Bargaining for Gender Identity: Love, Sex, and Money in an Israeli Moshav

Abstract

The study of gender and culture change in an Israeli village of Moroccan Jewish immigrants reveals a paradox: although women accept men's definition of the honorable female, one which limits women's activities to the private sphere, women challenge this definition at least on the issue of employment outside the home. In other words, women accept the ideal image of Women conveyed by their culture, but they do not accept the behavior this ideal demands. Examination of what it means to be a man or a woman in the village and how the notion of limit manifests itself in these meanings can shed light on this paradox. During one year (1983) of participant observation and extensive interviewing, I gathered data on all the married couples (46) of a small community in a co-operative village (moshav) in Israel. The first moshavim (agricultural co-operatives) were founded by settlers who emigrated from Eastern Europe (Ashkenazim) in the 1920s.2 As kibbutzim, they were based on a zionist-socialist ideology but each family lived in its own house and worked its own plot of land. Co-operation was the central idea of this organization. Even today the means of production are collectively bought and each member-unit sells its product through the collective. The moshav as a legal entity organizes loans to its members, which are repaid to the community. The moshav is governed democratically through general meetings, where each family (as a unit) has one vote. Decisions are taken by a majority vote. An elected committee of five members deals with daily problems. The moshav I studied was categorized as economically unviable and lost its political independence. The leadership is now appointed by outside agencies and consists of five persons, only one of whom is a member of the moshav. More than half of the men earn their living outside while the women and the teenagers are in charge of the main economic feature, the chicken coops. Of its 50 families, 46 are who settled here during the 1950s and four are new corners. The old timers are composed of 20 older and 26 families of sons (second generation). The newcomers settled in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most (80 per cent) of the old timer are from Morocco, the other 20 per cent derive from Tunis, Iraq, and Yemen. The newcomers, Ashkenazim, were settled to economically redeem the collectivity by adding wealthier families. They hold different values regarding honor and identity, which incites conflicts among the villagers. In this article, I focus on male and female identity as defined by separate but complementary gender-based concepts of honor, the behaviors that stem from these concepts, and the bargaining that men and women do to resolve