In Her Hands

Illuminates the influence that private schools for Jewish girls had on contemporary political discourse and educational innovation.

Though more than one hundred private schools for Jewish girls thrived in the areas of Jewish settlement in the Russian empire between 1831 and 1881, their importance has been largely overlooked in the scholarship of Jewish educational history. In Her Hands: The Education of Girls in Tsarist Russia restores these schools to their rightful place of prominence in training thousands of Jewish girls in secular and Judaic subjects, while paving the way for the modern schools that followed them. Through extensive archival research, author Eliyana R. Adler examines the schools' curriculum, teachers, financing, students, and educational innovation and demonstrates how each of these aspects evolved over time to provide new opportunities.