The South Providence Kosher Meat Boycott of 1910: A Study of Jewish Womenâ•Žs Consumer Activism

This thesis examines a kosher meat boycott in South Providence in 1910, placing this event in the broader context of Jewish immigrant women's activism around food issues and the popular strategy of consumer protest during the Progressive Era. Through an analysis of press accounts, census data, and community statistics, this study presents an analysis of the possible causes and impacts of this example of immigrant Jewish women's activism in early twentieth-century Providence. As women serve as both preservers of culture and mediators of the outside world (as expressed through domestic consumption), such incidents as kosher meat boycotts provide an opportune point at which to observe the strategies used to both conserve and transform the Jewish community. It is hoped that this study of a specific example of Jewish women's consumer activism in South Providence will not only illuminate aspects of one local Jewish community, but will also raise issues for the further consideration of what such incidents suggest about the importance of women's collective actions within communities undergoing economic, social, and religious transformation.


INTRODUCTION
To situate this consideration of Jewish women's collective action, this study also will examine various accounts of the Jewish immigrant experience, including works which suggest the ways in which Jewish culture may have shaped Jewish immigrant women's reaction to and engagement in community actions, as well as the reasons why food, particularly kosher food, has presented such a focal point for protest. In addition to these broader works on the Jewish experience, scholarly research pertaining specifically to the Jewish community of Providence will provide a context for understanding the characteristics and outcomes of the South Providence kosher meat boycott.

Perspectives on Working-Class and Women's Collective Action
Most considerations of working-class demonstrations address, in one way or another, E. P. Thompson's theories of collective action developed in his examination of the eighteenth-century English working class. In "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Thompson develops a basis for analyzing "crowd" actions such as food riots. Rejecting a reductive view of these often violent disruptions as the "spasmodic" reactions of the poor to economic hardship, Thompson instead asserts that food riots and other popular uprisings represent a "highly-complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives." The objectives of riot participants were based upon a set of assumptions about societal and economic structures that lent legitimacy to civil disruption. These assumptions formed what Thompson describes as the popular conception of a "moral economy," in which economic relationships were designed to ensure the survival of the community, and in which profiteering from the hardship of others-such as manipulating market prices during food shortages-constituted a moral crime. According to Thompson, the violation of these social norms, not simply the desperation brought about by nearstarvation, instigated food riots. Thompson points out that eighteenth-century food riots resembled much older patterns of communal self-regulation-as in medieval charivari, the primary objective was to punish communal transgressors, not to illegally secure supplies through mass force. The persistence of these older patterns reflected the tension between the traditional conception of a moral economy and the rise of the new ideals of the market economy, suggesting that even evolving ideas and behaviors have a long transitional stage. Thompson  Hyman, to demonstrate the persistence and effectiveness of these "pre-modern" tactics and to illustrate the tension that the women's strategies provoked in both the authorities and the mainstream press. Gutman emphasizes the need to examine the cultural origins of immigrant communities in order to understand their collective behaviors. 3 Although both Thompson and Gutman address the role of women in food riots, particularly as the members of the community most intimately concerned with food issues, neither develops a strong theory of female participation in such collective actions. In her study of women's activism in early twentieth-century Barcelona, Temma Kaplan explains the prevalence and militancy of working-class women's collective actions by constructing a theory of"female consciousness." Grounded in the acceptance of traditional gender roles, female consciousness motivates women to defend, with violence if necessary, the rights and obligations that accompany their position within the community. Kaplan builds on Thompson's and Gutman's observations of radical collective actions used to defend traditional communal structures, pointing out that female consciousness, though essentially conservative, has led to revolutionary situations. 4 Kaplan also takes the consideration of political consciousness expressed by working-class mass actions further than either Thompson or Gutman. Whereas both earlier theorists hold that "crowd" actions are "political" in only a nascent sense, Kaplan makes a forceful argument for the potential political power of "female consciousness" expressed in the mass actions of traditionally-oriented women. Her article takes to task more formalized movements for not recognizing the organizational power of female consciousness, particularly critiquing feminists for not acknowledging the important vision of social justice contained within traditional women's defense of their communities, and socialists for failing to utilize traditional women's networks to promote the socialist agenda. Kaplan's points reflect those raised by scholars like Mari Jo Buhle, who in her history of women in American Socialism points out the complications of women's involvement in the Socialist Party.

Kaplan's work, like Buhle's, anticipates the critiques that other scholars like Paula
Hyman and Dana Frank would make of Socialist failures to build upon the housewife protests of early twentieth-century New York. 5 The work of Ardis Cameron in her examination of the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, provides particular insight into this question of working-class women's social and political consciousness. Taking issue with historians' use of terms like "prepolitical" and "premodern" to describe women's collective actions, Cameron asserts that such assessments are based on a limited conception of political activity, restricted to voting, lobbying, forming unions, and running for office. Women, for the most part excluded from these activities, are locked out of this definition of politics. Cameron advocates a broader notion of political activity "developed relationally, from neighbor to neighbor, and rooted in the material reality of everyday life." Maintaining that women's neighborhood relationships and day-to-day activities in their roles as nurturers and protectors of their families constitute a political consciousness, Cameron asserts that collective actions such as food boycotts and rent protests comprised a "gestural language of female acts" through which this consciousness was expressed and enacted. Cameron also notes that while these gestural acts were rooted in the ordinary and routine, they were "nevertheless bound up with larger issues of identity, power, and legitimacy." As relationships between women transformed immigrant neighborhoods into "landscapes of subterfuge," the collective actions of working class women served not only as methods to address practical concerns of food and shelter but also as expressions of "community cohesion, identity, and collective power. " 6 In addition to expressing a sense of community solidarity and collective power, the strikes and boycotts that formed part of the vocabulary of this "gestural language of female acts" also ignited public anxiety about challenges to traditional notions of appropriate female behavior. The image of the "Amazon" taking to the streets in violent rejection of female submission had frightened supporters of traditional gender roles from the earliest entry of women into the labor movement. As Cameron points out, the striking Lawrence women were characterized as "radicals of the worst sort," just as women who participated in other major labor actions, such as the great shirtwaist strike of 1909, had to defend themselves against accusations of prostitution and ''unladylike" behavior. By engaging in public protest against the high cost of food or rent, militant housewives joined what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has described as a tradition of "disorderly women ." The powerful spectacle of women engaged in street actions such a meat boycotts reflected a convergence of "disorderly " female participation in the modern labor movement with the militant defense of traditional female roles described by Kaplan. 7 This scholarship provides a useful framework for the analysis of Jewish women's activism in food protests, particularly in its emphasis on the importance of the study of cultural traditions and communal norms to understanding community reactions to economic conditions and social change. Traditional cultural values and accepted social norms, such as the role of women in the community , can be used to resist threats to traditional community structures , and radical actions can arise from conservative motivations. This consideration of what collective actions reveal about working-class culture and consciousness forms an important basis for later studies of specific actions organized by Jewish housewives in early twentieth-century America.

