“We have in our midst,” this paper reported in 1910, “a woman noted for her philanthropic work throughout the country, whose special mission is to alleviate the sufferings of humanity… The name is a familiar one: Mrs. Bettie Lowenberg, the authoress of the much talked-of and widely discussed novel ‘The Irresistible Current,’ which has been read and criticised by all the prominent writers and thinkers of the day.”
Bettie Lowenberg, a Jewish woman from San Francisco, filled her novels with pathos and sentimentality to persuade the public on issues like prison reform, easing divorce laws and the possibilities of interfaith marriage. Now she’s both out of fashion and out of mind, but in her time she was a strong voice for reform.
She was born in Alabama in 1845 but moved as a teen to San Francisco, where she married the well-heeled Isador Lowenberg. We wrote in his 1919 obituary that he “was one of the early residents of San Francisco. Coming to this city from Germany in 1851, he soon made himself one of the recognized leaders of manufacture and finance, and belonged to the old coterie of merchants who formerly made Sansome street the commercial center.”
The Lowenbergs were part of the monied Jewish elite, and members of Congregation Emanu-El.
According to Boston College professor Lori Harrison-Kahan, author of the new book “West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture,” Lowenberg was interested in fostering an intellectual circle for women, or women of her class at least, and opening a path for civic activism and discussion.
Lowenberg’s first step was founding the Philomath Club. To advertise it, she put a notice in our paper.
The Philomath meets every second and fourth Monday at the Mercantile Library, corner Golden Gate and Van Ness avenues. Mrs. I. Lowenberg, President; Mrs. Adele Heller, Secretary.
It was a success. As Harrison-Kahan puts it, “Lowenberg created a distinctly Western space where her contemporaries, and their children, could overcome the intellectual and social barriers they experienced as women and religious minorities.”
While she was involved in more mainstream civic organizing, she also turned to novel-writing to make her point. In 1908, she wrote “The Irresistible Current,” a sentimental love story that made the case for bridging Christianity and Judaism and promoted interfaith marriage.
The plot is deliciously melodramatic. Grace, a young Jewish girl, is abandoned by her rich Jewish fiancé because of the machinations of another Jewish man who is in love with her.
“Misfortune follows misfortune,” a review we published the same year says cheerfully. “Her father, ruined in business, becomes a suicide; her mother dies the next day from the shock.”
Her chance at redemption comes from the love of a Unitarian minister, but her parents refuse: “I say no,” her mother tells the minister. “You are not a Jew, and though I am not Orthodox, keeping almost nothing, my heart is a Jewish one.” Because of all this, Grace flees to a nunnery; at the last minute she changes her mind, renounces Catholicism and dies.
Lowenberg has “demonstrated in her own person that the enjoyments and attractions of social life incident to wealth and a devotion to philanthropic work are no bar to intellectual pursuits,” we wrote. “More than that, in this book Mrs. Lowenberg displays a knowledge of religious subjects truly remarkable, and whether one may or may not agree with her conclusions, this much is true.”
In 1910 we interviewed her about her stance on prison reform, one of her great passions.
While prisons were necessary, she said, “the world is learning the great truth that the best way to prevent crime is to study the sociological conditions in which it flourishes and seek to give each man a better chance of living his real life by removing, if possible, the elements that make wrong easy.”
That same year, she also released “A Nation’s Crime,” which is not about prisons or crime, but rather tells the story of a girl trapped in a miserable marriage who divorces her husband and marries her former love. But the legality of her second marriage is challenged, leading to a raft of terrible things, including suicide by strychnine to avoid dishonor.
The novel made the point that not only might divorce be necessary purely on grounds of incompatibility, as opposed to violence or infidelity, it was unfair a divorce in one state wasn’t recognized in another — which was the case at the time.
Except it made that point with a lot more words: “The nation which has given liberty and protection to the friendless, to the oppressed, to the persecuted; which has emancipated slavery and placed the laurel on Lincoln’s brow, will give the world through your instrumentality a Uniform Divorce Law which all nations with a claim to civilization must — will — follow,” a character declaims.
“We wish that the authoress might have used simpler and more familiar language throughout the book,” we commented in 1910, in a review largely agreeing with Lowenberg’s thesis. “It would have given the characters and the situations a far greater degree of verisimilitude than they sometimes possess.”
Perhaps so, but this is not a column of literary criticism.
In 1920, she wrote a third novel, “The Voices,” a sort of Joan of Arc story about unionization and the dignity of work, with an uncharacteristically happy end.
Lowenberg isn’t an uncomplicated hero to modern eyes, though. While she was a champion of women’s minds, she was also against women’s suffrage. As Harrison-Kahan writes in her book, “Lowenberg thought that the vote would corrupt women, expressing the fear that ‘the polls [would] rub off something of that sweet womanliness which everyone loves and admires.’”
She was a strong personality with strong opinions, with a perspective deeply rooted in her Judaism and her San Francisco community. We don’t need to agree with everything she said to agree that she was a strong voice for change who deserves to be remembered.