held responsible. Was traditional marriage in crisis as a result of this? This question, in which the Polish debates on the new marriage and family law merged with those on social change, was discussed in a survey among Ewa's readers. They were asked to give their opinion on whether there was indeed a crisis ⁶² with regard to the institution of marriage, whether it should be preserved in its present form, or whether/how it should be reformed. ⁶³ In doing so, the weekly gave space to (radical) supporters as well as traditionalist attitudes, but concluded that this “diagnosis of female opinion” represented an important uncertainty that endangered the family system. ⁶⁴

Because of the importance of marriage, this topic was repeatedly a main component of Ewa's issues. Ewa still spoke out against “trial marriages” in 1928, because women were not “guinea pigs” ⁶⁵ . But around 1930, in reviewing the international debates, it had become more important for Ewa to discuss current publications and discourses on the postulated “crisis of marriage” as well as modern forms of marital cohabitation such as “premarital trials” ⁶⁶ . Therefore Ewa represented analogous discourses from other countries and commented, for example, the reception of Charlotte Buchow-Homeyer's works on the three-year “temporary marriage,” ⁶⁷ Rosa Mayreder's publication on the “crisis of marriage,” ⁶⁸ the model of “companionate marriage” designed by the American social reformer Ben Lindsey, ⁶⁹ and the heated debates on Lindsey's German language editions. ⁷⁰

An important (re)interpretation of the traditional marital image of women and thus of family values was represented, for example, by a contribution “The Truth about women in the Talmud,” ⁷¹ in which Ewa emphasized that the Talmud had demanded monogamy in times of polygamy, and concluded thus, that the Jewish wife must be loved and appreciated. Over and over again, Ewa's articles demanded that marriages should be made out of love in order to last. ⁷² The commentary on the passing of the new marriage law in December 1931 clearly shows how important marriage for love was in Ewa's eyes: the new marriage law, which introduced civil marriage and thus also made divorces legally possible, ultimately only legally facilitated, according to Judyta Horn's commentary, what was in fact common practice among Jews and Christians. With regard to the newly introduced possibility of mixed-denominational marriages without prior conversion because of civil marriage, Horn noted that “even more important than the national interest” was the “right of the heart for a person.” Even more so, she stated, it makes sense “also from the national point of view”, because, in this way, a Jew or a Jewess can certainly remain faithful to their religion. ⁷³

However, alternative life plans were also discussed: in view of an increasing number of unmarried women, marriage no longer was considered to be the sole goal of women's lives, and at the same time it seemed necessary to revise the pejorative image of the “old maid” ⁷⁴ . Hence, Appenszlakowa critically discussed the traditional female “life goal” of getting married, and clarified that this should no longer be the most important purpose in a young woman's life, although celibacy would provide her with considerable challenges, especially economic ones. Rather, she concluded, it was important for a woman to decide from a position of pride and free will. ⁷⁵ It is statement makes clear that Ewa represented the ideal of the “new” Jewish woman and also saw the family in transition. In this way, the weekly positioned itself as being thoroughly emancipated, and called the traditional image of the family into question, but without negating the role of the family for the nation.

Birth Control and Female Autonomy of Decision

The debates about the new marriage and family law, which began with a time lag compared to Western Europe, were not only influenced by the international debates, especially the vibrant German ones, and by the Soviet marriage law and the Soviet liberalization of abortion, ⁷⁶ but also by the strongly felt economic crisis. They interwove neo-Malthusian and eugenic arguments with older arguments of the morality movement's discourses before World War I and with contemporary European, especially German, ones. In Poland, representatives of the eugenic movement who had social reformist intentions were generally judged to be politically “leftist” and “Jewish,” which meant that anti-Semitic connotations resonated in general Polish debates. ⁷⁷ These debates revolved around “conscious motherhood” and were especially aired in the Wiadomości Literackie ⁷⁸ (Literary News). They were especially fueled by the trained physician and feature writer Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, but other “experts” such as the Jewish physician Herman Rubinraut, also participated enthusiastically. While they combined family values with the right to freedom of choice, they became nationally “colored” against the background of Polish statehood. ⁷⁹

Ewa reflected and adapted the arguments put forward around “conscious motherhood” (świadome macierzyństwo ⁸⁰ ) and demanded also birth control out of the will of the parent or mother. Furthermore, the journal showed the tension between a modern practice of the self and traditional Jewish society by reporting on traditionalist attitudes toward the family as well as discussing modern positions: a significant stylistic device for this were reports on congresses, ⁸¹ on articles in other periodicals and lectures, for example, in the packed hall of the Eugenic Society in Warsaw on the “interruption of pregnancy,” ⁸² and on the discourses on and demonstrations for birth control. ⁸³ Ewa also connected demands for appropriate sex education ⁸⁴ and for changes in social norms regarding marriage. ⁸⁵ Accordingly, Ewa assessed the adoption of the new Polish Penal Code, through which abortion by doctors became legal after an indication, especially after an diagnosis that the mother's health was at risk, as “unusually progressive,” ⁸⁶ because doctors could now indicate the need even on the basis of the difficult economic situation of a family.

