Title: Midrashic women
First published: 2002
Description: "While most gender-based analyses of rabbinic Judaism concentrate on the status of women in the halakhah (the rabbinic legal tradition), Judith R. Baskin turns her attention to the construction of women in the aggadic midrash, a collection of expansions of the biblical text, rabbinic ruminations, and homiletical discourses that constitutes the non-legal component of rabbinic literature.

Examining rabbinic convictions of female alterity, competing narratives of creation, and justifications of female disadvantages, as well as aggadic understandings of the ideal wife, the dilemma of infertility, and women among women and as individuals, Baskin shows that rabbinic Judaism, a tradition formed by men for a male community, deeply valued the essential contributions of wives and mothers while also consciously constructing women as other and lesser than men."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Aggada, Commentaries, Feminism, History and criticism, Judaism, Midrash, Religious aspects, Religious aspects of Feminism, Women in rabbinical literature, Women in the Bible, Feminism, religious aspects, judaism
LC classification: BM509.W7 B37 2002