In 1908, Golda Lishansky stepped off the boat in Jaffa. She was 22, a graduate of a women’s gymnasium, and one of the founders of the Poalei Zion party. For six years, until World War One, Lishansky, newly named as Rahel Yanait, exulted in her impoverished, improvised life. She and her romantic partner Itzhak Ben-Zvi travelled around Palestine on foot, singing Hebrew songs, founding schools and newspapers, entertaining friends and comrades on a straw mat in their small quarters in Jaffa. If her memoir is to be believed, they were deliriously happy. When Yitzhak and his friend Israel Shohat founded the roaming militia called Ha-shomer in April of 1909, she and Manya Wilbeschewitz Shohat were two of the very few women invited to join. Manya especially has become a legend, notorious at the time and later for her daring acts of violence and unconventional freedom from traditional wifehood and motherhood. In this paper I explore the lives of Yanait and Shochat’s peers, so as to interpret their uniqueness. Among the women we meet here are Yael Gordon, Sara Azaryahu, Zila Feinberg, Shoshana Bogen, Esther Shapira, Fania Metman-Cohen, Sophie Udin, Rivka Alper, and Ita Kalish. Some founded the first kibbutzim, some were teachers, others published authors and political activists. This research is crucial in evaluating the notion that Zionism was an essentially masculine endeavor. Alas, much of the new research ignores the real-life experiences of women. The focus on muscle Judaism is not wrong, but it is over-theorized and essentialist. Just because there was a masculine dimension to the Zionist project does not justify the conclusion that women did not achieve some kind of personal emancipation when they became Zionists. In this paper I survey the patterns we see among the thousands of Jewish women who came of age in this setting. Attention to the rate at which they married, the romantic partnerships they created, their birth rate and completed family size, as well as their abortions, miscarriages, divorces and suicides help us understand the reality of their lives. In conclusion I will assess Aaron David Gordon’s maxim was that “without family life, a nation will not be built.” In this paper I will assess whether the young women of this era did indeed create new family and new political practices, and whether these passions and institutions were the making of their emancipation, as women or as Jews.