Women's Quest For Occupational Equality: The Case Of Jewish Female Agricultural Workers in Pre-State Israel

Abstract

There is a common belief that Israeli women have achieved gender equality over and above that attained in America and European countries. Evidence cited to support this is the fact that women routinely serve in the Israeli army and the country elected a woman, Golda Meir, as prime minister. Equality between men and women is claimed to date back to the days at the beginning of the century when both sexes worked shoulder to shoulder in road construction and land reclamation (Bernstein, 1992: 2). The years 1904–14 and 1919–23, known in Zionist history as the Second and ThirdAliyah(waves of immigration), were indeed formative times during which the dominant values of the society were shaped and the infrastructure of future organizations was laid (Eisenstadt, 1967; Izraeli, 1981). The immigrants who arrived during this period, known ashalutzim(male pioneers) andhalutzot(female pioneers) were idealistic nationalists from Eastern Europe. They were young and single, and came with the express purpose of rebuilding Zion and creating a new type of egalitarian and labor-oriented society.