In Search of a New Female Identity: Pioneering Women in Prestate Israeli Society

78 SHOFAR IN SEARCH OF A NEW FEMALE IDENTITY: PIONEERING WOMEN IN PRESTATE ISRAELI SOCIETY Deborah Bernstein Deborah Bernstein is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa. Her main spheres of interest include the study of women in Israeli society, women and work, and prestate Israeli society. The new Jewish settlement in Palestine, under the auspices of the Zionist movement, aimed at creating a new Jewish society, one that would solve the basic problems of Jewish existence in the Diaspora. The transition from Eastern Europe to the Land of Israel (then Palestine), beginning in the late nineteenth century, was intended as an overall process of social change, from a minority to an eventual majority, from persecution and political subordination to autonomy, from economic dependence on services given to the host society to the creation of a productive, all-rounded Jewish economy, from an individual at loss in a stagnant and deteriorating traditional Jewish community to a proud individual rooted in his own land. The Zionist movement, institutionally organized as the World Zionist Organization, was an umbrella organization of different movements and political parties. While all shared the perspective of Zionism as both social and individual change, this was probably most pronounced for Socialist, or Labor , Zionism. The new society was to be the negation of the traditional Diaspora society. It was to be a society of labor and laborers, a society of equality and collectivity. Such social change necessitated deep, conscious, individual transformation. The emergence of a new society and a new person were seen as deeply related and interrelated. Geographic mobility, the transition to Palestine, did not in itself insure the creation of a new society. Far from it. New patterns of action, of behavior, of relations, of identity had to be carved out for the new society to begin to emerge. The image of the new Jew, the new Hebrew person, was best exemplified by the halutz, the pioneer. The halutz was the one to lead the way for others, to take the difficult, untrodden path. The halutz was the worker, the laborer, and preferably the productive, agricultural laborer. The halutz was seen as an autonomous , independent individual, not to be subordinated by others, either Volume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 79 by a dominant class or by a hostile national enemy. He was a conquerer and a transformer; that was the goal, the image, and eventually the myth.1 Women shared this conception of social change. They shared in the national and socialist vision of change, and were committed to the conception of individual transformation. A folk song of the Second Aliyah (the first wave of socialist pioneering immigrants, 1904-1949) goes as follows: Tell me, my sister, Let me ask you some things: What will you do in Eretz Israel? I will plough and sow, I will delight in my brothers, May I only be in Eretz Israel. Tell me, my sister, Let me ask you some things: What will you eat in Eretz Israel? I will eat dry bread, I will not have to bow before ~ny man, May I only be in Eretz Israel. Thus, prior to immigration, the young girl saw herself as far removed from her existence in the Jewish shted or larger town in the Pale of Settlement . She aspired to be an agricultural worker (!), saw herself as part of a collective of brothers and sisters, imagined herself dressing simply and having few material aspirations as long as she could be proud and independent in the desired homeland. These aspirations were a direct expression of the pioneering ethic, the pioneering man, the halutz, as internalized by the pioneering woman, the halutza. And yet, the latter had her own course to follow, as well. The social and individual change with which the young man had to struggle had additional meaning and complexity for the young woman of the same background. The Jewish community was a highly gender-segregated, patriarchal society. The act of immigrating to Palestine was a far more radical break for the young woman. The aspiration to become an agricultural worker meant a change both as a Jew and as a woman...