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This article draws on autobiographies and memoirs, polemical articles from the contemporary press, and bellestristic literature to illuminate the growth of a female reading public in nineteenth‐century Eastern European Jewish society. The exclusion of women from religious study and the emphasis on women's responsibility for managing family businesses which characterized traditional Jewish culture created conditions that permitted some women to receive a secular education. Reading canonic literature in European languages and non‐canonic literature in Yiddish, some women became catalysts of socio‐cultural change toward the modernization, Europeanization and secularization of Jewish society.