Israel Studies

Israel Studies 5.1 (2000) 266-286

From The Madwoman in the Attic to The Women's Room: The American Roots of Israeli Feminism *

Yael S. Feldman

Figures

Culture

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 The despised hysterics of yesteryear have been replaced by the feminist radicals of today.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 [End Page 266] 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 immense. ⁵

Still, this belated hindsight should not make us lose sight of the ethos (some would say mythos) of equal rights, as it was experienced by both fathers and mothers of the pioneering, founding generation. Nor should it make us belittle the political as well as cultural early "conquests" made by some of these women--Manya Schohat (1880-1959) and Rachel Katznelson-Shazar (1885-1983), for example, and, of course, the writer Dvora Baron (1887-1956) and the poet Rachel (1890-1931).

The force of this ethos was still felt in the early decades of the State, at least in some segments of Israeli society. English readers may be familiar with this ethos through the much publicized image of the Israeli female soldier, often photographed with a gun in her hand. In the late 1950s this image found its fictional expression in the popular, rather facile novel New Face in the Mirror, ⁶ written in English (and published in America!) by Yael Dayan--today the Chair of the Israeli Knesset Committee on the Status of Women. She was then known as the young daughter of Israel's charismatic Chief of Staff, the victorious commander of the 1957 Suez Campaign, and the symbol of Israeli male chauvinism, Moshe Dayan. The novel projected a female macho stereotype that in reality was neither "feminist" nor that common. It reflected, however, precisely that paradoxical Israeli ethos that made "feminism," as it came to be known in the United States in the sixties, seem redundant, as if it were something "we have always known" (albeit under the rubric of "the woman question"), a latter-day product of...