Berenice Carroll's book "Liberating Women's History" (1975) was one of the first to affirm that women do have a history of their own, even if it's been repressed and even wiped from the collective memory. For the past decade, this affirmation has gained momentum in Israel, with the publication of dozens of studies that reveal more and more about the place and involvement of women in Israeli and Jewish history. The new anthology of essays by Margalit Shilo joins this bonanza of revelation and liberation, this time with the focus on the history of women at the start of the country's settlement.
Shilo, a professor of Israel studies at Bar-Ilan University, who has been dealing with the subject for some 20 years, has collected her early and later articles and divided them chronologically into the three periods they deal with: the First Aliyah, or wave of migration (1882-1903)the Second Aliya (1904-1914); and the beginning of British rule (1918-1920). Putting together individual articles into the mosaic of a book is supposed to provide added value of its own, not only because a more complete historical perspective is thus presented, but also because the proximity of the essays to one another and the "interaction" between them creates an additional discourse, one that inspires more insights than the sum of its components.
On the other hand, this proximity is likely to give even more prominence to those elements that are missing. In other words, if the study of the Zionist narrative traditionally began its investigations with a representation of the European Jew as the sole ruler in the formulation of nationality in the Land of Israel, so it was too with the representation of the European Jewish woman. Shilo does not deal, for example, with the ethnic periphery of the women's community in the first aliyot but rather with its central and leading representations; such as the woman farmer, the laborer, the educated citizen and so forth. Nevertheless, Shilo does turn to examine marginal social phenomena that, at the time, everyone preferred not to acknowledge, such as the 500 (if not more) women who made a living as prostitutes when Jerusalem was swamped by the soldiers of His Majesty's army during World War I.
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Who were these women? Were they all Jerusalemites, or did they gravitate to the city from other places? Was it merely their economic plight that led them to sell their bodies, or was it more the opportunity to earn easy money, or were they perhaps tempted by the entertainment that was available at the "Anglo-Saxon" level (as was hinted about the pupils at Mrs. Landau's school). Needless to say, the snippets of information that are hinted at allow for a discussion that centers not on the prostitutes themselves, but rather on the attempts of the relevant municipal committees in the city to deny their discovery.
It was a different story with the associations of local women, including those involved in philanthropy, some of whom had financial resources at their disposal, and proposed more constructive solutions (such as working in agriculture) for the women of Jerusalem, who included, one can assume, those working in prostitution. Even if this instructive episode raises more questions than provides answers, the very fact of this difficult phenomenon being raised - rather than continuing to be swept under the carpet of history - is important in itself.
Blossoming of romance If we return to the story of the mainstream woman, which is the tale of the history of the European Jewish woman in her struggles and changing roles in this country, we find that it is no less enthralling and innovative. In the chapter devoted to the first aliya, we learn that, despite the conservative and patriarchal image of the society of farmers in the moshavot (large villages), the beginning of the national revival here appears also as a feminist revival. Even in such Orthodox villages as Petah Tikva, Mazkeret Batya or Zikhron Yaakov, a relative liberalization occurred in the life of the young woman in the Land of Israel, both in the way she became exposed to elementary study in formal schools and in her much freer and more open attitude toward male-female relations. This was a time when the institution of Jewish matchmaking was beginning to fall apart and the romanticism of rural Land of Israel served as strong glue for the relationships of the young men and women.
Moreover, even if women in the first aliya were excluded from any kind of equal partnership, they were not inactive, and tried doing everything possible to leave a mark on their community's day-to-day life: in the establishment of women's associations for volunteer social activities; or by taking the plunge into journalistic writing (Hemda Ben Yehuda), memoirs (Itta Yellin) or literature (Nehama Puhachewski); or in their ability to reach management positions and teaching jobs in elementary schools and kindergartens. Unfortunately, Shilo does not comment further here on the "teachers affair," which was also repressed until only recently. This scandal involved women who were sent by order of the Baron de Rothschild to study in Paris, and who were sexually harassed by the officials who accompanied them there.
The chapters that follow focus on women from the second aliya. These include the female "laborer," who has in recent years been comprehensively studied, including the attempts to set up agricultural schools for women (among them Havat Kinneret, which played a significant role in Shulamit Lapid's 1982 novel "Gai Oni"). On the other hand, the information available about "the watchman's wife" and "the civic woman" has not been examined sufficiently. The chapter on the former is both moving and annoying at the same time, as the heroic vicissitudes of a small community of women unfold before us, women who could have eased the burden of guarding (together with their watchmen partners) but who were rejected by them. A woman of this kind followed her husband around, like a gypsy who had to carry her homes and children, a partner to the suffering who was known only as the "wife of a watchman" (but never a "watch-woman" in her own right).
