Educated and Ignorant: Ultraorthodox Jewish Women and Their World

This ethnography investigates the meaning of learning in the lives of ultra-orthodox Jewish women. Presenting a picture of the Gur Hassidic community in Israel, the author explores the relationship between women's literacy and their subordination. She finds that ultra-orthodox women are taught to be ignorant. These women perform the role of being ignorant only as educated women can. Preserving their social and emotional ties with the community, they are at the same time able to observe their surroundings, and even their own worlds, as if from the "outside". This duality creates the social and personal conditions that allow them to accept their subordination, even at the end of the 20th century.