4. Women In Eretz Israel – The Impact of Zionism.
Having laid the general ground for our subject, let us now begin to explore
some of the specific ramifications in terms of the new movement that would
start to develop in these years: the movement of Zionism. Religious Aliyah
had been developing in greater numbers throughout the nineteenth century,
due largely to strong messianic trends in the traditional Eastern European
Jewish communities. It seems safe to say that many of the women who came to
Palestine in these years must have experienced some change in their lifestyles.
The very move to new locations more often than not has some effect in loosening
the ideational structure that surrounds people in one location and opening
them up to different questions and thus to different possibilities. As new
currents began to move through the circles of the non-Chassidim (Prushim
as they came to be called) in Eretz Yisrael in the late nineteenth
century, there is no question that some women were affected. Some traditional
Jews began to experiment with new ideas such as farming. This represents a
severe shaking up of conventional horizons even within the traditional framework.
Such new moods and ideas must have penetrated in some ways to the world of
some of the women whose husbands made the transition to new ideas and lifestyles.
A. Women In the First Aliyah.
With the First Aliyah of the 1880’s and 90’s, those
changes become more pronounced. The vast majority of the First Aliyah
pioneers were, and remained, religious, but these were Jews who were already
beginning to move within a new orbit of ideas. Many had started to be exposed,
directly or indirectly, to the world of European ideas, and many were gripped
by new national ideologies that opened them up to radical new possibilities
in their own lives. Those who pioneered the new directions and decided to
bring their families to Eretz Yisrael were almost exclusively the
men. The First Aliyah was almost entirely an Aliyah of families,
and the decision-makers were usually the husbands. Nevertheless, once again,
the world of women would be shaken up and horizons would be opened.
It is relatively easy to determine the change in lifestyle of the women of
the First Aliyah, since it is easy to see where the families went
and what they did. Many found their way to the land, spending at least some
years in farming settlements. This would have meant a radical change in lifestyle
for women who had been brought up in the urban or semi-urban reality of Eastern
Europe.
It is far more difficult to evaluate the changes in outlook on the part of
these women. The vast majority of literature that we have from the period
is from men, and this allows no real glimpse into the minds of the women of
the families. However, here and there, we have memoirs or stories written
by women, which, of course, give an invaluable glimpse into their lives. We
discover from some of the memoirs and stories that new aspirations were indeed
stirring many of the women, even if they were still seen by most men as filling
the traditional passive role of the Jewish wife and mother.
The stories of women such as Hemdah Ben Yehuda (the wife
of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, one of the few
secularists who came with the First Aliyah) and Nehamah Pukhachewsky, clearly
demonstrate that some women were becoming increasingly aware of the narrowness
of the role that traditional Jewish life had assigned them and were interested
in breaking away from it. Nevertheless, the difficulties that lay in the path
of even the more emancipated women are made equally clear from these writings.
Pukhachewsky’s writings, which begin from a critique of the women’s
role in the exotic but extremely conservative Yemenite community that develops
in Palestine in those years, graduate to a damning critique of the men in
her own Ashkenazi society, who subject their women to scorn and ridicule whenever
the latter try to assert their independence.
It is worth mentioning in this context that there were women who were born
into the families of the First Aliyah, such as Sarah
Aaronsohn who do strike out their own independent path. Among
them, without question, many were influenced by a more radical reality –
that of the Second Aliyah.
The Birth of Radicalism – The Second and Third Aliyot.
We now turn to look in detail at the period of the two radical Aliyot
that developed in the years prior to and succeeding W.W.I.
The reason that any examination of the position of women in modern Israel
should focus on this period is that the model of the new Jewish woman in the
country was primarily constructed during this era. In addition, the myth of
the equality of women developed on the basis of images that emerged in this
period. Let us look, then at what was meant to happen in these years and,
together with that, at what actually happened.
During the Second Aliyah, (1904-14) the real changes begin to form.
It was primarily an Aliyah of young people, mostly single, who had
been influenced by the socialist and radical movements in Russia and Poland.
In the last part of the 19th century, the growth of radical, socialist and
revolutionary movements in the Russian Empire (the largest Jewish centre in
the world at the time) exerted a great influence on Jewish youth.
In the revolutionary movements, different kinds of relationships started
to develop.
- Ideas of equality, comradeship, and the eradication of the old traditional
roles that separated men and women in the outside society no less than in
the Jewish one, began to take hold.
