Beginning with the engagement, Satmars have an ongoing and elaborate celebration of this event and of the wedding itself: exchanges of expensive gifts over the engagement period, the furnishing of the newly-weds' apartment, instruction classes for the young wife, the wedding ceremony, etc. [Pp.122-168]
Patriarchal control of women's bodies -- in reality, women's lives -- is still seen as fundamental to maintaining the system. Surely, the most extreme example of this objective is the practice in the sub-Saharan areas of Africa of female genital mutilation that is performed on girls, some as young as six or seven, in order to assure potential husbands not only that their wives are virgins but also that they will not be promiscuous after marriage.
Toward this end, the Satmar litany of rules seems endless. Singing is forbidden for females older than 12. [P.88] Wearing clothing featuring the color red is forbidden. [P.61] Girls are required to step off sidewalks to give way to men. A similar community on Long Island posts signs designating separate sidewalks for men and women. [P.93]
With the exception of Yom Kippur when women go to the synagogue's "women only" area, women and girls are expected to pray at home whenever the men go to the synagogue for worship -- on the Sabbath or daily for morning and/or evening prayers or when they celebrate a significant date on the religious calendar by building a bonfire and dancing in the streets. [Pp.83-4]
Thus, while men are bonding in these gatherings -- in the public arena, one might say -- women are home alone, perhaps with one or two female relatives, isolated through the institution of marriage from other women in their community. It is this isolation that over the centuries has held back the progress of women toward freedom, justice, and equality.
As Rosalind Miles has pointed out in Who Cooked The Last Supper?:
"No other subordinated class, caste or minority lives as closely integrated with its oppressor as women do; the males of the dominant culture have to allow them into their homes, kitchens, beds. Control at these close quarters can be maintained only by inducing women to consent to their own downgrading." [P.103]
In the Satmar community, Yiddish is to be spoken at all times and only Yiddish reading materials are permitted. Feldman recalls Zeidy's warning of how English would affect her:
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