Erasure of Women - Fighting the Tide of Extremism

'Womanless' Illustration of Eishes Chayil (Shoshanna Keats-Jaskoll via TOI)

There are… Facebook groups exclusively dedicated to this issue. An administrator of one of these groups, who describes herself as a “yeshivish rebbetzin,” started her group to organize yeshivish community members to fight the exclusion of women. She says the change will come when the readers of these magazines, not the Modern Orthodox community, speak out against this practice.

“This needs to be a movement from within,” she said. “Nobody wants to be changed by somebody from the outside.”

Her group, which has over 500 members who have to identify as “past, current, or potential subscribers” to magazines like Mishpacha and Binah to join the group, encourages members to write letters to the magazine editors explaining why they have unsubscribed. 

“They are afraid of their readership and their advertisers,” said the group administrator. “These are decisions that are being made as business decisions that are somehow being seen as philosophical decisions, and they’re not.”

(S)he hopes that the push from the right-wing community will have an impact. 

“This time the movement is from within the readership, within the target audience of the publications that exclude pictures of women,” she said. “And I think that’s why we have potential to make change happen.”