The contributions on eugenics or premarital health examinations as an expression of “concern for public health” ⁸⁷ in particular show how modern ideologemes influenced transnational ideas about family and birth control, as Ewa in particular took up the ongoing debates of the Weimar Republic and used them for argumentative purposes. ⁸⁸ Róża Melcerowa, a Zionist Sejm deputy and publicist, intertwined neo-Malthusian arguments with notions of individual freedom of choice in one contribution. ⁸⁹ She drew on experiences from an unspecified meeting in 1924 in the Germany, at which the legalization of abortion had been demanded, and from the International Workers’ Congress in 1926. As a major stylistic device, she used original language when quoting a German comrade in German: “Tell our comrades in the East they may not bring so many children into the world.” ⁹⁰ Therefore, only as many children should be born as the parents wished to have. “No woman” would want to have, say, a third, let alone a fourth or fifth child. The number of offspring should correspond to the parents’ wishes for economic reasons, especially since numerous births would harm the mothers’ health and would weaken the new-borns. For Melcerowa, therefore, abortions were a “heroic deed”: “even the strictest religious prohibitions, a threat and punishments on the part of the legislator can dissuade women from intervening in an unwanted pregnancy […] Such a heroic deed can [ultimately, however] be performed only by the wealthiest women.” ⁹¹ Thus, Melcerowa referred to social inequalities in birth control. She was equally pointed in advocating premarital health examinations as a practice of eugenic attitudes, likewise drawing on the discourses of the German Empire that had been virulent since the mid-1920s. According to Melcerowa, these were a “colossal benefit” for the bride and groom and “for society as a whole”. She saw them as a way to give birth to healthy Jewish children in the future, because the “struggle with the degenerate race” (by which she referred to impoverished, powerless Jewry) would be given suitable means through medical marriage testimonies. ⁹² Samuel Hirszhorn, for whom the limitation of the number of children was “very vital and positive,” justified the importance of neo-Malthusian ideas with the pauperization of Polish Jews, especially because they only gradually gained access to jobs. In this respect, for him, birth control was only a current phenomenon and would be only practiced until economic conditions would be improved. ⁹³

While Melcerowa and Hirszhorn advocated birth control by using neo-Malthusian arguments, Appenszlakowa focused on marriages for love, a modern but individualistic concept. She linked the right to freedom of choice with the desire for “children of love,” as the title of one of her discussion articles claimed. ⁹⁴ She hereby explicitly turned equally against contemporary demands for a choice of partners according to eugenic criteria (and thus ultimately against premarital health examinations) and against the traditional Jewish marriage in which partners were procured and which was supposed to give birth to as many offspring as possible. Through this, she succeeded in elaborating the changing role of the housewife from the guardian of kashrut and nida to the guardian of the nation: “everything” depended in her eyes on the Jewish woman, since the “mother and wife” had “decisive influence on national life, on the education of the young generation,” so that the “housewife” became “the decisive factor” for the nation. ⁹⁵ Here, she was referring to the role of traditions for a Jewish national identity as discussed above. That Samuel Hirszhorn, also writing for Nasz Przegląd, published on birth control in the same issue, seems no coincidence. He emphasized the importance of birth control as a means for the necessary elevation or renewal of Jewish culture and nationhood. His contribution shows very clearly that discourses on birth control are to be interpreted as discourses on social modernization and, at the same time, as discourses on nationalization. Hirszhorn emphasized that a small family size which means having only a few children, would strengthen the prosperity and culture of the Jewish family, thus ultimately the Jewish nation. Prosperity and high spiritual culture, significant also for military leadership, would be possessed only by those nations, he asserted, which would “raise their civilization and prosperity by means of birth control.” ⁹⁶ That Ewa considered itself as a forum for different attitudes is shown by Józef Bender's response to Appenszlakowa's contribution one issue later, in which he argued against “children of love”. Herewith, he did not explicitly address Polish Jews, but Poles as a whole. The aim should be giving birth to “children of conscious motherhood,” according to the title of his article. He pleaded for premarital health examinations and birth control, because in the case of sick parents, “children of love” would become “children of despair, children of misfortune.” Hence, the fate of mankind would depend on rational birth control, because on the whole, too many children would be born, and in general, too many sick children. And, he concluded, it would be better for Poland if half a million children were not born every year.” ⁹⁷ Within the framework of the ideal of the “new” Jewish woman and family as presented in Ewa's contributions, birth control and the woman's freedom of choice necessary for this were thus given a crucial role in the societal development, though Ewa's contributions shifted from ideologically neo-Malthusian and eugenically-based attitudes to an emphasis on “love”—ultimately Ewa conveyed a complementary view of family values and the importance of birth control.

