According to its Declaration of Independence, the State of Israel "will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex". However, the equality between men and women in Israel was not de facto. What did Israeli women have to say about that?
The book presents views and opinions of Israeli women in the 1950s and the early 1960s about their roles and duties in the public and the domestic spheres, based on contemporary women's sections in the press and women's magazines. It shows what women said about women in the Israeli parliament (Knesset) and about Golda Meir; women's service in the Israeli Defense Force and the exclusion of women from the public sphere; motherhood and parenthood, woman's right to choose to have an abortion and women's struggle for peace; women's duties as housewives and the discrimination of women as employees. The book also uncovers a forgotten feminist journal, sheds light on a famous adoption story of a Yemenite baby and discusses a protest of female cadets in the Israeli Air Force flight course that was ignored and silenced for many years.
The book unveils Israeli women's voices from the past, which show that in an era of many fateful decisions, Israeli women also made choices that affected their status in society. Readers might find these decisions relevant vis-à-vis women's status in Israeli society nowadays.
"Written from the perspective of a contemporary feminist, Sharon Geva’s engaging book offers a critical review of women’s status and rights in Israel of the 1950s, through the lens of women’s magazines and newspaper columns. Geva provides ample empirical proof for the justified criticism voiced by Israeli feminists as early as the 1970s— namely, women’s equality in Israel was nothing but a myth. Geva’s book covers significant topics pertaining to gender inequality and women’s everyday lives. She validates previous studies, and therefore this book is not a revisionist history." - Orit Rozin, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, March 2023
"Geva offers a dynamic discussion of the foundations of the status of women in Israel as we know it today. She enriches her discussion with portraits of the women journalists who recorded the lives of women, as well as details about the women who were the subjects of the columns." - Pnina Lahav, Israel Studies Review, Winter 2020
"From all these diligently and artfully combined sources, the discourse about gender (in)equality in this early period emerges, together with the mechanisms that caused women to internalize and express the idea that their rights should be subordinated to state interests, thus becoming themselves complicit in entrenching gender boundaries." - Sylvie Fogiel Bijaoui, Nashim, July 2021
"In addition to her very comprehensive survey of the valuable nuggets waiting to be mined in the newspapers of the period, Geva conducted research at the Israel State Archives, the Israel Defense Forces Archives and the Central Zionist Archives. She also perused women’s memoirs and interviewed memoirists, including some who were key figures in the unfolding history of women in Israel after 1948." - Ofer Aderet, Haaretz, April 2020