Women's Consumer Activism in the Progressive Era: Kosher Meat Boycotts and Cost of Living Protests
The Progressive Era saw the development of a distinctive "consumer consciousness," as concerns about working conditions, rising prices, unsafe products, and the inordinate influence of large corporations encouraged reformers and activists to focus attention upon the potential power of organized consumers to effect change.
As the primary managers of the household budget and domestic consumers, women played a prominent role in the Progressive Era consumer's movement, from grassroots protests to participation in national organizations like the Consumers' League. 8 In her "collective biography" of four prominent Jewish women activists, Annelise Orleck notes that these women developed their political consciousness at an early age from ''watching their mothers battle to improve their families' standard of living." Responsible for the well-being of their families, immigrant and working-class mothers "saw their homes as directly linked to the larger economy and fought to keep them safe from deprivation." This connection of domestic duty to the public marketplace often translated into collective action against the difficulties of life in urban, industrial America. Orleck points out that five times between 1902 and 1908, Jewish mothers "organized and picketed, boycotted and marched in protest over increases in staple food prices and rents." 9 Two such instances of Jewish women's activism around food issues have been frequently addressed in recent scholarship: a boycott of New York City kosher butcher shops in 1902 that evolved into a riot, and massive and violent cost-of-living protests that engulfed New York City in 1917. Though both incidents have been mentioned at least briefly in many studies of immigrant women's history, each protest receives the most complete treatment in articles by Paula Hyman and Dana Frank,respectively. 10 These studies provide useful models and raise important issues for consideration in the study of the 1910 Providence meat boycott.
In her study of the 1902 kosher meat riot, Hyman makes excellent use of both English-language and Yiddish press coverage to document the strike of Jewish women against the "Beef Trust" perceived as the source of the skyrocketing meat prices.
Hyman describes how the women's actions represented an intersection of traditional, moral economy-based strategies such as those described by Thompson and Gutman with more "modem" tactics inspired by the socialist and labor movements. Refuting, or perhaps more accurately complicating, Gutman's analysis of the boycott as a resurgence of relatively apolitical, atavistic behaviors of communal regulation, Hyman describes the housewives' protest as the political strategy of a disenfranchised group.
Though the boycott was based in part on communal traditions reflecting the values of a "moral economy," Hyman asserts that the strategy was more importantly an expression of the women's sophisticated understanding of modem economic structures of supply and demand and of their power as consumers. Hyman addresses the efficacy of women's community networks, contrasting the housewives' initial neighborhoodbased protest strategies with the attempts of various reform and Socialist organizations to organize and formalize the movement. While raising interesting questions about the short-lived duration of the organized protest and the seeming failure to develop lasting political ties from the boycott experience, Hyman ultimately concludes that the kosher meat boycott politicized the participants, providing a "prelude to the explosion of women activists in the great garment industry strikes at the end of the decade." 11 Dana Frank's description of the violent street protests by Jewish housewives in New York over the high cost of living in 1917 provides one of the most thoroughly considered analyses of women's consumer activism and its relation to more formalized political efforts. Frank compares the motivations and goals of the housewives in the strike with those of Socialist organizers, many of whom were also women. Though the cost-of-living protests differed from the 1902 boycott in that kosher foods were not the central focus, Frank's article raises several important points that can be used for comparison. Both protests centered on concerns about abrupt decreases in the community's standard of living defined by forced changes in accustomed dietary habits. Both protests also included organizational assistance and strategy from the Socialist Party. Like Hyman, Frank points out that, while Socialist organizers desired to capitalize on the motivation and solidarity displayed by the housewives' grassroots protests, the Socialist leadership was fairly ambivalent about the efficacy of consumer politicization as a strategy, preferring to focus on produceroriented tactics such as the campaign for a living wage. Frank argues that for working-class housewives, consumer activism was a form of labor organization, as their work was to manage the home and provide for their families through efficient shopping, and thus, their "workplace" was the marketplace. This echoes Kaplan's assertion that the female consciousness of traditional women has not been properly integrated into Socialist and other reform movements. 12 The examples of Jewish women's consumer activism described by Hyman and Frank succeed in reconstructing the figure of the Jewish housewife, generally considered apolitical and conservative, as a potential agent of radical social action in defense of her community. As Orleck points out, the "frequency of Jewish housewives' protests in the years following 1902 suggests that these immigrant women saw themselves engaged in a common struggle to protect the quality of life of the Jewish working-class family." This struggle was intimately connected to the activism of Jewish women in the labor movement. The working daughters of Jewish housewives learned their radicalism from watching their mothers' struggles, and activist garment workers often retained their militancy after marrying and becoming housewives themselves. The life of Clara Lemlich Shavelson provides one vivid example ofthis intergenerational interaction: after gaining her first experience in organized community protest during the New York rent strikes of 1907, Lemlich went on to become one of the key figures of the 1909 shirtwaist-makers' strike, a prominent labor activist, and the leader of successful housewives' meat boycotts during the Depression. Cameron also connects women's neighborhood activism with broader activities of protest, asserting that food boycotts and similar actions served to "radicalize neighbors and kin, thus broadening the extent and focus of dissent." Beyond the specific conditions that instigate a particular boycott or protest, the mobilization of women's community networks could, in some situations, "generate into a coherent attack upon an entire system of exploitation," as in the 1912 Lawrence textile strikes. 13 This scholarship indicates that many issues pertaining to Jewish housewives' activism remain open to interpretation. Is the consumer activism illustrated by kosher meat boycotts an expression of sophisticated political consciousness or an echo of traditional methods of community self-regulation? Does the consciousness expressed by these mass actions around food issues reflect a radical vision of a more humane society or a conservative defense of traditional communal relationships and gender roles? Has consumer activism in the form of mass actions proven an effective strategy--either in resolving economic issues or in politicizing traditionally disempowered groups? Further examination of other instances of these early consumer actions in immigrant communities , such as the Providence kosher meat boycott, may provide insights that can illuminate these questions.

