Ebook: Women and Education in Latin America: Knowledge, Power, and Change

This ethnography investigates the meaning of learning in the lives of ultraorthodox Jewish women. Presenting a vivid portrayal of the Gur Hasidic community in Israel, El-Or explores the relationship between women's literacy and their subordination. What she finds is a paradox: ultraorthodox women are taught to be ignorant. And they perform the role of being ignorant as only educated women can. Preserving their social and emotional ties with their community, these women are at the same time able to observe their surroundings and even their own worlds as if from the "outside." This duality creates the social and personal conditions that allow the women to accept their subordination and help to perpetuate it, even at the end of the twentieth century.