Zionism's gender: Hannah Meisel and the founding of the Agricultural Schools for Young Women.

SPEAKING TO A GROUP OF TEACHERS assembled in Palestine (1) in 1903, Haim Nachman Bialik, the national poet of Zionism, declared that "[W]hoever does not create all of his values from the land is half a man." (2) Indeed, the physically fit male body, "The Muscle Jew," had become the rhetorical idealization of Zionism's quest to create a new Jew by "returning" him to physical labor on the land. (3) Yet, if Zionism's gender was so blatantly male, how then were Jewish women to "return to the soil"? Hannah Meisel responded to such calls to manliness by fashioning a new Jewish woman. From her arrival in Palestine in 1909 as a farmer and teacher to her founding of the first Agricultural School for Young Women in 1926, (4) Meisel's career traces the course of a new feminine ideal and, in a wider perspective, Zionism's revaluation of gender after the Great War. It was a critical period. Between Herzl's death in 1903 through the Balfour Declaration's proposal of a Jewish "homeland" in Mandate Palestine at the end of the 1920s, the Labor Party in Palestine came to dominate the international Zionist movement and laid the foundations of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Meisel's work reflected the significant contribution of women to Zionism's idea of gender. From her stewardship of the first women's agricultural collective before the War to her world-wide quest after it for funding for her school, her view of gender responded pragmatically to the exigencies of time and place. By the end of the twenties her notion of gender flowed into the mainstream of Zionist idealism; or more accurately, perhaps, Zionism's mainstream flowed toward her.

The story of Zionism's gender shoves the academic historian into the realm of public memory, an arena of great interest to early Zionists, who saw education in history as a way to revitalize Jewish culture. Though never at the very center of the Zionist narrative, (5) female voices constituted a significant part of it. This was particularly true during the formative years of myth-making in the 1920S and 1930s, when educational institutions in the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, created heroes to inspire Jewish youth on "the Land" and in the Diaspora. (6) The Labor movement in Palestine churned out accounts of settler life that extolled the virtues of physical labor and presented the "pioneers" as modern versions of Biblical heroes. The corpus of heroic literature included reminiscences of women. (7) There is no better example than the collection of memoirs, created by the Council of Women Workers, that appeared first in Hebrew in 1930 and in other languages ever since 1932. It is devoted exclusively to women "pioneers" and contains detailed testimonies of endurance in the face of hardships that, most significantly, includes those created by some of the women's male colleagues. They do not in the least shy away from trenchant criticism of discriminatory hiring practiced by many of the Yishuv's institutions. (8) With the founding of various women's groups just after the Second World War, the female voice found expression through the popular media, including a women's magazine of distinction. (9) Early Zionists were quite well aware of female perspectives in the 1920s, not the least because women played a large role in forming those institutions. Though not at the very top, women acted publicly and politically on the Zionist stage--unlike Arabs, who were rarely spoken of and who rarely thought of themselves as sharing any common goals with the Zionists.

Current scholarship might be said to be catching up. While Arabs do not appear in Zionist myth, many Israeli scholars at work today consider the Arab component of the Zionist narrative crucial to understanding the Zionist enterprise as a whole. The issue has provoked a wide-ranging historiographical controversy over the relevance of Zionism in modern Israeli society. (10) Regarding women, the Zionist tradition of "engaged" scholarship continues in force. The image of women portrayed in feminist scholarship today assumes the same larger than life heroic qualities so characteristic of the early Zionist hagiographies, though recent portraits evoke sympathy for women as victims of their male-dominated environment rather than victors in their struggle for equality. (11) While earlier heroic portraits of Zionist women aimed at radical change within Zionist assumptions, recent feminist scholarship intends to subvert the Zionist claim of virtue altogether by declaring its historic advocacy of equality between men and women a "bluff." (12) The level of abstraction inherent in such formulations, whether those of the early Zionists or those of current feminist historiography, cloud a complex process of myth-making as well as the elusive character of social status and power in the lives of specific people in specific places. As fruitful as many of these broad generalizations might be as hypotheses, they rest on a weak foundation of fragmentary evidence torn from temporal context.

