Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]her a greater voice in determining her future. As we shall see, there are
instances in which a yevama’s claims may lead a court to encourage her
brother-in-law to release her from the levirate obligation. There is also a
move toward “normalizing” levirate marriage, including a requirement
that the yevama consent to the union.
What motivates this apparent concern for the levirate widow, or the
willingness to alleviate her situation? For Judith Romney Wegner, the
position of the levirate widow can be explained by her “relationship to a
man (her husband’s brother) who has an exclusive claim on her biologi-
cal function,” a claim that “diminishes her personhood” and “reduces
her to the status of chattel.”^10 Wegner’s theory that the Mishnah treats
a woman as chattel when a specific man has a claim on her sexuality
ex pla ins t he powerlessness of t he lev irate w idow to choose lev irate ma r-
riage or halitza, as well as aspects of the laws regarding her property
and vows.^11 Aspects of levirate law that recognize the levirate widow as
a person with rights — most notably her role in the ritual of halitza — a r e
explained by Wegner as the sages’ perception of the levirate widow’s
“dormant personhood.”^12
A very different reading of the Mishnah’s treatment of women is of-
fered by Judith Hauptman. In Rereading the Rabbis, Hauptman suggests
that comparing the status of women in rabbinic law with their status
in contemporary Western societies ignores the fact that the rabbis were
produc t s of t hei r t i me a nd plac e, a nd judge s t hem by c ontempor a r y st a n-
da rds t hey ca n not possibly meet. She a lso rejects a compa r ison bet ween
ancient rabbinic law and contemporaneous Greco-Roman law, because
“[a] religious legal system, much more than a secular one, is bound by a
commitment to maintain continuity with the practices of the past and
accept the authority of the texts of the past.”^13 Instead, Hauptman pro-
poses that we compare rabbinic law to that found in the Torah, asking,
“Without violating the letter of the law, were [the rabbis] seeking to ac-
cord [women] more rights and a higher status than that accorded them
by the Torah? Or were they introducing new stringencies that would
make women’s lives more difficult?”^14 She argues that while the rabbis
“perpetuated women’s second-class, subordinate status,” they also “be-
gan to introduce numerous, significant, and occasionally bold correc-
tive measures to a meliorate t he lot of women.”^15 A lt hough her work does
not deal with levirate marriage, I assume that Hauptman would find in