Excerpt from “An Interview With Mrs. Hannah G. Solomon”
The women of the council had vision and they had a definite plan of work, which looked far ahead of the generation in which they themselves were working. At our first triennial we had two aims: religious work and philanthropy. We hoped to establish Sabbath schools and to extend the study of Jewish literature and history. In philanthropy we wanted to introduce preventive work, making the family rather than the individual the object of our care. By these plans, you can readily understand how limited was our field of endeavor in 1896. Charity and religion – these two were the province of womankind. Women’s sphere is in the home, they told us. The last thirty years have been devoted to proof of our boast that women’s sphere is the whole wide world, without limit.