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51 C h a p t e r 4 Transforming One’s Self and One’s Body Like Miriam, forty-two-year-old Ruth represents women in the low segment of the middle class. She, too, is a semiprofessional, a kindergarten teacher’s assistant. However, in the construction of her narrative in which she told of her path into the low middle class she stressed her transformation of herself and her body in order to enter this class. Ruth and I met in a booth at a quiet café for her interviews. As she sat opposite me at the table, I could not help noticing her erect posture and her habit of looking directly into my eyes as she spoke. She began telling me about herself by recalling her background. Ruth told me that after their immigration to Israel, her parents and their nine children were sent to a transit camp for newcomers. The couple had married when her mother was fourteen and her father was twenty or twentytwo . The family was religious. Ruth, their tenth child, was born in Israel. In Morocco her parents had lived in the mellah (the Jewish ghetto) of Casablanca , where her father had been a peddler who traveled with his horse and cart to sell his wares, and her mother had been a housewife. Her father had some elementary education, but her mother had none. In Israel her father became a manual laborer and found work building roads, while her mother continued to be a housewife. A few months after their arrival in the country, the family moved out of the transit camp and into a slum neighborhood in Jerusalem that was populated by Moroccan immigrants like themselves. Ruth’s parents socialized her and her siblings to believe that work, rather than studies, would be their path to upward mobility. As she explained: Both of my parents, but especially my father, would say, “If you don’t work, you will never have anything,” and I felt that if I didn’t 52 C H A P T E R 4 work, I really wouldn’t have anything. They didn’t care what work I did, as long as I worked. And I have worked every day of my life. Of all the twenty years that I have been working, I have only been unemployed a month and a half. In her opinion, the priority that her parents attributed to work explains the fact that none of her brothers and sisters completed high school. She is the only one in her family who has a full high school education, twelve years of schooling: “My parents never supported my studying. There was never anyone who sat with me and helped me and encouraged me. That always bothered me.” In high school, Ruth’s teachers placed her in the vocational track to study sewing, a stereotypical female topic of studies. According to some researchers ,1 the Israeli educational system encouraged children of Mizrah .i origin, including Moroccan origin, to enter the vocational track, which resulted in their concentration in the low income, low status, working-class sector of society and excluded them from high status, high income sectors populated primarily by Ashkenazim. These scholars argued that through this process the school system reproduced class and ethnicity. However, by placing girls from Mizrah .i origin into stereotypically female fields, the school system reproduced gender as well. This explanation draws on Jane Gaskell’s study on the Canadian school system that showed a tendency to place girls from workingclass and subordinate racial-ethnic backgrounds in stereotypical fields in the vocational track and girls from higher classes in the academic track.2 Ruth was acutely aware that the choice to study sewing was not hers: “I didn’t choose the vocational track; the school chose it for me. I wasn’t good in mathematics, so the school decided that I should learn something useful.” Upon completion of high school, Ruth did some of her matriculation examinations, but not all of them, which means that she only has a partial matriculation certificate. She was aware of the importance of a complete certificate if she wanted to continue her education: “It always bothered me that I didn’t have one. You need a complete matriculation certificate if you want to study.” Therefore, she cannot study in a university and will not profit from the mobility resources that an academic education bestows. Despite the lack of parental encouragement, Ruth wanted to continue her...

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