Jewish Immigration and the Roots of Jewish Women's Food Activism
While the scholarship on food activism in immigrant communities provides important insights into the role of Jewish women as potential economic and political actors , it generally gives cursory attention to the ways that specific aspects of Jewish activism. Glenn's explanation of women's position as "breadwinners" in the Jewish household provides a basis for understanding Jewish women's attitudes toward their roles as consumers and as activists. The traditional concept of the ideal Jewish housewife as a woman able to provide for her family through her shrewd management of household resources and at times through her own commercial endeavors sanctioned the actions of Jewish women in the marketplace, providing support for the housewife activists described by Hyman,Frank and Orleck. 15 This image is amplified and complicated by other scholars, such as Andrew Heinze, who considers the Jewish housewife , or baleboste, as the principle consumer in the Jewish family, a primary agent for Jewish assimilation into mainstream, middleclass American culture. This suggestion raises the tensions that confronted Jewish women, like their counterparts in other immigrant communities, as they sought to both maintain traditional customs and roles and fit into and succeed in American society.
Kosher foods-the main issue of the Providence boycott-are central to this issue. As a cultural identifier that separated Jews from their neighbors, adherence to kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, proved a point of both cohesion and division within the Jewish community. As German Reform Jews, generally more assimilated, often rejected kashrut, keeping kosher became a source of identity for Eastern European Orthodox Jews. In her examination of the transformation of Jewish culture, Jenna Weissman Joselit explains the costs and pressures of keeping kosher from both within and without the Jewish community. Noting not only the economic costs of maintaining kashrut (meat is more expensive and extra cooking utensils are required), Joselit also describes how the professionalization of home economics and the rise of "scientific cookery" induced many Progressive reformers to "wage war" against kosher foods.
This, like the opposition from the Reform community, caused kosher food to be an important focal point for Eastern European Jews seeking to preserve their traditions.
As the protectors of the home, Jewish women no doubt felt this conflict most strongly. 16

The Jewish Community of South Providence: Collective Action and Local History
Although the body of literature about the immigrant Jewish community in Providence is relatively small, it is interesting to note that what scholarship exists often addresses similar issues of community cohesion and assimilation. In her article on Jewish identity in early twentieth-century Providence, Laura Grossfield focuses on the institution-building impulses of upwardly-mobile Jews. Grossfield notes that as Jews moved from the immigrant-dominated areas of South Providence and the North End to the more economically-advantaged East Side, the institutions they developed mirrored those of the dominant American society. She sees in this a trend towards the creation of a secular Jewish identity that would "enable them simultaneously to acculturate and yet maintain their Jewishness." 17 Patrick Janson also discusses the "organizational impulses" of Jews in Providence, noting a predominance of institutions which promoted Jewish acculturation into mainstream American society rather than resistance to assimilation. 18 The most substantial treatment of the immigrant Jewish community in Act. Widespread anxiety about rising prices, unsafe food, and corrupt politicians and business magnates gave rise to public outcry and organized actions against the "food trusts" suspected of controlling the nation's food supply and contributing to the "high cost ofliving." Efforts to address the "high cost of living" in the early twentieth century were part of the "amalgam of social criticism, popular protest, political restructuring, economic regulation, and social welfare legislation" known as the Progressive movement.' A wide variety ofreformers mobilized to address the myriad problems of"modern conditions," from the spread of tuberculosis to the control of urban areas by corrupt political machines. While incorporating activists from all levels of American society, the Progressive movement included a disproportionately high percentage of female participants, with many of the most significant organizations and reform efforts engineered by middle-and upper-class women's groups.
One of the arguments for women's involvement in Progressive reform movements derived in large part from a conception of "municipal housekeeping." Frequently used by suffragists as a justification for women's political participation, municipal housekeeping applied the female duty to protect and nurture to managing issues in the public sphere. Closely connected to middle-class conceptions of female domesticity, the issues addressed by "municipal housekeepers" often centered around protection for children and laboring women, housing, sanitation, and food safety; but Progressive women also saw protesting political corruption and agitating for business regulation as an extension of their domestic role. While many of the civic organizations formed to promote Progressive reforms were composed of middle-class members, a number of cross-class alliances were forged. One such alliance was the Women's Trade Union League, founded by middle-and upper-class women to help working-class women organize unions.2 Cross-class alliances may have seemed natural, even necessary, to many women in the Progressive Era, as the anxieties of modern living made women at all levels of society more aware of the need for organization and government protection.
As Nancy Dye points out, confronting the problems created by industrialization and an economy seemingly controlled by "faceless interests" caused even middle-class women to recognize that the concept of"separate spheres" was no longer appropriate; the home and the threatening outside world were linked and private issues were now seen as public and political matters. Dye asserts that it was this redefinition of the relationship between the home and community that characterized the Progressive Era. Hofstadter notes that consumer consciousness provided a "focus for the common interests of all classes that had to concern themselves over family budgets," that cut "across occupational and class lines, and did a great deal to dissolve the old nineteenth -century American habit of viewing political issues solely from the standpoint of the producer.',6 Women, as the primary purchasers of food and household goods, were the leaders and grassroots of Progressive consumer-oriented strategy. The most noted efforts were, again, orchestrated by upper-and middle-class women, as these classes had the most income to wield in "conscientious consumption." Initially , consumer strategies were used as part of movements to protect industrial workers , not consumers. One of the primary consumer organizations, the National Consumers' League, was founded in 1899 to "unite consumers for the purpose of protecting women and children in the garment trades against industrial exploitation. " The NCL ' s "White Label Campaign" encouraged consumers to purchase only linens and other garments made by shops that maintained acceptable working conditions for employees. Eventually, the League expanded its activities to include agitation for pure food and drug legislation and participation in the anti-trust food boycotts that took place during 1910. 7 Such boycotts became a prominent strategy for Progressive Era activists concerned with food and other cost of living issues. Inspired by tactics developed by the organized labor movement, food activists used boycotts to stage "strikes" against the various corporate trusts suspected of artificially raising prices or providing substandard or dangerous products. Unlike the spontaneous collective actions described in E. P. Thompson's studies of eighteenth-century food riots, the food protests of the Progressive Era were relatively structured incidents, with planned meetings and demonstrations, which provided opportunities for women of all classes to take on leadership roles and activate community networks. 8 The South Providence kosher meat boycott took place only three months after the end of a nationwide meat boycott and two months after a series of very turbulent kosher meat boycotts in New York. While it is impossible to determine whether the Jewish housewives of South Providence were directly inspired by these events, it is likely that the prevalence of the boycott strategy may have influenced their decision to strike against their neighborhood butcher shops. Because these events occurred so close in time to the South Providence action, and because they received fairly extensive coverage in the press, an examination of these meat boycotts will serve to illustrate the goals, strategies, and debates that characterized such consumer actions in 1910.

