Working Women/Cloistered Men: A Family Development Approach to Marriage Arrangements among Ultra-orthodox Jews*

INTRODUCTION Women's labor force participation has been increasing both in the United States (Wilkie, 1991) and elsewhere (Richter, 1994; Meleis and Bernal, 1995; Mehra et al., 1996) as they take additional responsibility for the support of children and other kin. An important issue in family research has been the problem of stress among married women in the work force due to multiple roles and possible conflicting demands of husbands, children and employers (Affleck, 1985; Barnett and Baruch, 1985; Presser, 1988; Hochschild and Machung, 1989; Potucheck, 1992; Agarwal, 1994). Recent research in family development has focussed on the dual-earner family in comparison with the traditional one-earner family with a male provider, assessing how the articulation between work and family demands is affected by the timing and sequence of stages in the family career (White, 1999). A less common but theoretically interesting variation is the family maintained by a woman with the husband present. Married women are not generally expected to take on the main financial support of the family unless the husband is disabled or temporarily unemployed (Voydanoff, 1987), in compulsory military service (Hogan, 1978), or in an occupation which requires long training such as law, academia and medicine (Fowlkes, 1980). This paper uses the family development approach to examine a cultural marriage variant in which the wife supports the family during an early stage of the marriage. A growing trend among ultraOrthodox Jews, who number approximately 360,000 in the United States (Goldstein, 1992), is for the husband to delay his entry into the job market, often for years, in order to participate in full-time religious study. Unlike the professional school, however, the educational program or "kollel" does not usually lead to an advanced professional degree or provide the students with any skills readily transferable to the workplace. The long involvement of the husband in education, the norm of child-bearing early in the marriage (Friedlander and Feldmann, 1993), large family size and traditional gender norms, place the main responsibility for working, child rearing and home management on the wife. In such multiple-role situations, working women from a variety of backgrounds have turned to networks of support (Lee and Keith, 1999; Jarrett and Burton, 1999; Weiss, 1999). This article examines the consequences of timing norms and the resultant economic and normative pressures on women as well as their use of support networks as coping strategies for handling these pressures. The subjects of this study are present and past kollel wives who are currently U.S. residents. The data are drawn from a larger study of women and kollel among three ultra Orthodox groups: Lubavitcher Hasidim, Aish HaTorah and Jews of the yeshiva world or the "Yeshivish." These groups differ in their organization, social structure, patterns of authority and. philosophical outlook, but share "an unswerving commitment to scrupulous Torah observance" and the view that, except for vocational training, all knowledge of importance lies in Torah (Jewish law) (Belcove-Shalin, 1995:15). The "Yeshivish" are the most committed to the ideal of a "society of scholars" and attempt to extend kollel as long as possible. In the United States this usually means up to seven or eight years. Lubavitcher Hasidim usually limit kollel to a year or two since their primary mission is outreach to secular Jews, although sometimes newly religious couples will remain in kollel longer, using it as an opportunity to "catch up" in religious education. Aish HaTorah, a relatively new movement founded in the 1960s, is made up almost exclusively of the newly religious and, like the Lubavitcher Hasidim, limits kollel to a few years after which students are expected to take on outreach activities. Previous Research A search of the literature on American kollel families reveals that there has been little scholarly attention to this topic. …