Innovation and Authority 7 the context of the social history of the Jewish feminist movement and offer a description and analysis of prayer groups based on the testimony of members and observers. Next, I will recount the circumstances under which the Schachter responsum was elicited and place it in its larger social and ideological context. Third, I will analyze the content of the responsum. Finally, I will suggest implications and conclusions.

Prayer Groups and the Social History of American Jewish Feminism

The 1970s saw the burgeoning of Jewish feminism, an out­growth of the second great wave of American feminist thought and practice that began in the mid-1960s. Although Jewish feminists borrowed theory from major feminist thinkers such as Simone De Beauvoir and practices such as consciousness raising from secular feminist praxis, distinctive Jewish concerns remained addressable only by a home-grown Jewish feminism. Central among these con­cerns were issues concerning halakhah and participation in Jewish ritual.'® The mothers of Jewish feminism were thoroughly accul­turated, highly educated, American Jews. They identified halakhah as a source of stigma and unequal treatment. Halakhah accounted for painful dissonances between secular and religious experience. As severely as sexism affected the secular lives of middle-class Jew­ ish women, it was seldom as concrete and overt as the exclusion and disempowerment these women experienced when they attended synagogue or sought a Jewish divorce. From no field of secular knowledge were they excluded as comprehensively and openly as they were excluded from the knowledge of halakhah and its sources, nor did any other system of authority demand their obedience while explicitly denying them representation in the power structure that governed them. Secular sexism was an under­current, concealing and dissembling its menaces and biases beneath an ideology of merit. This ideology declared that all had equal opportunities to become corporate executives, senators, or scientists, and the best“men” won. Halakhah , in contrast, unequiv­ocally stated that the status of woman disqualified them from full participation in the public life of the Jewish community.