The Meat Boycott of 1910
As Eric Rauchway notes, the high cost of living was widely considered ''the biggest problem in the country" in 1910. 9 Debate about the causes of the perceived increase in the costs of staple commodities ranged from the overuse of farm land and overpopulation caused by massive immigration to the higher standard of living now demanded by Americans. 10 Nearly all theorists also cast suspicion on the major corporate interests that had taken over much of the country's food production, giving rise to accusations that the "Mille Trust," the "Beef Trust," and the "Egg Trust" were using the modern advances of cold storage and railway transportation to manipulate prices by withholding supplies and artificially increasing demand. 11 The growing faith in the power of organized consumers to resolve the economic and social problems created by "modern conditions" is vividly illustrated by a massive meat boycott that swept the nation in 1910. Engineered by the National Anti-Food Trust League, an organization started in Washington, D.C., by a group of women with connections to Congress, the boycott quickly spread as thousands of clubwomen and working people undertook a thirty-day pledge to abstain from meat in an effort to break the "Meat Trust" and force prices down. Though the outcomes of this "anti-food trust" movement are difficult to determine, a brief examination of the 1910 meat boycott highlights many of the issues and debates surrounding Progressive Era consumer activism and provides a context for understanding women's activism around food issues.
In early January of 1910, the New York Times reported that the ''women of the National capital, including a number of wives of congressmen," proposed to counteract the power of the major producers and distributors of basic commodities by organizing "1,000,000 American householders into an enormous boycotting machine." Promising to strike at one overpriced, trust-controlled commodity at a time, the National Anti-Food Trust League selected the "Meat Trust" as its first target. The organization requested that members sign pledges to abstain from buying or eating meat for a defined time period, usually thirty days. Officers were elected at a meeting   14

Boycott Strategies and Public Anxieties
The League's meat boycott attained this level of nationwide participation despite considerable criticism of its strategies. In addition to the predictable outcry from the meat industry, critiques of the League's boycott tactics were leveled by the press, numerous "experts," and, most significantly, several major labor organizations.
These critiques, and the League's responses, illustrate the debate that accompanied the development of consumer-oriented collective strategies.
In addition to the "no meat" pledges, the League encouraged the use of other tactics to encourage unity among boycotters and to allay anxieties about the consequences of a non-meat diet. In Baltimore, the Federation of Labor printed fifty thousand buttons proclaiming, "I don't buy meat: do you?," to be distributed among the various unions in the city. Participants in St. Louis declared their support for the boycott by purchasing buttons printed with the slogan, "Meat shop closed for thirty days." 15 Sympathetic restaurant owners encouraged diners to select vegetable dishes.
In New York City, members of major manufacturing firms sat down to a "meatless luncheon" at the Machinery Club. The Anti-Food Trust League assembled a committee of home economics experts to devise substitutes for food staples likely to be targeted for boycott, and issued a list developed by this committee giving recipes and formulas for foods "believed to be capable of offering as much nutrition as beef" 16 While most of the antitrust protesters adhered to the peaceful nature of the boycott, some cities reported instances of violence and crime, as some strike supporters attacked purchasers and sellers of meat and others used the anti-meat sentiment as justification for looting. 17 Many food activists and social reformers greeted the Anti-Food Trust League's attack on the meat industry with calls for ''universal vegetarianism," which were met with equally fervent condemnations of the no-meat diet by advocates of meat as a source of protein and nutrition. In February, Dr. Horace Fletcher gave a lecture before a group of Pittsburgh clubwomen, predicting the end of meat eating in the United States within ten years. 18 In a large article in the New York Times, Dr. Harvey W.
Wiley of the U.S. Department of Chemistry cautioned that complete abstinence from meat would be "as foolish as it would be criminal." In addition to destroying the "great cattle, sheep, and hog raising industries of the country," and crippling farmers, the boycott could result in the physical and mental deterioration of the American people. In vivid language, Wiley warned that a reduction in meat consumption would jeopardize America's international standing: "We might become a race of mollycoddles! We certainly would not be able to maintain our position in the world, for much of the vim, alertness, energy, and inventiveness that characterize the Americans as a nation comes from the admirable mixed food that we eat." 19 Wiley's position echoed the sentiments of the New York Times editorial board, which also linked national meat consumption with national strength. Decrying the "nitrogen starvation" that would inevitably result from a vegetable-based diet, one Times editorial worried that the meat boycott would put the United States on the same footing as other nations, who "by necessity, never by preference," adhere to a vegetarian diet. "Those races, taking them by and large, are a poor, spindling lot, without mental or physical energy enough to attempt or even to imagine any escape Women's engagement in the meat boycott incorporated both the "municipal housekeeping" theme of the suffrage movement and growing interest in the recent successes of working women in organizing for better conditions. NPWS President Sofia Loebinger blamed the oppressive increase in food prices on "man's indifference," asserting that, "Woman is the one chiefly affected, and she has a right to be up in arms for a voice in this vital matter. We ought to have woman inspectors in all the markets and stores." Comfort-Brooks connected her efforts to promote the meat boycott among various classes of women to the successful 1909 shirtwaist makers' strike, the ''Uprising of the 20,000 ," which showed that "when women get together ... results must come. " 25 Despite this connection to prevalent feminist themes and actions, the anti-food trust movement revealed significant tensions within these cross-class female alliances, as well as between women and men in working-class organizations. While labor activists like Rose Schneiderman accepted the difficulties in forming alliances with upper-and middle-class women's groups , the distance between the experiences of the two classes of women was at times exploited by the press to make the boycott seem frivolous. In one series of statements , clubwoman Anita Comfort-Brooks provided easy fodder for a New York press already somewhat ironic about the efficacy of the meat boycott strategy. Asserting that "it is about time that we did something for the poor people," Comfort-Brooks admitted that "I have been living in a hotel for the last ten years, and so I do not know just how much women have to pay for meats, coal oil, vinegar, and such things: but I know that it is too much. Why, a small steak for luncheon at a restaurant that used to cost 75 cents now costs $1. delegate , denounced the council: "You men are a bunch of quitters," she cried, "and you voted down the resolution simply because the working women were first to start the movement here. " 28 This accusation voiced frustration with the reluctance of many union leaders to accept consumer-oriented strategies, which were generally associated with women. As boycotts held the potential for the loss of many jobs for laboring men, union leaders continued to prefer producer-oriented strategies, such as the agitation for a living wage.
In contrast , the club women and suffrage activists involved in the meat boycott dealt with a different level of male authority . In one encounter , Loebinger and a group of delegates from the National Progressive Woman's Suffrage Union confronted an alderman in New Jersey about the issue of cold storage of meat, after attending a board meeting from which women were usually barred. The alderman, Joseph Schloss, was a butcher by trade and responded aggressively to the women's presence, saying "These women ought to be at home minding their families ... No woman can make an intelligent argument." To Schloss's assertion that he "represents the dealers, and it is to the dealers the consumers must look to their meat," Loebinger replied that, to the contrary, "It's to the consumers the dealers must look to for their patronage." 29

