Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
munity. This means that women often fi nd themselves at a disadvantage in cases of divorce and
inheritance, although women have won the right to be members of regional religious councils.
Furthermore, despite the proclamation of equality in the Declaration of Independence, reli-
gious parties were able to block the explicit mention of gender equality in the Basic Law on
Human Dignity and Liberty — a part of Israel's constitutional legal framework—because they
feared that it would interfere with matters under religious jurisdiction.
Numerous women's organizations provide services and advocate for a variety of issues of
concern to women and society at large. Successful lobbying has brought laws that assure wom-
en's representation on the boards of public institutions; stipulate equal pay for equal work;
prohibit sexual harassment in the workplace; and improve conditions for rape victims at trials.
Women are represented in politics, the military, the workforce, and the cultural world.
In 1897, at the First Zionist Congress, 17 women were present among the 200 participants;
most were accompanying their husbands. One exception was Rosa Sonneschein, a Hungarian-
born U.S. citizen who came as a representative for
The American Jewess
, a journal she founded
and published. Women were given the right to vote in the Zionist movement in 1900, at the
Third Zionist Congress.
In the Second Aliya, 1904 -1913, women accounted for 17 percent of the mainly Russian
immigrants. Many of them were committed to challenging traditional female roles by doing
hard physical labor. By the standards of the day, they were well educated, and their socialist
doctrine emphasized equality between the sexes. A dynamic example was Manya Shohat, who
came from a wealthy, educated family and had been a Socialist Revolutionary Party member
in Russia dedicated to overthrowing the tsarist regime.
Shohat's brother wrote her from the Land of Israel claiming to be ill and asking that she
come to help him. Actually, he was trying to save her life, since he was sure that her revolution-
ary activities would lead to her execution. After she came to Israel, Shohat, who had studied
the Talmud and was fl uent in Hebrew, helped found the fi rst Jewish agricultural workers'
collective at Sejera in the Galilee. There, women undertook many of the same jobs as men,
including plowing and doing guard duty. Later, Shohat smuggled in arms, was arrested by the
Ottoman authorities, and was sent into exile. After World War I, she returned and continued
her pioneering activities.
Other women, however, had different experiences. The kibbutz system promised to liberate
women from the yoke of domestic responsibilities. Children were to be raised communally in
special children's houses. All meals were to be prepared communally with the work shared by
everyone so that women did not have to do it all. Even laundry was done communally.
Despite socialist ideas of equality, women were passed over for the most important, high-
status jobs, such as being guards, and were often shunted to the communal kitchens and
laundries. As one pioneer woman, Zippora Bar-Droma, put it, while men “were 'building the
country,'” women “would take care of everyday matters of the 'builders of the country.'” In a
1975 book,
Women in the Kibbutz
, anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Joseph Shepher concluded
that the majority of women were cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing while men were harvest-
ing, planting, guarding, and building. Women composed only 14 percent of those at the high-
est level of kibbutz management.
