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CHAPTER 8 [T]he concept of a new society, and especially an egalitarian one, seemed to open the way for women to change their traditional position. At the same time, it was also a difficult time to wage a battle for new relations between women and men, as other struggles were to gain unquestioned primacy, even in the eyes of most women. This is still very much the case. -Deborah Bernstein "Telling the Untold Tale" Feminism Feminist sociology is yet another academic offshoot of the New Left and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s. Since the 1970s feminist scholarship has progressively broken new theoretical grounds and has become one ofthe most prolific and vigorous branches ofsocial and cuItural studies in academia (for instructive discussions and references to feminist thought, see L.]. Nicholson, 1986; R. Tong, 1989; P. M. Lengermann &]. NiebruggeBrantley , 1990; R. A. Wallace, ed., 1989;]. Scott, 1987). Israeli feminist sociology began to emerge as a recognizable trend in the 1980s. Like other trends in the field it is being formed under the dual influences of developments in Western, especially American, sociology, as well as local Israeli social and political developments. The local development that prompted the emergence of the feminist perspective was the advent of a new feminist social movement in the 1970s and of a new consciousness that was spread by it to the larger female population. Though feminist sociology is obviously concerned first and foremost with women, it bears critical implications for Israeli society at large. It is the aim of this chapter, in line with the rest of the study, to grasp the particular contribution, or potential contribution, offeminism to the interpretation ofIsraeli society. Before considering the works ofIsraeli feminist sociologists, an outline of the historical and theoretical framework is in order. 149 150 Chapter 8 New Movement: Feminism Comes to Israel The new feminist movement in Israel emerged at Haifa University in the early 1970s in conjunction with the New Left Yesh movement, discussed in the previous chapter (the following survey of the history of feminism in Israel draws upon D. N. Izraeli, 1986/ 7:48-51; M. Freedman, 1990; B. Swirski, 1991b). Though this was not the first women's movement in the country's history, its emergence took place after a prolonged recess in feminist activity of about three to four decades, and it entered into an utterly new terrain. In the early days of the pre-state Yishuv, women struggled for equality with men on two different fronts. Pioneer women affiliated with various wings of the Labor Movement and adhering to its ideology of liberation through toil struggled for equal work, which in the conditions prevailing then meant physical farm work and later road construction and house building. Urban women of the middle class were more concerned with political equality. They struggled for legal equality and especially the right to vote. These two movements perished during the 1930s and 1940s. The reasons for this are complex: suffrage was achieved in 1925; an economic crisis and unemployment channeled energies to a different course; the young pioneers married and settled into a traditional domestic division of roles. Mostly, social affairs receded in fron t of the national agenda, which included an intensified conflict wi~h the Arabs, the Second World War and the Holocaust, the struggle for independence, and later in the 1950s the absorption of immigration. Inthe 1950s and 1960s women formerly active in both trends became part of the dominant elite, whether as wives of party functionaries and government officials or of businessmen and professionals. In line with the general etatist ethos, they adopted a social services orientation. A spark of change appeared in the early 1970s. The initiative came from two professors at Haifa University, both newcomers from the United States, philosophy teacher Marcia Freedman and psychologist Marilyn Safir. Seminars they had given continued later as consciousness-raising groups attended by students and teachers, and as direct-action groups. In 1972 activists associated with these seminars formed the first radical women's movement in Israel, Nilahem (a Hebrew acronym for Women for a Renewed Society). The Haifa movement was radical, criticizing the oppression of women in a male-dominated society, though just beginning to formulate autonomous views of its own. Separate sister organizations sprang up later in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the former displaying a liberal stance and emphasizing the struggle against legal inequality, and Telling an Untold Tale 151 the latter a more leftist socialist one, emphasizing the link between...

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