The Meat Industry's Response
The frrst reports of the Anti-Food Trust League's protest noted that meat dealers appeared largely unconcerned by the boycott. Reports from Chicago note that the major meat packing companies refused to take notice of the boycotts and declined interviews. 30 As the boycott grew in size and reach, however, some meat dealers grew uneasy. The New York Times reported that major meat packers had threatened to target Ohio--the state with the earliest response to the boycott-by refusing to reduce prices to retailers in the states, threatening to sell their meat to other areas and intimating that striking communities in Ohio would "pay higher prices in the future for any losses the packers suffer now." 31 Soon after the meat boycott began to spread, many cities began reporting of its success. By the end of January, Omaha announced that butchers had reduced prices; prices dropped in Pittsburgh by two cents for some kinds of meat; and Boston noted a decline in meat costs of two to four cents a pound. Baltimore reported that many large dealers had a 35 percent reduction in sales once the boycott began. Several cities also reported the closing of many butcher shops, mostly small independent retailers. 32 This decline in prices lasted only a short while, however. By March 23, meat prices were up again by two cents a pound in New York. The New York Times reported that "all sides" in the conflict admitted that meat prices were the highest since the Civil War and were likely to keep rising. 33

Governmental Action Against the Packers
Despite the somewhat transitory effect on meat prices, the boycott did seem to

The Rise of Consumer Consciousness
While the concrete outcomes of the 1910 meat boycott are difficult to determine, the protest seems to have had the lasting impact of raising consumer consciousness. If nothing else, participants in the boycott experienced a sense of their power as consumers. Interestingly, this consciousness was often expressed in terms comparing consumer power to the power of organized labor or even the business trusts that were under attack. In St. Louis, a city employee participating called for the formation of a permanent "consumers' trust" to defend consumer interests. 35 In a letter to the New York Times, a reader from East Orange, New Jersey-"a householder and a family man,"--called for New York City to join the meat strike. "We hear a great deal about organized capital, organized labor: why not have the organized consumer?" 36 Maud Nathan, President of the Consumers' League, asserted that, While we do not stand for the boycott principle, we do stand for combined efforts to bring about better conditions than those at present, when the food supply of the people is in the hands of a few large concerns. The consumer, after all, is the real master of the situation, and ifhe sets earnestly about it he can compel fair treatment even from the trusts. 37 Despite its mostly negative editorials about the meat boycott as a strategy, the New York Times asserted that a positive outcome of the nationwide boycott movement was the development of "a class consciousness and a class organization" among consumers: [T]his may mean that what are called labor and capital are no longer to have a monopoly of organization, and that at last the third and most deeply interested party to every quarrel between employers and employees is to have a word to say for itself .. There will be power behind it whenever it is raised, and, whenever the power happens to be directed with wisdom, results will be sure to follow-results likely to be equally surprising and unpleasant to those who hitherto have been wont so coolly to ignore the public.
The Times expressed the hope that this sense of power would "make it easier for public to become articulate beyond just election days." 38 The Anti-Food Trust League's nationwide meat boycott is an important example of the debates that raged around the perceived economic crisis in America and the appropriate measures to solve it. Though rejected by several major labor organizations as an ineffective strategy, the League's meat strike revealed how much Progressive reformers and other associations had learned from labor movement tactics.
The host of objections to the League's anti-food trust movement offered by labor leaders-from the fear of driving independent meat dealers and small retailers out of business to the complaint that abstaining from meat would lower the quality oflife for working men-were rooted primarily in a distrust of the effectiveness of the consumer boycott strategy. According to many in the labor movement, in the battle to manipulate the market forces of supply and demand, the advantage lay with the meat packers.
Despite this pessimism within the labor movement, the meat boycott can be seen as a politicizing experience for its participants, particularly women. The general meat boycott of 1910 provided an outlet for women's organizing, and perhaps laid a foundation for the more effective consumer movements of the Depression and New Deal. Most importantly for this thesis, the Anti-Food Trust League's meat boycott emphasized the centrality of food issues as a topic for public discourse and a focus for women's political action that sometimes crossed both class and ethnic lines. The following chapters will consider the particular significance of food issues within the immigrant Jewish community, as well as the Eastern European religious and intellectual traditions that contributed to Jewish women's activism. As will be seen in the discussion of the kosher meat protests that followed soon after the end of the League's boycott, the intersection of Jewish women's domestic and communal roles provided a powerful impetus for grassroots organization around food issues. Dieticians waged war on the preferred tastes of Eastern European Jews, charging that their predilection for sour and pickled foods caused "irritation," which made "assimilation more difficult." According to professional home economists, "Jewish dietary problems" contributed to constipation , excess weight, anxiety, and the general emotionalism seen as a principal problem in Jewish communities. Jewish mothers supposedly were too indulgent in feeding their children, neglecting to impart to them the important "value of self-denial." Diner observes that by 1910 these assessments had been taken up by many members of the Jewish community itself, noting that "leaders of American Jewry-writers, rabbis, teachers, and communal activists from within and without the immigrant community-asked repeatedly why Jewish homes seemed to be, as they saw them, such hotbeds of tension and discord.
Bad food was high on their list of answers." 12  The certification and employment of the community shohet has long been a topic of communal contention. According to Harold Gastwirt, originally all Jews, including women, were permitted to slaughter, so long as they were properly trained in the laws of shehitah. Ashkenazic authorities eventually excluded women from becoming shohatim because of their "delicate constitution." In Talmudic times, ritual slaughterers also sold the meat they prepared, which often gave rise to suspicions of laxness in the shohatim 's adherence to shehitah. Rabbis increasingly took control of shehitah training and inspection, and in the early part of the fourteenth century, a division between the slaughtering and selling of meat was noted in several European communities, with the retail aspect relegated to kosher butchers. 16 Control over the inspection of kosher slaughtering practices and butcher shops came under the jurisdiction of the kehillah, which paid the shohet from fees collected from the community. Rabbis also collected fees for their inspection duties, which often resulted in intense rivalries between rabbis and suspicions of collusion and corruption.
Despite incidences of abuse and political infighting, the supervision of kosher meat in Jewish communities in Europe was at the very least overseen by a communal system that had been established over centuries and that was invested with religious authority. Historians of American kosher supervision assert that the development of a similar system in the United States was slow. Berman notes that, in the United States, in most instances the communities are without power, the authority of the rabbi is not respected, and the shohet has become a workman paid by the butcher.
The result is that in many American cities, not only does the Jewish community not receive the benefit of strictly kosher meat and the revenues of a Shehitah tax, but it is treated to spectacles of irresponsible rabbinical bans, strikes, lockouts, and even the perpetration of crimes. 17 Rasia Diner suggests that problems in the supervision of kosher meat arose from the "basics of the political structure" of the United States, asserting that the state and federal governments were not particularly interested in religious functionaries, and the general emphasis on laissez faire economics gave Jewish butchers free reign to set prices and to call their products kosher. 18 It was not until the 1920s that Jewish communities in the United States developed communal structures that were able to effectively supervise the slaughter and sale of kosher meat. These structures were typified by the institution of the vaad, a permanent committee comprised of representatives of Orthodox synagogues in a given city which was authorized to pay ritual slaughterers, license kosher meat shops, and hire overseers to inspect kosher butcher stores. Even with the establishment of committees such as the vaad, however, conflicts over the supervision of kosher meat extended well into the 1930s. 19 These issues of communal politics were further complicated by the structure of the meat industry in the United States. After the development of the American railway system and technological advances in refrigeration in the late nineteenth century, most butchering and meat packing was done in the Midwest, primarily in Chicago, which became the principle meat supplier for the Eastern United States. 20 The dictates of shehitah made this system less than ideal for kosher meat suppliers, as kosher law requires meat to be rinsed and salted within seventy-two hours of slaughter. The transport of dressed meat from Chicago to stores in the East risked exceeding this time limit. Donna Gabaccia notes that, though the higher prices generally charged for kosher meat enticed Chicago meat packers to hire a shohet to prepare kosher meat for shipment to East Coast communities, Jewish consumers were skeptical, and continued to prefer locally slaughtered meat. 21 The suspicion of the Chicago-based meat industry that inspired much food activism in the Progressive Era was particularly acute for Jews concerned about the ritual purity of their meat supply.
The controversies and complications of kosher meat supervision contributed to the conditions that gave rise to Jewish women's actions against the kosher butchers in their communities. It is important to note that, though Jewish women bore the responsibility for providing their families with kosher meat, they had no formal input in the system that ensured the ritual purity of the meat available to them. As in the nationwide protests against large corporate trusts and corrupt government officials, Jewish women engaged in collective actions in an attempt to enforce the conditions that would enable them to fulfill their religious and domestic duties.

