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From The Madwoman in the Attic to The Women's Room: The American Roots of Israeli Feminism
The woman novelist must be an hysteric, for hysteria is simultaneously what a woman can do to be feminine and refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourses. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution(1)
Female hysteria seemed to be on the wane, as feminism was on the rise [...] The despised hysterics of yesteryear have been replaced by the feminist radicals of today. Elaine Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud(2)
ISRAELI FEMINISM HAD TO BE reinvented in the 1970s. About half a century had passed since the Suffragettes of Jewish Palestine won the vote in 1920; by the 1970s, intervening events -- primarily the Holocaust, the establishment of the State, and its prolonged state of siege -- have turned the struggle and the achievements of those "New Hebrew Women" into a dim memory. The familiar images of female soldiers and even a female Prime Minister [who was not a feminist!] did little to change the life and status of "the woman in the street." "From the time of Independence until the Six-Day War (1948-1967) the status of women was, for the most part, a non-issue," is the succinct summary of sociologist Dafna Izraeli in her 1987 Encyclopaedia Judaica feature essay on "The Status of Women in Israel."(3)
This summary may sound paradoxical to anyone somewhat familiar with the ideological roots of the Zionist movement, which was bound up with 19(th)-century socialism and nationalism. The former had openly propagated -- at least in theory -- both social and sexual equality for women. However, as recent sociohistorical studies in Israel have shown, not a little was lost in the translation from ideological platform to lived experience. In the view of contemporary scholars, cogently recapitulated in the term "the Equality Bluff," the prestate Zionist women's movement had not fulfilled its own expectations in either the urban settlements or even in the kibbutzim [collective farming communities].(4) Nor did the legendary Palmach, apparently, despite the long-held perception to the opposite. As told only recently by one of its most notorious fighters, Netiva Ben Yehuda (b. 1928), the distance between the inscription on its "flag" and the reality in the ranks of Israel's War of Independence in 1948 was rather...