Kayla has everything it seems--great looks, a promising career as a ceramics designer, more men than she wants, and yet--as a female artist she faces a constant battle to gain respect and recognition from her male colleagues, who regard her merely as a sex object. Crushed by the failure of her first marriage and then the breakup of a passionate relationship, she struggles to rebuild her life as a single woman in Greenwich Village. Caught up in the conflict between her parents' expectations for a "nice" Jewish girl and the new freedoms of the early women's lib movement, Kayla vows, "No more...

Blume Speiser, daughter of a rabbi, longs to escape the constraints of an Orthodox Hasidic woman's life. She seeks freedom, to get a secular education, and to choose a husband herself. In her world, however, what she may study, whom she may love, and when, are rigidly prescribed. She vows that she is not going to live like her half-sister Itke, locked in a lovelessmarriage to a rabbi, her cousin Fay, powerless to protect her son from her husband's rigid conformity, or her sisters Charlotte, who has distanced herself from the family to be "modern," or Rivke, who glows in a haze of perpetual...