Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel

Part III. Women's Rights, Women's Spheres

Part III Women's Rights, Women's Spheres Just as the women of the labor movement attempted to transform their socialist Zionist goals into feminist goals, so did the women of the middle-class. The middle-class of the Yishuv was composed of various social groups known at the time as the Hugim Ezrahi'm-the civic sector. These were a somewhat mixed assortment of groups without a clear-cut common denominator. The civic sector included all those elements which were not identified as belonging to either the right wing, the left wing, ethnic groups or religious groups. This would include groups such as the private farmers of the moshavot, industrialists, merchants, intellectuals with a general liberal orientation, the political center organized in the General Zionist party and so forth. This assortment of groups, which never developed one overall representative organization, was matched by a variety of women's organizations from among the women of the same constituency. They developed their Zionist aspirations for a liberal, modern, secular Jewish society into liberal feminism. They aimed at a society in which women would enjoy equal rights without challenging or transforming women's conventional roles. They organized to enhance women's contribution to the new society by advancing women's spheres rather than by challenging the distinction between the spheres. If the historiography of the Yishuv created a myth around the women pioneers (the halutzot), it ignored the women of the civic sector. Their achievements were either taken for granted or deemed unimportant. Both chapters in this section aim to redress this bias caused by an interplay of male dominance and labor movement dominance in the conventional historiography. Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui, deals (in her contribution to this section) with the strength and success of the women of the civic sector. Hanna Herzog deals with their marginality and weakness. The difference between them is primarily one of focus. Fogiel-Bijaoui studies the one major success of the women's movement, led by the 257 258 Part III Association of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights, in the struggle for suffrage. Herzog discusses a wide range of additional initiatives and achievements, but focuses on the marginalization of that success and of the many other successful initiatives in the accepted historiography. The struggle for women's suffrage took place during the formation of representative institutions of the J ewish community in Palestine . These would provide leadership to the developing community and represent it before the governing authorities-the British mandatory government. The deep splits within the Jewish community , especially those between the Old Yishuv, the ultra-orthodox, highly conservative non-Zionist and anti-Zionist sector and the New Yishuv, which was nationalist, modern and non-religious, came to bear on all decisions concerning the formation of its representative institutions. Thus the issue of women's right to vote took on added significance as a touchstone to the nature of the new Jewish society. For the ultra-orthodox the introduction of women into the public sphere of political participation was seen as a basic deviation from religious law and norms. For the women and their socialist and liberal allies the right to vote and to be elected was, as Fogiel-Bijaoui claims, "an inseparable part of their Zionist revolution which aspired to create a new society, based on liberty and human equality in the Liberal or the Socialist sense of these terms." In her analysis of women's success in obtaining the vote Fogiel-Bijaoui focuses on the broad women's movement which emerged, bringing together women of different sectors of the New Yishuv, under the leadership of the liberal center, the women of the civic sector. She identifies ideological, political and organizational factors which combine to explain the women's special achievement, not only in gaining the vote, but in increasing women's representation far beyond that achieved by women in other societies at the time. Given the inability of women to achieve many of their other goals, as can be seen in the chapters of this book, the analysis of this successful venture is of special importance . Hanna Herzog does not deny this success. On the contrary, she presents a detailed discussion of a wide range of additional achievements-the establishment of legal bureaus (by the Association of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Eretz Israel), the establishment of mother and child clinics and the beginning of social work in Palestine (the Federation of Hebrew Women) and the ad- Women's Rights, Women's Spheres...