Women have traditionally played an important role in Jewish life. In the shtetls of Eastern Europe, there was a strong tradition of women working after marriage, and sometimes women would be the family breadwinners while their husbands devoted themselves to religious study.

This pattern continued when migrants left Eastern Europe in their thousands in the late-19th century. The fragmentation of society often left women in charge of households. Some had emigrated alone, or been abandoned by their husbands, or widowed. Even those with husbands often found that their family could not survive on one income alone.

For any of these reasons, women were often forced to engage in some form of economic activity and to make economic decisions. Single women, widows, and a small minority of married women worked outside the home, in clothing workshops, in provisions stores or clothes shops.

Married women were forced to combine domestic responsibilities with some means of earning money, for example by taking in home work, running small shops in their back rooms or taking in lodgers. The matriarch, the strong, working woman who is the backbone of the family, is a familiar symbol in Jewish society.

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