In Search of a New Female Identity: Pioneering Women in Prestate Israeli Society

Abstract

The new Jewish settlement in Palestine, under the auspices of the Zionist movement, aimed at creating a new Jewish society, one that would solve the basic problems of Jewish existence in the Diaspora. The transition from Eastern Europe to the Land of Israel (then Palestine), beginning in the late nineteenth century, was intended as an overall process of social change, from a minority to an eventual majority, from persecution and political subordination to autonomy, from economic dependence on services given to the host society to the creation of a productive, all-rounded Jewish economy, from an individual at loss in a stagnant and deteriorating traditional Jewish community to a proud individual rooted in his own land. The Zionist movement, institutionally organized as the World Zionist Organization, was an umbrella organization of different movements and political parties. While all shared the perspective of Zionism as both social and individual change, this was probably most pronounced for Socialist, or Labor, Zionism. The new society was to be the negation of the traditional Diaspora society. It was to be a society of labor and laborers, a society of equality and collectivity. Such social change necessitated deep, conscious, individual transformation. The emergence of a new society and a new person were seen as deeply related and interrelated. Geographic mobility, the transition to Palestine, did not in itself insure the creation of a new society. Far from it. New patterns of action, of behavior, of relations, of identity had to be carved out for the new society to begin to emerge. The image of the new Jew, the new Hebrew person, was best exemplified by the halutz , the pioneer. The halutz was the one to lead the way for others, to take the difficult, untrodden path. The halutz was the worker, the laborer, and preferably the productive, agricultural laborer. The halutz was seen as an autonomous, independent individual, not to be subordinated by others, either