Epilogue: The First Sex

Summary

The remarks the organizers invited me to give at the final gathering of the conference on “Women in the Emigration after 1933” - now published here - require something of a prelude. It will be, I warn the reader, a rather personal prelude. But, then, when refugees get together, they reminisce. When Fred Grubel originally asked me to give the concluding talk at the conference, I gladly complied. I have views on refugee women, views I did not mind sharing. And one of these views was that such a conference was long overdue. I had thought so at least since 1966. I submit this perhaps falsely precise date because it was in 1966 that I published a book from a set of lectures I had given at Berkeley that year, and I dedicated that book to “the many thousands of pilgrims, Jewish and not Jewish, German and Austrian and Polish, whom Hitler compelled to discover America.” And in listing some of these discoverers, I included what I called “the spoiled, idle wives who supported their unemployable husbands by washing floors, making candy, and selling underwear.”

I should quickly confess that in hindsight the adjective “spoiled” was not only gratuitous but really rather cheap - a remark that had not earned its way in reality. I might have recognized it as unfair if I had simply thought of my mother in this context. In 1936 when it became plain that we would be emigrating from Nazi Germany, my mother, frail as she was, suffering from intermittent bouts of tuberculosis, took up sewing in a serious way to have a craft to fall back on in emigration.