Setting the Agenda: The Impact of the 1977 Israel Women's Party

Although the Yizug Shaveh [Equal Representation] women's list eventually dropped out of the Spring 1999 elections to the Knesset, it is clear that separate women's lists represent a potent political option for Israeli feminists. Yizug Shaveh marks the fourth time since statehood that Israeli women have attempted to gain electoral representation in a separate political framework. (Pnina Rosenblum ran a list that was concerned with small business and women's rights, although she did not call it a women's list .) The tradition of separate women's lists dates further back, however, than 1949 and the First Knesset. They have been part of the Israeli political scene since 1918, when the first women's list, the Women's Society, was elected to the first Representative Assembly with the goal of securing the formal recognition of women's suffrage as a fundamental principle of Jewish autonomy in the Yishuv. The Women's List, later called the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights (UER), elected representatives to each of the four Representative Assemblies and, in 1931, sent one of its representatives, Henrietta Szold, to the Va'ad Leumi in order to head the establishment of the Department of Social Welfare. The UER, in conjunction with the Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO) and the Zionist Women's Organization (HNZ) [the Histadrut Nashim Zionot], elected a representative, Rachel Kagan, to the Knesset in 1949. ¹

Kagan's term was short lived; a WIZO decision that electoral politics was not the appropriate sphere of activity for a non-partisan, voluntary Zionist women's organization meant that it did not field another candidate for Knesset after 1951. Nor was Kagan's term marked by great feminist accomplishments; her attempt to pass a bill for improving women's status was torpedoed by a government bill which was so mild in content that Kagan refused to support it. ² But it is likely that those who established the current women's list (and its 1992 predecessor) did not look toward either the UER or the WIZO list when deciding to run for election. Instead they are most probably hoping to replicate the experiences of a different women's list which had emerged out of a political vacuum twenty-six years after the WIZO list withdrew from electoral politics: the 1977 Women's Party. The 1977 Women's Party did not win a mandate, but its election campaign exerted an important impact on feminists in Israel in two different and contradictory ways: on one hand, by propelling feminists to pursue different strategies to gain electoral representation; and, on the other, by encouraging women's lists to run for election with the primary goal of influencing the election campaign.

The Representation of Women and Women's Lists

The meaning of representation of women and women's "interests" has never been more contested than during the past decade. Many feminists argue that the very category of "women" is socially constructed and has no intrinsic meaning, and that, therefore, there is no coherent body of "women's interests." ³ But while the meaning of "women" is a subject of academic debate, women continue to comprise a very small proportion of those who hold electoral power, making up "only 11 percent of the world's legislatures." ⁴ Comparative research on electoral systems indicate that, even though women representatives tend to vote along party lines, "there are issues, such as abortion, where gender appears to make a difference in how legislators vote." ⁵ The physical presence of women in electoral politics thus definitely affects women's status in specific policy areas.

One way that women have tried to raise their profile in legislatures has been by establishing separate parties. Women's parties ran in Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland from the early 1900s until the end of the 1920s. For feminists, these parties were alternatives to what women viewed...