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J Hannah Safran International Struggle, Local Victory Rosa Welt Straus and the Achievement of Suffrage, 1919–1926 “What next will you be introducing from America?” [they asked.] “Strikes, perhaps. We do not want such things in a Jewish Colony in the Holy Land.”1 A year after her arrival in Eretz Israel in 1919, Rosa Welt Straus wrote a letter to Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA); the letter was published in the organization ’s journal Jus Suffragii.2 In it, Welt Straus tells that on the eve of her departure for Eretz Israel she received a suggestion from Chapman Catt to organize the women in Palestine and to have them join the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Welt Straus continues that carrying out her task was easy, because upon her arrival she found that women’s political associations were already active in the country. Moreover, she learned that the Jewish women had obtained the right to vote the previous year.3 But attaining the right to vote for Jewish women in Eretz Israel was not gained as easily as Dr. Welt Straus had thought at first. The struggle for suffrage that the “Association of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Eretz Israel” began in 1919 lasted for eight years, ending only in 1926. Three months after coming to Eretz Israel, Welt Straus, who had been active in New York This article is part of my doctorate on “The American Connection: The Influence of American Feminism on the Struggle for Women’s Suffrage in the Yishuv (1919–1926), and Women’s Equality in Israel” (1971–1982), written for the Department of History at the Haifa University, under the guidance of Prof. Michal Sobel and Prof. Deborah Bernstein. I wish to thank both of them for the help, the encouragement, and their support. I would also like to thank Prof. Margalit Shilo for the indefatigable help she provided me in writing the Hebrew version of this article. on behalf of women’s suffrage, became chairperson of the association. She conducted the association’s international connections for twenty years. This article focuses on the Jewish women’s fight for suffrage at the time the national institutions of the Yishuv in Eretz Israel were established and particularly on the role that American women, such as Welt Straus, played in this struggle as well as in the establishment of women’s organizations in Eretz Israel. Their contribution is addressed here for the first time and anchors the discussion of the issue of women in Eretz Israel within feminist activity the world over.4 A Forgotten Struggle For a long time, the struggles for women’s suffrage in Eretz Israel and elsewhere , too, were not the object of historical research and exposure. In recent years, these battles for the right to vote have begun to stimulate fresh interest and have become a topic on the historiographic agenda.5 In Israel, until recently, women had been missing in the historiography of Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel, since discussion of women’s place had been rooted in the myth of equality. The source of the myth lies in the aspirations and hopes of the labor movement and in the Zionist dream of creating a new society in Eretz Israel, and not in the realities of the life in which the debate and struggle were waged, at times bitterly, on the role of women. The prevailing supposition was that the labor movement , which laid the foundations for the society and the state, was the body that worked for and cared for the rights of woman and that inherent in the creation of the new society were equal rights for women. Challenging the myth of women’s equality in Eretz Israel in recent years made possible a reexamination of women’s history in the country. Feminist women, who began to be active in the 1970s, found the book by Sarah Azaryahu, which documented the history of the struggle for women’s suffrage, and they republished it.6 In their studies, Margalit Shilo, Dafna Izraeli, and Deborah Bernstein cast doubt on the myth of the equality of Jewish women in the Yishuv. Their research shed light on the centrality of the labor movement that focused on the struggle for the conquest of labor for the women laborers, especially in agriculture.7 Sylvia Fogiel-Bijaoui and others have pointed out the centrality of the fight for suffrage in the process of building...

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