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Susan Sered What Makes Women Sick? Maternity, Modesty and Militarism in Israeli Society University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press, Hanover, N.H., and London, 2000. 194 pp. reviewed by Amy Avgar Israeli women are sicker and die younger than their counterparts in other Western countries. Over the past decade, their life expectancy has consistently ranked around thirteenth to seventeenth in the world, while the life expectancy of Israeli men is one of the highest in the world. Although women in Israel, as in most of the world, statistically outlive men, their survival average is only half that of the average for women in developed countries. Israeli women visit primary care physicians more often than men do, suffer more from chronic illness and are more likely to be hospitalized for depression and other affective disorders. Women who are hospitalized for heart attacks, the number one cause of female mortality, arrive in a worse functional state than men who are hospitalized for the same reason. They are slower to recover and less likely to survive. Despite a growing public and professional awareness of the relatively poor health profile of Israeli women, compared to Israeli men and to women in other parts of the developed world, little attention has been paid by medical research, social science or feminist scholarship to understanding the underlying reasons for this phenomenon. In her latest book, What Makes Women Sick, feminist anthropologist Susan Sered offers a provocative and poignant explanation. She blames patriarchal institutions in Israeli society for promoting social constructions that equate femaleness with illness, weakness and vulnerability and maleness with health, strength and superiority. According to Sered, the most salient institutions that shape the corporeal experiences of women include the state, the military, the religious establishment, the media, the consumer 280Nashim:A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and GenderIssues, no. 4. © 2001 Susan Sered: What Makes Women Sick economy and, of course, the medical care system itself. These powerful institutions, she argues, join forces to control women's bodies, to exercise authority over them and to pathologize and medicalize women's lives. Sered draws upon Knesset protocols and proceedings of public health committees and press reports in addition to the observations of social scientists and her own qualitative interviews with women to make her case. Organizing her book around the major institutions that collude in the control of women's bodies, she juxtaposes private experiences and individual voices with the collective and with public discourse in her effort to show how patriarchy universally makes women sick and how patriarchal cultural practices in Israel make Israeli women sick in particular ways (p. 19). In Chapter I, Sered describes the ideological background that legitimizes the widespread national interest in women's bodies and grants the medical establishment excessive authority in acting on that interest. This ideology holds that motherhood is women's national mission and their wombs a national resource for replacing the six million lost in the holocaust, for producing the next generation of soldiers and for combating the "demographic threat" posed by the relatively higher birth rates of Arabs compared to Jews. The collective representation of motherhood, in turn, gives rise to public policy that is inherently paternalistic and aimed at protecting the "vulnerable wombs" ofwomen. Among the mechanisms that the state uses to gain control over female reproduction are monetary grants to birthing mothers and public committees for the termination of pregnancy. In both cases, the medical establishment is granted a monopoly in carrying out what government considers to be in the best interests of women. Thus, for example, government allowances for the purchase of baby equipment and social security payments during maternity leave are granted only to women who give birth in hospitals. Knesset discussions of the legislation that formalized these matters in the 1950s focused on the need for medical supervision, particularly among the masses of immigrants from underdeveloped countries. The proceedings of discussions of the 1954 Women's Labor Law also preserve a record of what Sered refers to as "a large group of men deciding on the status of women's bodies" (notes, p. 173). Knesset members proposed that a woman should not receive maternity leave after a miscarriage...

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