By delineating the dispute between R. Yohanan and Resh Lakish, the Gemara opens up a facet of education as pertaining to girls and women that impacts rabbinic thinking to this day. R. Yohanan situates the source of the law in question at Sinai, Resh Lakish situates it in rational thought. Consequently, we see implied the question of how to think of the lower status Resh Lakish ascribes to women's education β is it implicit in the law as given at Sinai, or is it a product of halakhah's sociocultural surroundings? Either which way, we find this hierarchy of education then codified by the Rambam.
Almost two millenia after Resh Lakish, and 600 years after the Rambam, R. Benjamin Artom, too, struggles with the matter of women's education, coming to the opposite conclusion but basing his conclusion on a similar logic:
But is the father to work alone, to be unassisted in his sacred but difficult task? Which is the divine law which teaches and upholds this principle? It may have been one of the erroneous doctrines of those nations which, when not employing woman as an instrument of pleasure or reproduction, put her contemptuously aside as though she were a useless being. But these neither were, nor are, the opinions of the Hebrews. It is a law of nature that the mother should be the first to feed her children. And it is equally a law of nature, which no legislator deemed it necessary to mention, that the mother should give her children the first ideas of knowledge. From her the child learns to lisp his first words, to utter his thoughts, the name of his father, the name of the Creator; from her he learns to join his little hands, and to whisper his first prayer to the Father of mercy; and his intellect is first prepared by her exertions for the observance of duty and the practice of virtue. This is the law of nature and reason; and our religion, which has never opposed either reason or nature, though it often appeals to the father, does not forget to remind the mother of her moral duties; but it speaks of them as an understood and already accepted obligation. [...] When the wise king said: "My son, forsake not the law of thy mother," did he not imply that a mother must teach her children?
R. Benjamin Artom, Education, in From Generation to Generation: Insights from the Past, Present, and Future of Jewish Education
R. Artom, writing from 19th century London, lived in a world radically different from those of Resh Lakish and the Rambam, among other things, standards of masculine and feminine had changed, the nuclear family had been invented, and European socities increasingly considered the education of children a feminine task, thus having R. Artom, much like Resh Lakish, frame his (opposite) viewpoint as a matter that is so ubiquitous it requires no explanation. What remained to be seen in the Gemara, is here clearly marked: it is the sociocultural surroundings that define women's role in education, not necessarily because halakhah defines it as such, but precisely because it does not.
Another century later, R. Marc Angel turns his mind to the ways in which sociocultural surroundings have impacted women's education in an attempt to disentangle the knot of custom and halakhah that closes the doors of higher education to many women:
Rambam codifies the notion that the intelligence of most women is deficient and that most women cannot be properly instructed due to their poverty of understanding. The result of this position is that men should not teach their daughters Torah, at least not the Oral Torah. [...]
There is an obvious gap between Rambam's text and current reality. Women today do receive fine educations and are able to succeed quite well. Women serve in the top echelons of contemporary intellectual, professional, and political life. If women's intellects are able to grasp the whole range of academic topics, why should they be prevented from studying Talmud?
Rabbi Haim David Halevy suggested that in earlier times, girls received no formal education at all; thus, to teach them Talmud would have been beyond their ken. They lackef the rudimentary intellectual training required for proper analysis of Talmud. Since in our times women do receive formal education, Talmud may be taught to girls and women who have demonstrated their ability to grasp the material.
It has been argued that in spite of Rambam's words relating to women's intellectual abilities and education, he actually had a far higher opinion of women's intellects. His statement in the Mishneh Torah reflected his understanding of how things were, but not how they could or should be.
R. Marc D. Angel, Maimonides, Spinoza and Us: Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism
It is of note that R. Halevy's line of reasoning is not at all dissimilar from that employed by R. Pamela Barmash in her teshuvah putting women an equal halakhic footing with men in the Conservative movement.
R. Angel's reading of the Rambam and R. Halevy reflects, more than just an opinion on women's education, the notion that the Torah was given in human language, to be intelligible to the society that received it. Then, of course, it becomes a thorny question to discern between matters meant to change with society, and matters meant to change society, as Leibowitz attests to when describing the difficulty of establishing a halakhic framework for the zionist project.
The Torah, for all its explicit Mitzvoth, leaves us stranded with the problem of taking a definite political stand on concrete issues. We still do not know whether the Torah, for all its detailef and ramified social and political provisions, deals with society and the state as they ought to be or as they really are. It is the intention of the Torah to create a specific sociopolitical system, defined by its Mitzvoth, or were the laws given to be applied within an existing system? Consider the proscription of ploughing with an ox and an ass yoked together. Does this imply a duty to base agriculture on animal power and to create the opportunity for fulfilling the prohibition? Reversing the terms, is mechanized agriculture, which obviates the use of animals as a source of energy, forbidden because it removes all opportunity for observing this Mitzvah? Or is it permissible to assume a hypothetical imperative: in the event that animals are used, avoid ploughing with an ox and ass yoked together?
In this instance, every intelligent person will no doubt understand the proscription in accordance with the second alternative. However, adoption of this alternative is not so simple in relation to the corpus of civil law in the Torah, which assumes to a certain sociopolitical system already exists. The Torah, in the relevant chapters of the Book of Exodus, assumes the existence of the institution of slavery and regulates it. The labor legislation assumes the institution of hired labor and regulates it as well. Laws of fraud assume private commerce and regulate its profits.
Our own historic situation is radically different
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State
Maybe, once the abolition of manhood and womanhood, of gender as such, has been set in motion on a larger scale, we can find a way for halakhic gender abolition as well.
