These concerns about the impact of context and perspective on legal decision making are fundamental to feminist jurisprudence. Feminists argue that law rests upon narratives and is composed of narratives.’ Narratives are not abstract and general but concrete and sharply specific.” By dropping crucial contextual elements, a jurist may distort the nature of a case. A feminist approach to law demands an expanded notion of legal relevance that renders admissible more richly particularized accounts and wider tempo­ral boundaries than classical legal argumentation would admit." Feminist legal scholars argue that admitting more data about the actual circumstances and concerns of women into the legal process enables a better fit between cases and the legal principles applied to them.? In contrast to formalist legal approaches, this approach is implicitly historicist. It seeks out data about personal and social experience that abstract paradigms would exclude.

A second principle of feminist jurisprudence germane to the study of responsa concerning women is the hermeneutics of sus­picion with which feminist legal theorists approach the ostensibly ungendered language and categories of law and social policy.” Discourse and principles may present themselves as universal and gender-free and yet harbor hidden androcentric presump­tions or reflect exclusively androcentric narratives or perspec­tives. Feminist jurisprudence presumes that no unitary account of human nature and no universal enunciation of norms can ensure justice. Rather, justice demands an account of human difference and norms that reflects gendered existences." To this end, femi­nist jurisprudence uses the social sciences to provide richer descriptions of human psychology and of human environments. 3

In this article I have combined the principles of feminist jurisprudence with Ellenson’s sociohistorical methodology for reading responsa to produce a feminist reading of the Schachter responsum. This methodology allows me to retrieve and interpret the narratives at issue: the narrative implicit in the responsum and the counter narrative the responsum seeks to repress. It peoples these narratives with real, complexly motivated human beings and situates them historically. Thus, it provides a social and historical frame within which to examine the form, function, and argument of the responsum. The article is organized as fol­lows: First, I will situate the development of prayer groups within