Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Frances Kallison and horse posed in front of wooden fence

Frances Rosenthal Kallison

Frances Elaine Rosenthal Kallison was a horsewoman and historian, a cofounder of the Texas Jewish Historical Society, and the only Jewish woman in the National Museum and Cowgirl Hall of Fame. A regional leader of the National Council of Jewish Women, she lobbied to end the poll tax and open pre-natal clinics for the poor. The exhibit she curated on Texas Jewry for the 1968 World’s Fair in San Antonio has been continually updated.

Mattie Rotenberg

The first woman and the first Jew to be granted a doctorate in physics at the University of Toronto, Mattie Rotenberg also founded Toronto’s first Jewish day school in 1929 to educate her five children. She went on to embark upon a successful second career in journalism.

Bethsabée Rothschild

Bethsabée (Hebrew: Batsheva) de Rothschild, the scion of a well-known philanthropic family, helped support numerous activities in the United States and Israel, especially dance, music, and science.She created the Batsheva and Bat-Dor dance companies and was awarded the Israel Prize in 1989 for her special contribution to Israeli society.

Dame Miriam Rothschild

Dame Miriam Rothschild was a renowned British natural scientist who published over 300 scientific papers throughout her lifetime, making groundbreaking contributions to the fields of entomology, zoology, marine biology, and wildlife conservationism. In 1985 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and credited for her work in the histology, morphology, and taxonomy of fleas.

Ruth Rothstein

As chief of Cook County Bureau of Health Services, Ruth Rothstein helped Chicago hospitals create a better safety net for the disadvantaged.

Vera Cooper Rubin

Through her groundbreaking research, astronomer Vera Cooper Rubin forever changed our fundamental view of the cosmos, from a universe dominated by starlight to one dominated by dark matter. Among her many accomplishments, she received the Presidential National Medal of Science in 1993 and mentored many astronomers, saying she would always be “available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers.”

Mary Doria Russell

An experimental writer who often grapples with religion in her writing, Mary Doria Russell has found inspiration in historical events from WWII to the OK Corral.

Sallyann Amdur Sack

Sallyann Amdur Sack, an American genealogist and psychologist, founded many innovations in contemporary Jewish genealogy. She graduated from Harvard University (Phi Beta Kappa) and received her doctorate from George Washington University and was a clinical psychologist until the early 2020s.

Sadie Shapiro

Sadie Shapiro was an American-Jewish medical social worker who made pioneering contributions to the field of rehabilitation. She developed a novel service for wounded soldiers during World War II that integrated medical care, rehabilitation, and occupational retraining. Regarded as the nation’s top expert in the field of medical social work, Shapiro was hired by the AJJDC to oversee medical social services among Holocaust survivors in the DP camps of Europe.

Marilyn Safir

Marilyn Safir is an Israeli-American psychologist who played a critical role as a feminist activist in sparking the Israeli women’s movement and in establishing the academic field of women’s studies in Israel. Her academic career has focused on sex, sexuality, and gender.

Eva Salber

Using the lessons she learned as a doctor in South Africa, Eva Salber worked with poor populations in Massachusetts and North Carolina to improve public health and empower community leaders. Salber also published three books that sharing her intimate knowledge of the various communities she helped.

Freyda Sanders

Freyda Sanders trained for jobs in a number of fields, but her experience teaching girls in a juvenile detention center led her to her life’s work in adolescent psychology.

Hannah Sandusky

Called “the angel” and “the saint” by her patients, midwife Hannah Sandusky was remarkable both for the sheer number of births she oversaw and for the respect that male doctors granted her for her skills.

black and white photograph of a woman in a lab surrounded by lab equipment

Maria Anna Schirmann

Maria Anna Schirmann, a distinguished Viennese physicist, was unable to escape persecution by the Nazis and immigrate to the United States. Double discrimination against her as a Jew and a woman prevented her from obtaining an American university position and sealed her fate.

Dominique Schnapper

Dominique Schnapper is a French sociologist who has devoted an important part of her work to an analysis of French Jews and Judaism, in particular in connection with the French model of citizenship, nation, and the republic.

Ottilie Schönewald

Deeply involved in several women’s and Jewish organizations, Ottilie Schönewald was an activist who became a politician to advance her causes. She worked with the League of Jewish Women and helped Jews emigrate from Nazi Germany. After Schönewald and her family fled in 1939, she continued her social work during and after the war.

Regina Schoental

Our knowledge of toxic substances in plants, in fungi, and of aromatic and other chemicals that cause cancer owes much to the pioneering work of Regina Schoental.

Science in Israel

In Israel, awareness has grown recently that only through proactive effort can gender equality in scientific fields can be realized. Thorough investigations of inequalities have taken place, and actions are being taken to catalyze policy and systematic action to further women in science and technology.

Miriam Finn Scott

Miriam Finn Scott, a child diagnostician and educator, believed that the key to child development was educating parents as much as children. She founded the Children’s Garden, a clinic that studied relationships between parents and children and helped parents better support their children’s development. She also published two parenting books that were widely read and translated.

Barbara Seaman

Muckraking journalist Barbara Seaman survived a tumultuous childhood in New York City to become a bestselling author, a prominent second wave feminist, and, as a founder of the women’s health movement, an architect of informed consent. A lifelong scourge to the pharmaceutical industry, Seaman exposed the dangers of the high-dose birth control pill, hormone replacement therapy, and male doctors’ hubris.

Mindel Cherniack Sheps

As a pioneering physician, biostatistician, and demographer, Mindel Cherniack Sheps was acutely aware of the role science could play as a powerful social force. She taught that peace, social justice, and science were inextricably bound; humanism in any field must be based on social equity and knowledge.

Abby Shevitz

In her work on AIDS and HIV, Abby Shevitz became an advocate for patients who often had no one else to turn to.

Sarah Shmukler

Sarah Shmukler was a nurse and midwife who emigrated to Palestine from the Russian Empire during the Second Aliyah period. Her short life was characterized by providing medical assistance to migrant workers in Palestine and by close friendships with her fellow pioneers.

Marjorie Shostak

Despite a lack of formal training as an anthropologist, Marjorie Shostak wrote one of the most popular life histories in the field, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, in 1981. A recounting of interviews between Shostak and a woman she met in the Kalahari desert, Nisa has become a touchstone for feminist anthropological studies.

Judith Tannenbaum Shuval

Judith Shuval is one of the main scholars in the field of the sociology of health in Israel. Her research on migration and health, inequality in health, self-care in health, the doctor-patient relationship, and the processes of professional socialization has been based in concrete life in Israel and has broader implications for such topics cross-culturally.

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The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

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