The ultra-Orthodox seamstress who determined the fate of Jewish women

Haaretz   Schenirer wrote of the dissonance in the community, as "Carolin": 

“And as we pass through the days before the High Holy Days...fathers and sons travel, and thus they are drawn to Ger, to Belz, to Alexander, to Bobov, to all those places that had been made citadels of conceited religious life, dominated by the figure of the rebbe’s personality. 

“And we stay at home, the wives, daughters, and the little ones. We have an empty festival. It is bare of Jewish intellectual content. The women have never learned anything about the spiritual meaning that is concentrated within a Jewish festival. The mother goes to the synagogue, but the services echo faintly into the fenced and boarded-off women’s galleries. There is much crying by elderly women. The young girls look at them as though they belong to a different century. Youth and the desire to live a full life shoot up violently in the strong-willed young personalities. Outside the synagogues, the young girls stay chattering; they walk away from the synagogue where their mothers pour out their vague and heavy feelings. They leave behind them the wailing of the older generation and follow the urge for freedom and self-expression. Further and further from the synagogue they go, further away, to the dancing, tempting light of a fleeting joy.”[...]

Of course, a century later in Orthodox girls’ schools, no one taught us about Schenirer’s secular studies. Nor did anyone tell us about the testimonies that those who knew her have given since, stories which would fit all too awkwardly into a hagiography: that she had been married previously at an early age but soon afterwards got divorced (some say her husband was not religious enough for her, others claim it was childlessness which drove them apart), that she studied the Mishna in the original Hebrew without Yiddish translation, that her lectures were attended both by men and women. 

After Schenirer’s death, religious leaders went to great lengths to describe Schenirer as a "modest, pious woman." As Shoshanah Bechhofer writes in her 2005 dissertation on the subject, a “movement that represents change [in] a religious community that reveres tradition” must “celebrate its innovator without celebrating the idea of innovation”. And so, it was decided that, if ambition contradicts the traditional ideal of female piety, Sarah Schenirer’s memory would have to evolve first and foremost as a paragonof modesty, a modern-day redeemer of the daughters of Israel. And so, she has become today exactly what she once mourned in her diary: a woman wrapped in shawls rather than words, a perfectionist in “clothing the body” but not so much in clothing the seeds of the soul - or the mind, for that matter.[...]