- Ideas of emancipation from traditional frameworks and from traditional mores
and perspectives spread like wildfire among many of the liberally inclined
educated youth of Russian, including the Jews. People who were drawn into
the revolutionary movements, Jewish and non-Jewish, began to internalise different
models of male/female interaction.
This was also true of those who joined the socialistic sections of the Zionist
movements and began to find their practical expression in the Second Aliyah.
The majority of the Olim of the Second Aliyah were young men: perhaps
only one in ten of the Olim was a woman. Many of the women were strong and
extremely impressive characters such as Mania
Shochat and Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi.
These were not women who had any intention of seeing themselves in any subordinate
role to men.
These women arrived with the expectation that in addition to sharing in the
realisation of their Zionist ideals, they would be accepted as full and equal
comrades by their male colleagues. What they encountered was very different.
The majority of these young pioneers (chalutzim) sought work on the
land, but finding work in the settlements of the First Aliyah was
difficult for all chalutzim. They were resented by most of the religious
First Aliyah settlers for their radicalism and their secularism,
while farmers preferred to rely on cheaper Arab labour. Slowly, the persistent
chalutzim began to gain acceptance with at least some of the farmers,
but for the women among the pioneers, the task was far harder. The conservative
farmers of the First Aliyah did not know how to relate to these radical
independent women (in trousers!) and saw them as extremely threatening.
The salvation of the women (and, to a large extent of the men as well, if
for different reasons), came with the beginning of the establishment of independent
or semi-independent workers’ farms in the north of the country, a few
years into the Aliyah. Many chalutzim came to these farms,
determined to throw off the humiliations of the bitter experiences with the
First Aliyah farmers. They felt that here, on their own farms, they
could start properly to live the life that they had planned in their ideals
and dreams. The women came with the same ideas. Here, at last, they would
be properly accepted by their comrades as equals. It was for this that they
had waited and planned. It was here, in these communes and kvutzot,
that the new Jewish woman, free, emancipated and equal, would finally come
of age. That was the theory.
Once again, the women were to be disappointed. Almost all of the women in
these early settlements found themselves considered very much as second-class
citizens. On the whole, they were not formally accepted as members, but rather
had the status of day-labourers. Their opinions were not usually sought out,
nor were they welcomed when given. But perhaps most humiliating, in the opinion
of many of the women: their male comrades relegated them to the services –
feeding, cleaning and laundering – rather than the productive life in
the fields for which they longed.
In order to understand this development, we must first understand that the
Second and Third (post W.W.I) Aliyot, tended to measure people’s
worth by their contribution to the wider society in productive terms. They
had come to the country to plant and to grow and they saw their essential
contributions in these terms. Women, no less than men, had internalised these
values. The productive individual rooted in the Land and working on the land
-- brave, strong and determined to contribute to country and nation--was the
ideal of these Aliyot. The mythic “New Jew” of these
Aliyot was the ideal.
Unfortunately, as has been increasingly realised in recent years, the “New
Jew” was basically a male Jew. The strong productive Jew, conquering
his environment and his land, was an ideal based on heroic male self-images.
There was little place for a woman inside these myths and ideals. When the
woman came to the new independent workers’ settlements, expecting to
be granted the fruits of equality, she found, all too often, that the emphasis
on physical strength as a key to productive work in the fields played to the
strengths of the men and to the detriment of the women. The importance of
economic success in proving the viability of these independent workers’
farms meant that women, perceived - usually correctly - as lacking the physical
ability to equal their male comrades in the hard field work, were relegated
to the services, of far lower status than productive field work. Here and
there, in individual settlements, women won the right to go out to the fields,
but this was done without the commensurate male willingness to go into the
services, still seen as women’s work.
The situation was further complicated when children began to be born in these
early settlements. Those few women who had gained the right (usually through
struggle) to work in the productive branches felt threatened that the need
to look after their children would act against them and cause them to lose
the fruits of their struggle. Some would take their children with them, into
the fields and the dairy barns, rather than lose their hard-won position.
This whole situation was clearly untenable. Many of the women in the early
workers’ settlements felt frustrated by the gap between their expectations
and the harsh and unrewarding reality that they encountered on a daily basis.
This was the primary motive behind the establishment of the first women’s
training farm for agricultural workers at the Kinneret farm in 1911.
The prime mover and shaker behind this particular enterprise was Hannah
Meisel, who had arrived from Russia with an agricultural degree in
hand. Realising the accumulated frustrations of the “non-productive”
women workers of the Second Aliyah, she persuaded the Zionist powers to open
a training farm, in which women would be trained to work in productive agricultural
branches that would play to their strengths rather than their weaknesses.
