Zionist Women’s Struggle for Suffrage in Mandatory Palestine, 1917–1926 by Margalit Shilo (review)

In this captivating book, Margalit Shilo, Professor of History at Bar-Ilan University, describes the struggle of feminist Zionist women for the right to vote and to be elected to office in the autonomous, quasi-national institutions of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine, during the years 1917–1926. In a process that occurred in many countries striving for independence, these “feminist founding mothers” redefined democracy in the Yishuv by linking the struggle for women’s rights with struggles for western-style modernization and national sovereignty and engaging with the specific boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that those struggles constructed.

Relying on primary sources and documents from public archives and private collections, on memoirs, journals, letters and photos as well as on press reports of the time, Shilo brightly and vividly describes the political achievement of these feminist Zionists, emphasizing the roles of feminist women (and men) and of feminist politics in the course of nation-building. In so doing, she elaborates upon a number of central and innovative issues, as well as presenting the biographies of several women who should be better known, such as Sarah Azaryahu (1872–1962) and Dr Rosa Welt-Stauss (1856–1938), the mythological leaders of the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Eretz Israel, which, from 1919 on, led the fight for women’s suffrage until the final victory in 1926.

In the three sections of this essay, I shall focus on some of the issues pertaining to gender, democracy and nation that surface in this study. First, I will describe Shilo’s excellent book. Thereafter, I will discuss the author’s analysis of the inherent connection between the women’s struggle for suffrage in Mandatory Palestine and the institutionalization of democracy in the state in the making. Finally, I will address the challenges posed by the “feminist founding mothers” to the path taken by Israeli democracy today.

Gendering Nation-Building

In her first chapter, Shilo elucidates the strong historical connections between feminism and Jewish nationalism and their mutual reinforcement as Zionist women struggled for suffrage in Mandatory Palestine in the context of the movement to found a Jewish and democratic state. Except for a handful of studies, Shilo emphasizes, the women’s victory in that struggle has literally been erased from the political history of the State of Israel. Writing against the grain of the male-centered historical canon, Shilo applies up-to-date feminist scholarly methods to the “herstory” of the suffrage movement.

The victory of the suffrage advocates brought to an end an intensive if relatively short political struggle that had split the Jewish community of Palestine into two hostile camps. The supporters of women’s suffrage, led by the civic sector (known as the ḥugim ezraḥi’im) and the Labor Movement, sought to found the Jewish people’s national home in the making upon modern and democratic principles, including social justice and gender equality. Their opponents, led by the ultra-Orthodox sector of religious Jews, strove to root the national institutions in the tenets of Orthodox Judaism, strictly interpreted. Fiercely opposed to women’s suffrage, which they saw as immoral and anti-religious, they threatened to boycott the elected bodies of the Jewish community. In the early 1920s, the ultra-Orthodox and their allies constituted nearly half the Jewish community in Palestine, making their boycott threat a real menace to the process of Jewish nation-building; such a boycott might have lead to the delegitimization of the elected bodies of the Yishuv as its representatives to the British authorities and to the negation of those bodies’ authority over the Yishuv itself. Ultimately, as Shilo relates (pp. 297–348), when the second Elected Assembly (the Asefat Hanivḥarim, the forerunner of the Knesset) issued its declaration in January 1926 confirming equal rights for women in all aspects of life in the Yishuv, including political...