UNTIL RECENTLY the history of Jewish women in the lands which made up the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, both before and after 1750, has been somewhat neglected. Women are rarely mentioned in the classic works of east European Jewish history, such as those by Dubnow, Bałaban, Schiper, and Mahler, and have figured only marginally in more recent writing. While it has been claimed that this is a consequence of the lack of references to women in the sources, it is characteristic of the approach of these historians that Dubnow himself could unreflectingly observe that not a ‘single woman [attained] literary fame among the Jews of Poland and Lithuania’. In addition, with a few exceptions, Jewish women have not figured significantly in the developing literature on Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian women.

This situation has changed considerably in recent years and much valuable work has been devoted to this theme. Underpinning it has been a new theoretical understanding of how the history of women should be written. Initially, as was the case in the general development of women's history, historians of Jewish women in eastern Europe attempted to ‘fill in the blanks’, taking conventional historiographic categories used to describe men's experience and attempting to fit women into them. Moshe Rosman has described this approach as follows: ‘We know what the rabbis said about men's marital obligations; what did they say about women’s? X number of men loaned money; how many women loaned money? There were men who were courtiers of the Polish kings; were there also women who were close to the monarchy?’

While this approach has resulted in a widening of our knowledge of women’s activities, it was limited by the unspoken assumption that men's experience was normative and that of women only mirrored it.