Thus, a typical claim, that "in the building of the State of Israel" men assigned women an "inferior status," provides no historical evidence and derives its authority from a chain of conjectures anchored in the oftcited work of Dafna Izraeli. (13) For Izraeli, the rise of the women's labor organizations within the Zionist movement in Palestine of the 1920s is a story of "the struggle against male oppression." It was, in her view, a lost cause. (14) The trouble began in 1920, when the labor movement's flagship union, the Histadrut, diluted the power of women by refusing to put forward a separate electoral list for them. (15) Izraeli's account flows unsceptically from a 1950s memoir of the renowned "radical feminist," Ada Fishman-Maimon, (16) who proposed that, if refused representation on the organization's executive council, women should submit a separate electoral list. In an odd turn of events, considering that Izraeli wants to attribute a loss to the early feminists, "leading figures in the major parties" led the Histadrut to accept Fishman-Maimon's proposal and to allot two places for women on the executive council. (17) There are many ways one might seek to explain the stunning move whereby the male dominated Histadrut embraced a "radical feminist" program. Izraeli, however, passes over it without a word and instead continues with unsupported speculations about why the women were so "co-optable" (18) and the men so "expedient." (19) Though Izraeli recognizes the Histadrut's moves to include women during this period and to found and fund many feminist programs, she characterizes these as mere "concessions" made by the male-dominated labor movement as "the price" of gaining the women's political support. (20) At no point does she offer evidence of the men's motives--or, for that matter, the women's. It is passing strange that subsequent works quoting Izraeli would similarly overlook the widespread acceptance of "radical" feminist ideals by men in the labor establishment, or neglect to even entertain the possibility that the Zionist movement's actions might reflect substantial agreement between laboring men and feminists about the role of women in the new society under construction. Instead, current political commitments and the quest for a single, all-encompassing theory obscure a complex reality.

A notable exception to this form of "engaged" scholarship is Margalit Shilo's pioneering portrayal of the pre-World War I women's collective at Kinneret that laid the groundwork for the flowering of women's groups and programs after the War. (21) I propose to expand her focus chronologically by connecting Meisel's pre-War experience with the development of a new idea of gender equality that emerged full-blown within the Zionist movement after the War, when the settlement of Palestine became the chief aim of labor Zionism and when the settlement movement became the dominant component of the Zionist Organization. Meisel attempted to adapt her views of gender to reach the many constituencies within the Zionist movement from which she hoped to draw support. I set her evolving gender ideas within the context of Zionism's concept of manliness and focus particularly on the pervasive image of the "muscle Jew." After elaborating her synthesis of the various strands of gender thinking, I then show how the institutions of the Zionist movement, male and female, in Palestine and abroad reacted to her request for funding. In an effort to understand the attitudes toward gender of the Zionist movement as a whole, I follow Meisel's own conclusion that the clash between competing ideas of gender was not between progressive women and dominant men, but between men and women of the Zionist community in Palestine, on one hand, and, on the other, Diaspora sympathizers and donors, both male and female, who had no connection to physical labor.

MEISEL, MANLINESS, AND GENDER EQUALITY

The image of manliness in Zionism's call to the soil did not deter Meisel in the least. Hannah Meisel took seriously the Zionist project of transforming Jewish culture by educating a new generation that would be steeped in the value of physical labor and closely bound to an agrarian life as an antidote to the centuries of urban living that created what was deemed an effete and ineffective culture of subservience and useless intellectualism. Physical labor for women as well as men would restore the "natural" connection between Nature and Jew and create a new polity, at once more just as it was more healthy than the sickly Judaism of the Diaspora. (22) Unlike many others, Meisel arrived in Palestine uniquely prepared. She was the only woman with an advanced degree in agronomy, having completed her Doctor of Science thesis in France on the nurturing and germination of vegetable seeds. (23) Her initial task entailed a kind of paradox: how would she become a laborer while having earned an advanced degree? Was she not just the kind of Jew that Zionism scorned: an intellectual with little purchase on the hard ground of reality? Meisel's response shaped her entire career. She proposed a novel educational goal that would bring young women and girls out of the kitchen and onto the land at the same time that it would enhance, rather than reject, academic learning. Science would fit the specific needs of small-scale collective agriculture and enable it to survive and even flourish under difficult conditions. And science would be the new Jewish woman's domain, simultaneously saving the entire Zionist agricultural project as it lifted esteem for women's labor to a position equal to that of men. The transformation to be accomplished was thus both private and public. The personal change of each Diaspora woman in Palestine would transform Jewish culture as a whole. Yet, cleansing the Jewish soul of its Diaspora accretions never brought Meisel to emphasize personal over public goals. (24) Meisel united the development of personality with the larger civic goal of Jewish nationalism to build a modern state. Her first project was her own transformation. How could she turn her book-learning to "manly" labor on the land?