Another example of a feminist contribution that Shilo examines, which has not been sufficiently researched up until now, is that of the "civic woman." The dominant historical discourse in the study of the first aliyot has for many years been devoted only to the working class - the socialist Zionists, who established the labor force of the Land of Israel and the central leadership for its future. It is needless to say that this labor bloc, with its effective action and massive documentation, obscured, so to speak, the place of the "civic" bloc, parts of which contributed no less to the development of modern civil society in the Land of Israel. This obscurity can be felt also with regard to the far-reaching activity of the civic woman (in the large villages and towns) so that it too is forgotten or obliterated.
After all, the struggle of women for equal rights, including the elementary right to vote and be elected, was not carried out by women laborers. Under the influence of the socialist utopia, which promised the imminent abolishment of class differences, they dissociated themselves from aggressive cooperation at the time with the "civic woman." The result was therefore that it was the latter who had the sense to translate the Balfour Declaration into the formation of a fledgling organization aimed at being the precursor to a constitution with equal rights for men and women, by setting up the basic tool for their struggle: the Association of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in the Land of Israel (1919).
A lonely struggle And indeed the study of the "civic woman" in the second and third decades of the 20th century, which looks at their professional contributions (to education, welfare, medicine, music and so forth) as well as their stubborn and lonely struggle against the male leadership and the women's groups who remained opposed to them, is one of Shilo's most important studies in this collection.
I would also like to draw attention to the tremendous amount of rummaging
that was required here, since searching for documentation about women is like groping in the dark for doors that may or may not exist. In other words, someone searching for material about women, which has only in the last few decades begun to be turn up, finds limitations in the references to sources, has to hang onto every thread of information about places, and knows in advance that documentation of the feminist history in this country (history that was always seen as marginal and unimportant) is scanty.
In order to begin the search for testimony about women, one will inevitably have to turn, out of lack of choice, to the male story and the plethora of documents, protocols, reports, articles and photographs that tell it. This may be the only place one can find information about women, but one has to keep in mind that the findings will always be conditional on the way men regarded women, and that it will be difficult to extract from such sources a genuine feminine voice.
The feminist picture Most of the women's materials that could serve as sources for the story of the activities of women in these early periods is to be found in personal documentation, and this too is not very plentiful. This reservoir includes a few diaries and letters that are authentic for their time and place (among the writings of woman laborers, one finds some letters and speeches), as well as memoirs, biographies and autobiographies that were written later, and which in any event are loaded with additional perspectives.
In light of the available documentation, it is no surprise that Shilo has had to rely for the most part on masculine documentation in her attempts to expose the beginnings of the "wars" of the women of the Yishuv for "independence." That is to say, Shilo does not trace this critical social period on the basis of women's sources (only from the 1920s, when the women's organizations were founded, does the documentary material on this subject increase) but rather is dependent on protocols of municipal and nation-wide meetings in which the male community was obliged from time to time to devote attention to women's rights.
In order to complete this historical feminist picture, Shilo devotes detailed study to women's personal writings, and compares one to another. For example, she compares the autobiography of Yehudit Harari, from Rehovot, to that of Itta Yellin, of Jerusalem; the diary of the young Hannah Leah Segal, from Petah Tikva, to that of Rivka Grabovsky, from Rosh Pina. Additionally, she examines the writings of the kindergarten teacher Hassia Feinsod-Sukenik in the light of those of the wandering teacher and journalist Shulamit Flaum and the midwife Hannah Trager, in her travels between Petah Tikva and London. Trager's biographical writings are compared to those of her father's, which creates something of a gender "Rashomon," in which the daughter's interpretation is confronted by her father's view on the same events.
This collection of articles is a first and most welcome attempt to present the narrative of the women of the early waves of immigration from the perspective of a gender debate. That is to say, this collection might have been expected to clarify issues in the lives of the women settlers, the laborers and the pioneers, both in their domestic and public spheres, in an attempt to examine it as an inseparable part of the male-female historic national story. The relationships between them, however, pose a challenge for additional revelations of the insights of the history of the Yishuv - a history of a young nation - in its tensions and its endeavors to rebuild itself as a modern society.
Shilo's point of view proposes an earlier kind of methodology: It is possible that the dominant reliance on male sources dictates this, or perhaps there are other considerations, but in any event the discussion is dichotomous and develops throughout all the essays along two parallel lines. Shilo reads the history of the Yishuv during the early aliyot as two separate narratives - the male and the female - and this two-lane reading is intended to conclude and stress, as she puts it, that "the women's story is not the opposite of the men's story but rather its 'complement'."
Alongside this statement, it is worth studying the writing of the historian Joan Wallach Scott, who claims that the late entry of the woman's story into history not only enlarges and redefines it but also gives it meaning as a new history. The feminine story of the early aliyot, as it is presented in this collection, doesn't take into consideration Wallach Scott's suggestion. Future research, in which these male and female materials are read anew, should lead to the expansion and redefinition of the history of the Yishuv, and induce it to speak out as a new history.
Prof. Yaffah Berlovitz teaches in the department of Jewish literature at Bar-Ilan University.<.i>
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