When I Came Home

The Women's Club movement became the platform for Weil's social activism. Following her mother and aunt's footsteps as a leader of the Goldsboro Woman's Club, she rose in the hierarchy of the state organization, earning the sobriquet “Federation Gertie.” Eschewing marriage, she bonded with other women and remained loyal to her family while working to expand women's role beyond domesticity. An advocate of municipal housekeeping, she urged the women's movement to advocate for children and women exploited in the textile mills. Increasingly, she saw that reform would not progress without women achieving legal rights and pushed the federation to adopt suffrage resolutions.

Hip! Hip! Hooray!!!

Educated at the Horace Mann school and Smith College, Weil represented a rising generation of college-educated women who were scientifically trained in new ideologies of social theory and public reform but found themselves unsuited for any particular career. Feeling the conflict of social and family claims, as defined by Jane Addams, Weil prized her autonomy but returned to her native Goldsboro. There she sought to move social welfare programs from their origins in the Social Gospel and religious societies to scientific principles of social reform. She began her social welfare career working with impoverished school children and joined Home Culture Clubs and the local Woman's Clubs.

My Kinship with All Other Jews

After the war and Holocaust, Weil dedicated herself to the restoration of the Jewish people in Palestine. She took state leadership positions in the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women. She remained a Temple lady, a congregational activist teaching Sunday school and worshipping on the Sabbath, but she retained a questioning, universalistic outlook on religious questions. In a series of credos she wrote and spoke on What Judaism Means to Me, delineating a prophetic ethic reflective of German idealism but still affirming Jewish peoplehood. As a member of Hadassah and the Zionist Organization of America, she was a benefactor of the budding state of Israel which she visited in 1951 and 1962, returning to Goldsboro as a public advocate for the Jewish State.

Meeting the Needs

Although battling cancer, family deaths, and the financial crises of the Depression, Weil continued her fight to establish a welfare state. Her platforms included the Goldsboro Bureau for Social Service and the North Carolina Conference for Social Service. Weil served in New Deal agencies as chair of City Emergency Relief Committee, working for a relief program to provide social services and public works projects for the unemployed. She also supported Margaret Sanger's birth control agenda and, like many progressives, endorsed eugenics not as a racial policy but to relieve the financial burden of generations of dependent families on public relief.

Holding Her Breath

World War I deferred women's progress toward suffrage and social welfare. Like other women, Weil worked for the Red Cross and was appointed to civic boards that sought to ensure social services maintained their vitality in war time. War service demonstrated women's qualifications for citizenship. As a volunteer nurse, she served the poor during the influenza epidemic, later suffering a bout herself. Weil joined organizations like the North Carolina Conference for Social Service which advocated for reform legislation. At war's end she committed to women's international peace organizations in support of disarmament, a World Court, and the League of Nations.

The Terrible News in Each Morning’s Paper

Weil in the late 1930s confronted rising anti-Semitism in America as well as Europe. An advocate of world peace and disarmament, she saw the war effort as necessary to defeat Hitler. She remained close to her European cousins, who wrote her detailing Nazi persecutions, and worked assiduously to support their attempts to immigrate to America by providing affidavits, money, and sponsorships. She saved perhaps a dozen relatives, who fled Germany, although several were lost. In the camp town of Goldsboro Weil opened her home to Jewish soldiers and worked in the larger interfaith community to provide hospitality to those serving at local military bases.

How Shall Women Vote

In 1920 Weil convened a state League of Women Voters and was elected president. The League battled a corrupt, conservative Democratic political machine, which dominated state politics, and fought for ballot reform. Weil's leading campaign was for a state survey of working women. Weil was caught in the crossfire between advocates of the League's extensive and progressive national agenda and the conservatism of the state's women who argued for a state-centered approach to such issues as a child labor amendment. In the early 1930s Weil joined organizations dedicated to interracial cooperation and in opposition to lynching. As labor conflicts grew increasingly violent, Weil advocated for union rights. By the 1930s, with the onset of the Depression, the League had largely exhausted itself.

Greater Heights of Spiritual Achievements

Weil rooted her in idealism in the ethics of Classical Reform Judaism although she described her beliefs as personal. A spiritual seeker, she adhered to a prophetic rather than a rabbinic Judaism that emphasized ethics, rationalism, and universalism. Judaism was a live issue, and she was drawn to Ethical Culture Society. At the Oheb Sholom temple in Goldsboro she served for fifty years as Sunday School principal and worshipped there faithfully on the Sabbath. She was also a leader of the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women, founded by her Aunt Sarah. In contrast to Reform ideology, the Weil women were committed Zionists, fostered through their friendship with Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah.

Legacy

Weil is still remembered in scholarly publications on the women's movement and American Jewry. Although her ideals of ending war, poverty, and racial inequality were not wholly realized, incremental advances were achieved over her lifetime. She would regret persisting inequalities of wealth and the resegregation of schools. Her liberal Zionism has also underwent challenge as Israel confronted wars and demographic change. Weil's legacy was as a practical idealist, not an ideologue nor revolutionary. Living on the fault lines of North Carolina's social and political contradictions, she was a both conservative and progressive, both traditional and modern. Her lasting legacy is the example she set of living a life of public service while retaining her humanity

The Whole of Life

Weil traveled the word but remained a rooted cosmopolitan, a citizen of Goldsboro. There she hosted an intellectual salon featuring a southern-style dinner and intense conversation with a visiting lecturer, journalist, or professor. She worked to keep the Jewish congregation alive as the local Jewish population declined. She involved herself in local efforts to support school bonds and to build a new town library. She declined honorary degrees although she accepted a Sophia Smith Medal from Smith College. Nearing death, she dissipated her wealth with charitable benefactions and bequeathed her home and an endowment to build a new public library. She died in 1971 in the house in which she was born,