Jewish Identity in the United States and the Kosher Meat Boycotts
The growing Jewish communities in American cities created a high demand for kosher meat. Gabaccia notes that during the first decades of twentieth century, there were more than ten thousand kosher butcher shops in the United States, with nine thousand in New York alone. The additional processing and supervision required by kosher law caused the price of kosher meat to exceed that of non-kosher meat, often by several cents a pound. Joselit attributes the kosher meat riots that broke out periodically in New York City to a snapping of the "thread of endurance" that enabled Jewish housewives to spend extra money on keeping kosher in times of rising prices. 22 The where shops were broken into and meat burned. 9 As tumultuous as the women's attack on the butchers was, this action also reflected extensive community organization. In her influential study of the turbulent and effective kosher meat protests in New York in 1902, Paula Hyman concludes that, rather than express a "preindustrial" sense of a "moral economy ," the kosher meat protest reflected a "sophisticated political mentality emerging in a rapidly changing community." Though the boycott included acts of violence similar to those of premodem food riots, Hyman notes that: Unlike traditional food rioters, the Lower East Side housewives were not demanding the imposition of a just and popular price on retailers. Nor were they forcibly appropriating meat for purchase at a popularly determined fair price, though they did retain a traditional sense of a moral economy in which food should be available at prices which the working classes could afford. Rather, recognizing that prices were set by the operation of the laws of supply and demand, as modified, in this case, by the concentration of the wholesale meat industry, they hit upon a boycott of meat as the most effective way to dramatically curtail demand.
Hyman point out that the women participants in the boycott took on the vocabulary of the organized labor movement, referring to themselves as "strikers" and to those who did not join the boycott as "scabs." This awareness indicates that the Jewish housewives of the Lower East Side were "familiar with the political rhetoric of their day, with the workings of the market economy, and with the potential of consumers to affect the market. " 10 As in later food protest, the use ofthis rhetoric also reflects in the influence of women's increasing participation in labor movement activities, culminated in the garment workers strikes at the end of the decade.
Like other scholars of working-class women ' s actions, Hyman shows how female neighborhood networks were instrumental in organizing and executing the strike. Personal relationships and appeals to community solidarity were used (along with physical force) to encourage women to adhere to the boycotts. "The neighborhood, a form of female network , thus provided the locus of community for the boycott: all were giving up meat together , celebrating dairy shabbosim together , and contributing to the boycott fund. " 11 Hyman also points out how religious traditions played a role in the women ' s organization of the strike. Women went to the synagogues to gain support for the boycott , using the traditional custom of interrupting the Torah reading "when a matter of justice was at stake" to call on Jewish men to encourage their wives to join the protest. The boycott suggests that the compartmentalization of the immigrant community by historians into Orthodox , socialist and anarchist, and Zionist sectors does not do justice to the interplay among the groups. Boundary lines were fluid, and socialist rhetoric tripped easily from the tongues of women who still cared about kosher meat, could cite Biblical passages in Hebrew, and felt at ease in the synagogue. 12 In her analysis of the demographic characteristics of the boycott leaders, Hyman concludes that these organizers were representative of the majority of women in the Lower East Side. The participants in the strike were not the young, unmarried women laborers expected to take part in radical actions, but middle-aged housewives with several children. Most had been in the United States for an average of eleven years, and most were the wives of artisans in the garment trades. Hyman also points out that many of the boycott ' s leaders were neighbors , providing evidence of the activation of informal women ' s networks to organize the strike. 13 In addition to the mobilization of neighborhood networks, the strike was also driven by more formal organizations generated by the local communit y leadership. Like Hyman, Frank asserts that the women who participated in the cost of living protests were not engaging in "prepolitical" behavior, but instead expressing their own politics and efficacy: When they protested against rising food prices, New York's immigrant Jewish women demonstrated their own perceptions of political economy: who they believed was in power; what they thought should be done to alleviate their distress, and, most importantly, how they believed they as women could affect the economic system in which they were enmeshed. Through their boycott, demonstrations, and neighborhood solidarity, the city's Jewish women acted upon their own model for political action. 18 Consumer activism-expressed by food boycotts----was a practical strategy for these women, as it allowed them to act within the marketplace "at the point at which they were accustomed to encountering it." "They knew from experience in haggling with local grocers that prices were not absolute; they knew that purchasing power could affect prices, if applied craftily; and they knew that grocers' stocks were extremely perishable." In addition, local markets were generally run by other members of the neighborhood. Day to day interactions would make local women quite familiar with the produce merchants and butchers they dealt with, many of which were likely to be neighbors or kin. 19 Frank refers to Kaplan's theory of female consciousness, noting that the obligation to care for their families was a primary factor in motivating the women in the cost of living protest. The protesting women "demanded their rights to feed their children, demanded that the market yield up a "living" to their families." Unlike Hyman, however, Frank describes the women's protest as closer to the basis of the premodern "moral economy," noting that "in voicing their demands as consumers,   My earliest memories are of Friday shopping trips on Willard Avenue, the Jewish marketplace. The street, from Prairie A venue to Plain Street, bustled with activity from early morning. I remember the bearded, long-frocked rabbinical butchers hustling to their chicken stores, the windows of fish stores full of glassy-eyed mackerel, perch, and whitefish glistening on their beds of ices, and the proprietor of the egg store separating the brown shell from the white shell eggs, which for some unaccountable reason were priced differently. Willard A venue was a street of smells, many of them unpleasant, but on Friday the air was rich with the hot, delicious odor of freshly-baked bread, the challah which every housewife carried home. 6 As noted in previous chapters, kosher meat was a staple of Jewish food shopping, and the presence of"rabbinical butchers" was an important neighborhood asset. Horvitz describes the evolution of kosher meat availability in Providence, noting the development of kosher butcher shops in the Willard Avenue shopping district.
The kosher butchers and poultry stores did a thriving business. One would pick a live chicken, and the shohet (ritual slaughterer) would kill it. There was Berman the butcher, whose wife delivered the meat orders on foot, Bloom   Such accounts suggest the ways in which the lives of ethnic retailers were interwoven with those of their neighbors. The butcher shops that came under attack from the housewives of South Providence were run by neighborhood families; the protesting housewives no doubt knew these families on a personal , day-to-day basis.
As will be noted in the following examination of the South Providence kosher meat boycott, these neighborhood relationships often play a significant role in the development and resolution of community conflict.