Conclusion

Ewa's contributions to the image of the family and women, and the attitude toward birth control derived from them represent a diagnosis of noticeable tendencies within Polish Jewry. Even if Eva Plach comes to a quite critical assessment of failure, namely that Ewa's commitment was not a “wholesale defeat” but only a “disappointing compromise”, because the weekly did not win a real feminist battle, ⁹⁸ my analysis comes to a more appreciative conclusion, that Ewa contributed to changing attitudes of Jewish women, particularly accultured women, through mobilization and providing examples for self-empowerment. Hence, one should not (only) evaluate the journal's impact through the circulation thickness, but particularly through the assessment that Ewa's impact lay in its merit of starting the discussions on changing families values and on the image of women within the acculturated Polish-Jewish intelligentisa. Again, Eva Plach agrees that Ewa “represents […] a bold attempt at a great transformation: transforming indifference into feminist and nationalist consciousness on the part of the Jewish women. Ewa also stands as an eloquent example of the Zionist attempt to ‘normalize’ the Jewish experience, and, in this case, to normalize a Jewish middle- and upper-class feminism.” Hence, she concludes, “Ewa's feminism was its Zionism.” ⁹⁹ Ultimately, a cultural translation took place through the content of the reports, which was adapted to the needs of its target audience, since it can be assumed in principle that readers knowledgeable of Polish could theoretically have followed the heated debates about a unified Polish family, marriage, and abortion law ¹⁰⁰ precisely in the Polish intellectual weekly Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News). This weekly published articles then from the perspective of a left-liberal position within the Polish majority society, although people with Jewish roots also wrote in this journal and many of its contributors published in Ewa too. Ewa was also able to show that Jewish feminism, although specifically tinged, ultimately dealt with the same issues and problems as other feminisms in the Euro-Atlantic region. Like them, it was concerned with the advocacy, if not the enforcement, of a particular, liberal and individualistic value: the women's freedom of choice, even if the Zionist woman was supposed to use it in favor of the Jewish collective.

Therefore, the analysis of Ewa's content has revealed that the journal's aim was to mobilize Jewish women for (self-)reflection and for the Jewish nation and ultimately to take on a progressive pioneering role within Polish Jewry. Through the stylistic device of reporting on events and attitudes and of commenting feminist activism in non-Polish and non-Jewish societies, Ewa facilitated a specific transfer and adaptation of attitudes. Because Ewa's articles mirrored and tried to foster changing norms and values, they became the main tool and inspiration for conveying transnational discourses and developments, which Ewa “translated” and “interpreted” for its target audience.

It is to be noted that Ewa used her diagnosis of Jewish families and women as well as the plea for birth control practices as an opportunity to motivate and empower Jewish women in Poland: They should become active and advocate for Jewish identity and community in terms of birth control and a change of family images. Although motherhood was valued as a destiny for women, it was interpreted that it allowed women to contribute to and to influence actively the further development of the Jewish nation. Thus, the very issue of birth control verifies Jolanta Mickutės more general finding ¹⁰¹ that the self in Zionist discourses was entirely dedicated to the collective.

In the context of the state's policy of integration and assimilation, which increasingly led to anti-Semitism at the beginning of the 1930s, Ewa represented an attempt to strengthen the identity of acculturated Jewish women who were unsettled by the experience of modernity and the social changes it brought: “family” and its size were now rationally justified and integrated into a canon of norms that continued to be modernized. The demanded liberal freedom of choice was thus reinterpreted as an opportunity for women to be committed to the well-being and identity of the Jewish nation. With its progressive stance, Ewa felt empowered to pointedly discuss the incipient change in norms and values regarding the image of the family, the size of the family, and the role of women, even if it was a minority opinion. It challenged traditional religious values and norms with its rationally-based construction of a secularized ideal of Jewish national identity and family. Hence, Ewa showed that related ideals, norms and values were already in flux. This transformation of values and norms, which can be found in all European societies at varying degrees, should be interpreted as a symptom of social modernization. Since values and norms are negotiated through discourses, it becomes clear that one of the most important merits of Ewa was the active and engaged contribution to that value change through the commitment for the “new” Jewish women and families in Poland and her reproductive freedom of responsible choice combined with the national collective. Ewa was therefore a particular arena ofnegotiation of key societal values and norms—Ewa contributed to re-configurate them in the context of Polish statehood, and to defend, albeit in a progressive manner, this specific Polish-Jewish ethno-space.