Playgrounds and Penny Lunches in Palestine: American Social Welfare in the Yishuv

Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, was founded in 1912 in New York City in order to give Jewish women a frontline role in the Zionist movement. Under the leadership of Henrietta Szold, the fledgling organization adopted a controversial new approach to Zionist work: it sought to improve living conditions in the Yishuv in Palestine by providing hands-on health services to local women and children, beginning with maternity and infant care. In 1913, Hadassah launched its first venture in Palestine by sending two public health nurses to Jerusalem. Some Zionist leaders, however, condemned this as mere charity-work. They criticized Hadassah for "Diaper Zionism," which diverted attention and resources from what they regarded as the more productive, nation-building work of advancing the Zionist cause through political lobbying in the Diaspora and land development in Palestine.¹ This accusation may provide a clue as to why Hadassah's Zionist statebuilding role has been largely ignored in histories of Zionism: Hadassah focused on developing social welfare in Palestine because it modelled itself not on other Zionist organizations but rather on the women's benevolent societies and female-led settlement houses that flourished in the United States during the Progressive era.

Szold told Hadassah's founding members that, for their first project, she desired to establish in Palestine a system of "district visiting nursing patterned after Lillian Wald's project on the East Side of New York."² The evolution of Hadassah's interests over the years to encompass child welfare, health, and sanitarian reform was typical of women's activism at the time. Women's voluntary organizations and activists opened settlement houses and hospitals, sent public health nurses into the community, educated immigrants, helped young women in trouble, and organized school lunch programs and children's playgrounds.³ Over the years, Hadassah exported this roster of American field-tested Progressive-style social programs to Palestine.

Like other Progressive-era female reformers, Hadassah leaders justified their involvement in public-policy formation and administration with what historians characterize as "maternalistic" rhetoric.⁴ Drawing on earlier ideas of separate spheres for men and women, twentieth-century activists asserted that the maternal, domestic role of women gave them both a particular reserve of expertise and a specific realm of social responsibility; that is, women were best able (and most obligated) to look after the needs of other women and children. It was in this vein that Hadassah leaders like Irma Lindheim explained the organization's focus on social welfare as an almost inevitable extension of women's domestic concerns to the world outside the home:

The Hadassah Medical Organization had, for its starting point, the deceptively simple premise that good health, for her family, and her community, is every woman's job. . . . Henrietta Szold knew well that women will best respond to the need for action when the cause touches their personal experience. As Hadassah women cared for the health and well-being of their families, so could they not be welded into a force to care for the health and well-being of the larger family, their people?⁵

This view of women's expanding social role was steadily gaining currency. An editorial in the American Zionist magazine The New Palestine, for example, judged Hadassah's mandate highly appropriate for its all-female membership:

It is peculiarly a women's organization, not simply by membership, but equally in spirit, for it has undertaken tasks which are properly associated with the best inherent abilities of women. The hospital work, the promotion of child welfare, the training of nurses, the education of the Jewish mother—all these were well and wisely chosen as within its province.⁶

To the maternalist agenda, Hadassah attached its own priority, namely, the Zionist goal of building a Jewish state, thereby creating a hybrid: Zionist maternalism. According to this ideology, Jewish women were responsible not only for all Jewish children, but, by extension, for the welfare of the entire Jewish people and, concomitantly, for the nurturing and upbuilding (in Zionist parlance) of the Jewish state in the...