ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with discussion of several of the significant English-language monographs and published collections of essays about Jewish women and gender roles that were published prior to 2000, during the formative period of research. It considers some of the significant scholarship focused on eras from late antiquity through the end of the eighteenth century. The chapter provides note of tensions that have emerged in this relatively recent academic enterprise. It reviews examples of scholarly research on the diversity of women's roles in the contemporary Jewish world. By including the female half of the Jewish people as subjects in academic research on Jewish history, religion, and cultural production, scholarly approaches of women's and gender studies have had a transformative and salutary effect on Jewish studies historiography. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, a growing number of Jewish studies scholars began to incorporate considerations of women's lives, and how they differed from those of men, into their research.
