In the Pale of Settlement, Jews had a peculiar situation  to face, there were extremely low numbers of Jews involved in agriculture compared to non-Jews, low numbers involved in heavy industry, which gained momentum as Russia entered its industrial revolution, and there was a decline in Jewish mercantilism.

Life in the Sunday Jew Market, Moscow, Russia. William H. Rau. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

All of these factors contributed to an overwhelming number of Jewish skilled workers or artisans, and the Pale was extremely overpopulated, by having the Tsars continually relocate more people into a smaller area, and having a lower death rate than most of Russia. The Pale wasn’t the center of economic change that it needed to be, and 37% of people were involved in artisanal work, and 49 percent of those were involved in some form of needlework, mostly tailoring. The “Jewish industrial revolution” that tried to take hold was often backwards and technologically incompetant, with only 28 workers per factory to Russia’s 43, and only 27 percent of those “factories” were mechanized.

Jewish Paper Shop, Frank Carpenter Collection

In the Pale of Settlement, Jewish women found themselves in a position of power unheard of in a patriarchal society. Young Jewish girls worked while they were young and single, contributing to the economy of the shtetl or town they lived in, and would often hand their entire paycheck over to their mother, who made the major economic decisions for the family.

Being able to support a scholar of a husband was extremely respected and a quote from the time period reflects this, “The wife acted as a legitimate symbol of the female breadwinner for the masses of east European Jews. If the scholars wife worked, why not the merchants, the trader’s, the watchmaker’s, or the tailor’s?”

Women typically found work until they were married, it was seen as temporary, and they were often drawn to artisan shops where they made small goods like matches or cigarettes. Once they were married, Jewish women continued to work inside their often, using their needlework skills to make dresses and other garments, sometimes selling them to a contractor to bring in extra money.

Some chose to run a stall selling household wares, or worked in a shop owned by the family, selling food and other goods. This allowed the wife to become very knowledgeable of the market, spoke the local languages better than their learned husbands, and developed a reputation for being aggressive and shrewd businesswomen. Running a store was believed to be part of the gender role of women at the time, an extension of mothering, being able to run to their kitchen in the back of the shop and back again while she worked. The wife managed the families budget, the sons and husband turned over a better portion of their paycheck to her, her daughters gave up the entirety of theirs.