Over the six years that the farm existed in Kinneret, many women – including
Rahel Bluwstein, who would become famous in later years as
the poetess Rahel, were trained in agricultural
branches such as livestock and dairy agriculture and vegetable growing. Groups
of women graduated from the farm and set off to found their own collectives
or to join with men in establishing mixed farms. This was unquestionably a
major step in the right direction, but the war for equality of women had not
yet been won.
The farm at Kinneret also became the focal point of women’s political
organisations. Meetings held there helped define the agenda and sow the seeds
for separate women’s frameworks that would do what the men had so patently
failed to do. The men were beginning to wake up to the fact that there was
a "women's problem" in the workers’ movement. It was up to
the women to do something about it.
The arrival of the Third Aliyah in the immediate post-war years
provided a major boost. Firstly, there were many more women. The Aliyah
itself was much larger and some 36% of all the immigrants were women. Secondly,
most arrived within the frameworks of youth movement garinim (settlement
groups) that had undergone collective training in the Diaspora, and many of
the women had been trained before their arrival in Eretz Yisrael.
Thirdly, these movement-affiliated groups tended to be more radical than their
predecessors of the Second Aliyah. Most of them came from post-revolutionary
Russia and their horizons tended to be wider than those who had come from
Tsarist Russia.
In this context, it is worth mentioning one woman who came at this time as
part of the labour movement, but whose story had diverged just a little from
the normal pattern. This was Golda Meir,
as she came to be called, a woman who had left Russia as a young child and
relocated in the United States. She now made the decision to come to Palestine.
However, despite these advantages, there were some major struggles between
the younger women and their older counterparts of the Second Aliyah.
Notwithstanding the radicalism of the younger women, they tended to have more
trust in the men of their groups and parties and saw less use for exclusive
women’s frameworks, believing in many cases that they interfered with
the general work of the workers’ movements as pioneers of Zionism.
This highlighted a weakness that all attempts at women’s organisation
would encounter in the pre-State Yishuv and in the State of Israel.
There were always large struggles and important goals that had to be accomplished
within the society as a whole. In such a reality, the attempts of the women
to organise for their own rights, could be considered not only divisive; it
could – and often was – regarded as petty. Why couldn’t
the women perceive their role as joining the larger struggle rather than demanding
“special treatment?” When these complaints were first voiced,
there is no doubt that even many women who were aware of the specific problems
that faced women felt bothered, and even embarrassed, by the accusation.
When the Histadrut was formed as the umbrella organisation of all the workers’
groups in 1920, women found themselves divided as to whether to enter the
organisation as a separate sub-unit or to play their part in the existing
mixed workers’ groups and parties. The initial decision was not to submit
a separate women’s list but to be content with representation as part
of other bodies. However, when it became clear that of the 87 delegates to
the initial founding convention of the Histadrut only four were women, the
initiative for separate women’s representation was revived and a Women’s
Workers’ Council was set up in 1921.
These years, in retrospect, need to be seen as the highpoint of the Jewish
women’s movement in Palestine. It is from these years that many of the
pictures of women working on the roads or in the fields of the newly emerging
kibbutzim originated and it is these pictures that helped develop the myth
of the emancipated Jewish woman in Eretz Yisrael.
But, despite the myth of women’s equality that was fostered in subsequent
years and the pictures of happy pioneer women behind ploughs, building the
roads or sitting on piles of rocks, the reality that women encountered was
a hard one. Over the last 20 years, many researchers have taken the veil off
the rosy picture of equality that had been built up over the years. This is
not the place to go into detail, but the research is clear and unequivocal.
Neither in the more radical parts of the society, represented by the kibbutzim
and the Labour movement in general, nor in any other part of the society as
a whole, did women come anywhere near equality. According to every social
and economic indicator, women in pre-state Palestine were anything but equal.
There were certainly important advances. The old model of the passive domestic
Jewish woman situated within a patriarchal family was indeed changing under
the impact of events. Many women, even from the more conservative parts of
society, were beginning to develop more of a sense of self-worth and independence,
and fought through to at least a subjective self-emancipation which was clearly
important. Nevertheless, in terms of actual equality within society, despite
occasional breakthroughs, the picture was not over-encouraging. In comparison
with the desires of many of the early pioneer women of the second and third
Aliyot, the results had been meagre and disappointing.