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.

Women who worked in the fields of social welfare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been understood by historians as performing a form of affective labor that enabled their inclusion in nationalist, modernist or progressive movements. By working as nurses and social workers, women were thought to not only have fulfilled roles as “mothers of the nation,” but also to have engaged in sectors of public life in ways that did not violate social ideas of gendered spheres and gendered roles. This paper complicates that image of women’s work by focusing on the layered modes of expertise enacted by Palestinian Arab women employed in health and welfare industries during the Mandate period. It argues that while these women worked in positions that might have recalled maternal roles, their work in fact reflected the contradictory nature of gendered labor under Mandate Palestine’s system of colonial governance. By exploring the careers of nurses and social workers employed in the field of child welfare, this paper challenges our notions of women’s work in the social realm as a form of public motherhood. Instead, it uncovers the ways in which these women embodied professional expertise, both in spite of and because of their gender. Nurses and social workers were integrated into the labor systems of colonial welfare governance as professionals with scientific knowledge and specialized training that met modern standards of professional education. At the same time, the colonial government relied on them to be representatives of local populations and assumed that they had particular knowledge of and connections with Palestinian communities. In the arenas of child welfare, where many of these women were employed, the workers' gender itself became a form of expertise that simultaneously relied upon and defied simple gender dichotomies. Drawing upon employment records and reports from the health, prisons, and welfare departments of the Mandate government, this paper also highlights the unique roles that these women occupied in the structure of colonial governance, as both objects of colonial rule and interlocutors in the production of a certain twentieth-century vision of social progress.

As new models of schooling and education spread globally during the 19th and 20th centuries, the image and expectation of who would stand at the front of classrooms took different forms. While male teachers in the United States, and most of Europe wrestled with “historical and cultural frameworks that defined most teaching as women’s work,”1 in the Arab world, teaching did not conjure up images of women. Instead, women performed men’s work rather than vice-versa. This paper focuses on the Arab population of Mandate Palestine, arguing that although teachers faced expectations based on their gender, the profession of teaching coded both masculine and to a lesser extent elite feminine, rather than clearly feminine. Historians of the Middle East have focused on the feminization inherent in curricula, and also in women’s growing role in politics and feminist movements. However, they have focused less on teachers’ gender, or on the slippage between ideals of womanhood and that of the teaching profession. Policies and discourses relating to education, from local, missionary as well as colonial perspectives, sought to femininize women. These encouraged an ideal woman who would be a modern mother and homemaker. However, teaching necessarily postponed this ideal, often indefinitely. A continued scarcity of teachers, the segregation of schooling after kindergarten, as well as different pedagogical and even feminine ideals, preserved teaching as an elite rather than a feminine profession. This paper also follows Arab Palestinian teachers beyond Palestine. The acceptability of teaching as a profession, even as it came up against ideals of womanhood, allowed women to circulate, in increasing numbers, across the Arab World, creating pockets of similar educational backgrounds, sentiments, fashions and worldviews. Memoirs, official documents, newspaper articles and literature equated female teachers, to an even greater degree than their male colleagues, with the advent of modernity. Their dress, their travels, their leisure activities and their profession defined them as, if at times unwillingly, a pioneering elite. 1. Christine Skelton. The Sage Handbook of Gender and Education. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009.

Beginning with the period right after the Oslo accords and ending with data from 2017, the paper examines over three decades of employment trends and how various political and economic impacts have reshaped gendered employment in Palestine. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) began collecting labor force survey data in 1995 and this paper uses these data to examine how gendered patterns of employment have shifted over time, with a focus not only on the role of Israeli and Palestinian Authority policies, but also at how globalization has impacted these trends. Because of the unique ways that the Palestinian economy is inserted into the global economy, employment trends (particularly shifting occupations as well as unemployment/occupational segregation/wages differences) differ by time, geographic location and class. Given the extensive and consistent data now available, it is possible to paint a fairly comprehensive picture of shifting employment trends and compare patterns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with each other, as well as with surrounding communities (particularly Jordan and to a lesser degree Egypt), to better understand what is both unique and typical about the gendering of Palestinian employment and how trends have shifted over time. The data suggest that while in some contexts economic and political factors have reinforced traditional gender norms, in others, the opposite is the case.