Autonomy and power are bought for women at the cost of their sexuality, precisely as would be predicted by certain radical feminist theorists, who argue that sexuality itself (or at any rate, heterosexuality) is inevitably domination. On the other hand, rabbinic Judaism, as I hope to have shown till now, so strongly approved the married life, including the life of the sexual body, that there was virtually no escape from marriage within that cultureeither for men or for women. Since marriage seems inevitably to have led to androcentric domination, the body was bought, it seems, at the price of autonomy, especially for womena bleak picture indeed. In this chapter, I shall consider some intimations from within the rabbinic formation of the possibility of an escape from this implacable dilemma.
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Classical talmudic Judaism denies women access to the most valued practice of the culture, the study of Torah.
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The significance of this exclusion has been discussed by many scholars, most recently by Peter Brown in his monumental
The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual
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 | | 1. For a similar (and very impressive) effort to find such a break in the Christian monolith, see Harrison 1990b and 1991. Harrison argues that for certain Christian thinkers, transcendence of gender went in both directions, with men transcending their maleness and assimilating female characteristics and women doing the opposite. But more common, it seems, was Philo's schema whereby perfection for both meant overcoming the feminine, a task even harder for women than for men (Genevieve Lloyd 1984, 2627). In general, Harrison's splendid work should move us away from simple equations by which sexual renunciation is identified with contempt for the body, sexuality, and women. Even radical asceticism is not necessarily the product of such an ideology, and the fact that both men and women equally renounce sexuality in such religious groups is also not to be ignored.
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| | 2. This formulation already points up the paradox of my very inquiry here: the assumption that Judaism is "male" and can deny or impart to women some "privilege." When I presented this chapter at the University of California at Berkeley, a question was raised by Naomi Seidman as to the historical significance of this evidence from the point of view of feminist historiography. In brief, the question was, why should we assume that the learning of Torah was relevant to women? Is it not a reproduction of the same value system even to assume that study of Torah would have been attractive to women, that it is something that they would have wanted to be "let in on," given the androcentrism of that Torah's content? Plaskow 1990 is effectively asking this question also. Perhaps a feminist historiography must reconstruct entirely different models of Jewish piety in order to be meaningful at all. The question is challenging and legitimate, but rather than make any attempt to address that issue here, I prefer to present the analysis that I have made of the texts and leave the question of its significance for feminist practice for another essay (Boyarin 1993). The short answer is that for many women it seems to be important to have a vital connection with the historical, ancestral culture of their people, in this case the Jews, and that providing a place for feminist women (and male fellow travelers) to retain a positive sense of such identity seems to me consequential and empowering for such people.
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