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  • The Psycho-Intellectual Aspect of Gender Inequality in Israel’s Labor Movement
  • Eyal Kafkafi (bio)

Introduction

The aim of the Zionist Movement, founded in 1897, was to settle the land in Palestine and create a Jewish State. In concert with other liberal and socialist movements in Europe at the time, it strove to achieve both national and social goals; central to these goals was the principle of equality of the sexes. 1 The Zionists acclaimed the role that women were to play in building the new Jewish society and in acting as ambassadors to propagate the Zionist cause throughout the world. By proclaiming the equality of men and women, the Zionist Movement manifested its adherence to established ideological principles. 2 This approach contrasted strongly with that of traditional Jewish communities in the Diaspora, where husbands “spent their days in religious studies” and the role of their wives was primarily that of breadwinner. 3 It was a world where women had “neither authority nor prestige.” 4

However, the Zionist aim to change several aspects of Jewish society in the process of settling Palestine, including women’s status, was by no means an easy proposition. Indeed, the discrepancy between their acclaimed ideal of gender equality and the reality of gender inequality was all too evident. 5 Zionist leaders such as Nachman Syrkin, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben-Gurion had chosen wives who forfeited their own careers in order to devote themselves entirely to their husbands. Independent women leaders such as Mania Shohat and Golda Meir paid heavily in terms of family relations. Their husbands refused to regard them as equals 6 or to cooperate with them as such. Agricultural employers in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in prestate Israel) did not welcome women workers. They believed [End Page 188] it was immoral and a “desecration of the Holy Land” for men and women to work in the fields together. 7 Occasionally they would agree to take on women workers at a lower wage. 8 From its inception in about 1900, the Zionist Labor Movement, with its ideology of universal equality for workers, radically opposed the stand taken by Jewish employers in Palestine; the Movement claimed that it had entirely changed women’s status and placed them on an equal footing with men. However, the reality was somewhat different.

An Image of Egalitarian Society

Contrary to the claims made by the Zionist Labor Movement, the work and roles assigned to women in building the State of Israel reflected the very same message of inferior status preserved for generations by the family framework and the traditional environment; male workers who did accept women into their agricultural communes 9 continued to regard them as housekeepers, whose primary function was to look after the men’s personal needs. 10 Throughout the world, women’s status, in their role of housekeeper, was lower than that of working-class men, and their earnings “less than wage-slavery . . . since they [were] used to working for nothing.” 11 But, as pioneers [halutzot] whose work exemplified the struggle of the return to the soil in Eretz Israel, the land of their forefathers, the women workers of the Zionist Labor Movement in Palestine had a special reason to strive for equality of status with their male comrades in agricultural work. Jewish women in prestate Israel, therefore, did in point of fact struggle for equality, 12 but since their primary concern was to build the State rather than to achieve personal rights, they kept their fight low key. 13

Publicly and officially, the Yishuv presented an image of a sexually egalitarian society, of which the kibbutz was a supreme example, 14 but a pattern of non-participation by women at the power center of all the economic and political sectors was established early in the history of the Yishuv. 15 Judith Buber Agasi regards the kibbutzim, the pioneer communes founded in Palestine during the first half of the century and the heart of the Israeli Labor Movement, as a “theoretical test case” of the unequal status of women. Although the communal kibbutz system provided women members with the same basic necessities as the men, such as food, clothing, and health care, women did...

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