The Boycott Against the Willard Avenue Butchers
The The decision to take action against the kosher butchers in South Providence was made on June 21, at a mass meeting in Bazar Hall, the neighborhood community center located, like most of the butcher shops, on Willard Avenue. Though it is unclear who organized the meeting, an article in the Providence Daily Journal the following day noted that the "hall was packed to the doors" with seven hundred housewives in attendance , and that the "declaration of war--or rather, the order to strike-was carried with a shout that could be heard several blocks away." 11 This declaration included the vow that "no orthodox Jewish woman will buy an ounce of meat from a Jewish market , and the regular diet in Hebrew families until further order will be fish, vegetables and cheese. " As in the general meat boycotts that had swept the nation earlier in the year, the women urged one another to go without meat , rallying support with cries of "Boycott the butchers! ... Ask your friends to live on fish and vegetables! " The boycott strategy was unanimously approved by all present at the meeting , and a committee was appointed to oversee the organization of In fact, most of the vitriol in the conflict seems to have come from the butchers and their families. The Journal noted that the butchers heaped insults upon the strikers and recorded that one boycotter reported being "held up" and assaulted by the female family members of one of the butchers. Another woman declared that a butcher had told her that the butchers planned to keep the meat "for a month if necessary," and force the community to buy it, no matter how decayed it was. In addition to these aggressive encounters, the butchers reportedly employed both trickery and trade solidarity to circumvent the boycott measures. During the first day of the boycott, reports were made that the butchers had gone from house to house delivering meat that in many instances had not been ordered. Members of the boycott committee went to these homes and urged the families to return the meat. In addition, the South Providence butchers sent representatives to shops in the North End to prevent the sale of meat to women participating in the boycott. 15 Community solidarity, however, seems to have been largely on the side of the boycotters. In one interesting incident, two peddlers came into the neighborhood selling live chickens for twenty-two cents a pound. Though the butchers reportedly offered to purchase the fowls for considerably higher prices, the peddlers refused to sell to them-saying that they were "looking for the custom of the women and not the butchers, and that the latter could not have the chickens at any price." When the butchers forced the peddlers to move away from Willard A venue, they went to nearby Staniford Street, where the striking women purchased all of the chickens and took them to the kosher slaughterer. 16 The South Providence butchers seemed unmoved by the demands of the protesters. The Evening Bulletin noted that the butchers considered the boycott a "huge joke," and quoted one of the butchers as mocking the mass organizational meeting at Bazar Hall, saying, "Why, there were nothing but Socialists and boys at that meeting last night." According to the Journal, a meeting between the boycott committee and the butchers brought no agreement, aside from a concession from three butchers to comply with the requests for cleaner conditions. Even so, a resolution was According to the newspaper accounts, the primary motivation for the action against the kosher butchers of South Providence was the high cost of kosher meat.
The Journal noted that speakers at the first mass organizational meeting asserted that the price of kosher meat had tripled over the past three or four years, increasing from eight to twenty-four cents a pound. Both the butchers and the rabbi responsible for supervising the quality of kosher meat in Providence asserted that this increase in price reflected general trends in the cost of meat across the country, a position supported by the massive meat protests that swept the nation some months earlier. Rabbi Israel S.
Rubinstein, the leader of several Orthodox Jewish congregations in Providence, held jurisdiction over the city's nine shohatim and seventeen kosher butcher shops. 19 In an interview with the Evening Bulletin, Rabbi Rubinstein admitted that ''the prices are without question high, but the general increase among Gentiles as well as Jews is explanation enough for this." Rabbi Rubinstein also stated that the Jewish community was accustomed to paying higher prices for kosher meat, asserting that ''this is one place where a Jew's religion costs him considerably, but the rule is iron-clad and no one would think of breaking it." 20 But while exorbitant prices may have been the most obvious motivation for community protest, another issue seems to have provided the flashpoint for the South Providence boycott. At the first organizational meeting at Bazar Hall, speakers asserted that one of the Willard Avenue butchers had been selling meat from a cow that was infected with tuberculosis. The Journal reported that the butcher had purchased a "broken-down, tuberculous cow" which he cut up and sold to his customers at twenty-four cents a pound. When the farmer tried to collect payment for the cow, the butcher refused to pay, on the grounds that the animal had been diseased.
The conflict went to civil court, and though the case was eventually settled in favor of the butcher, public outrage at the suggestion of the butcher's guilt fanned the flames of protest. 21 It would be difficult to construct a more inflammatory scenario for this particular time period and this specific community. Spreading rapidly through the densely populated tenement neighborhoods where many immigrants settled, tuberculosis presented one of the greatest public health problems of the early decades of the century, addressed by numerous charitable organizations and medical institutions developed to combat "the white plague." The very mention of tuberculosis had the potential to incite panic in the overcrowded triple-decker neighborhoods of South Providence. In addition, as noted in previous chapters, the quality of meat had become a matter of national concern. Anxiety about urban conditions and the "cleanliness" of all manner of foodstuffs permeated the public consciousness. stating that ''we Jews attribute much of our longevity and our ability to stand persecution to the care with which our food has been prepared throughout the ages." Like other Jewish religious officials and scientific experts during the Progressive Era, Rubinstein used evidence from modem studies and secular authorities to justify kosher practices , Rabbi Rubinstein asserted that "our belief that pain which is suffered by an animal makes it unfit for meat is supported by many scientists, " and that the "inspection of meat by the Jews is so perfect that in 1900 the military department of the English Government advised that kosher meat be bought whenever possible." Rabbi Rubinstein defended the kosher inspection process in Providence by affirming the superiority of the traditional religious practices of shehitah while acknowledging the incorporation of modem methods of sanitation and inspection: "The whole Jewish system of slaughtering has been built up with these two objects in mind-to prevent the use of diseased meat, or meat of animals who have suffered. The origin of the system dates back for more than 3200 years, but the rules which applied in those early days do not apply to-day. As modem methods of inspection have been adopted, we have absorbed them, and to-day our methods are as modern and as rigid as any in the world. Zalzman" was listed among those who delivered "fiery and excited" speeches at the last, "most largely attended" meeting of the boycott reported in the press. 36

