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“Grace Is Deceitful and Beauty Is Vain”: How Hassidic Women Cope with the Requirement of Shaving One’s Head and Wearing a Black Kerchief

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Abstract

Women’s modesty norms are often perceived as governing women’s bodies and as patriarchal oppression. This study challenges these perspectives, offering a deeper, multi-dimensional picture showing that the reality of the women’s life is much more complicated. The article chose to discuss aspects of modesty among women of one of the most extreme Jewish ultra-Orthodox groups, and in particular, to investigate how they experience an extremely demanding requirement—shaving off the hair on their head upon marriage and covering their head with a black kerchief. The findings show that there are a variety of voices among the women, ranging from the view that these practices are desirable, through the view that they empower the women, to the view that they damage one’s attractiveness and are quite painful.

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Notes

  1. Those few who did so [44] did not investigate it among zealot groups but among modern-Orthodox Jewish women.

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Acknowledgements

The research was conducted for a doctoral study under the supervision of Prof. Menachem Friedman, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Prof. Friedman for his mentoring. In addition, my thanks go to a number of funds for their support during the research: The Schupf Fund, the Memorial Fund for Jewish Culture, and the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Jewish Women at Bar-Ilan University.

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  1. The Department of Land of Israel Studies, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Sima Zalcberg

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  1. Sima Zalcberg
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Correspondence to Sima Zalcberg.

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This article is based on a broader study of the world of the Hassidic women in the Toldot Aharon group.

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Zalcberg, S. “Grace Is Deceitful and Beauty Is Vain”: How Hassidic Women Cope with the Requirement of Shaving One’s Head and Wearing a Black Kerchief. Gend. Issues 24, 13–34 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-007-9043-3

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