"Socialists and boys"
Given the prominent role of women in the boycott, it is interesting that the Journal and the Evening Bulletin placed such emphasis on male participation. Beyond the obvious gender bias of the period, this focus may also reflect concern about or interest in the kind of men involved in the protest. The comment of the butcher quoted in the Evening Bulletin that the boycott had been organized by "Socialists and boys" not only discounted the significance of the neighborhood women's participation, but also implied that the protest had an explicit (and dismissible) political orientation.
Though the press generally stopped short of describing the boycott as a Socialist action, the organizational centers of the protest strongly suggest Socialist involvement. Frank notes in her study of the 1917 cost ofliving protests in New York, the women who engaged in food activism were generally not the "poorest of the poor," but rather housewives of some means struggling to maintain a certain quality oflife. 43 If the Willard A venue boycott is seen as a practical means for combating an economic problem, the fact that it did not spread may suggest that the North End did not have similar problems with their butchers or had found different, community-specific means of dealing with them.
The localized nature of the South Providence boycott also may have contributed to relatively nonviolent character of the protest. The close proximity of the butcher shops to the protesters' homes and the predominance of women and families in the demonstrations may have discouraged the outbreak of havoc and destruction.
[See Figure 1 and Table 1 Table   2.] In addition to this contradiction of the boycott committee's intentions, it is difficult to ascertain whether the plans to institute a committee to oversee the butcher shops were successful. An official body for the supervision of kashrut was not charter. There is also some indication that an earlier association was founded in 1916, "to aid and assist in the enforcement of the pure food laws, education, charity, and benevolence"-but again, little evidence to connect this organization with the kosher meat boycott. 47 The perseverance of the boycotted butchers could suggest that pragmatic economic relationships may have outweighed political ideals or communal desires to Semonoff and, interestingly enough, Annie Berman, the wife of boycotted butcher Benjamin Berman and eventual proprietor of a market in her own right. 49 The only sign of continued political involvement among the female boycott participants is that of Annie Weinbaum, the wife of seltzer manufacturer Barnet Weinbaum, who later ran (unsuccessfully) for school board office on the Socialist ticket. 50 While it is difficult to determine if the kosher meat boycott increased Jewish women's activism in Providence, these indications of an activist consciousness rooted in women's traditional community work present intriguing possibilities for further research.
The question of the boycott's lasting effect on community organizations also remains unanswered. As Hyman observes, even in the larger, more elaborate protests described in Boston and New York, the organizational structures devised to run the boycotts and lobby for the community interests generally did not survive long after the immediate conflict subsided. 51 As noted above, the South Providence boycott did not seem to give rise to any long-standing organization, and the committee appointed to ensure that the butchers adhered to community standards would most likely have been closed to women, being concerned with religious matters. Even after the institution of the Vaad, the supervision of kosher food in Providence was not without controversy , as evidenced by a series of editorials in the Providence Jewish Herald in the 1950s. 52 It would be interesting to trace the issue of organized kosher supervision in Providence after the conclusion of the boycott, particularly in regards to women's involvement.
Rather than producing definitive answers, these observations about the South