Women's Suffrage in the British Empire by unknow

Women's Suffrage in the British Empire by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Civil Rights, Social Science, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780415208055
Google: vBKl_0hz2ngC
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2000-01-15T15:54:55+00:00


8 “Pioneering representatives of the Hebrew people”

Campaigns of the Palestinian Jewish Women’s Equal Rights Association, 1918–1948

Ruth Abrams

We still have not entered the land of Israel, the hour has not yet arrived for us to arrange our public lives there, we still don’t have an organized government, and already we have sticking to us the sickness of modern politics, “woman suffrage disease,” as if we already had something over which to argue and debate, as if we really had organized lives on our land and a real government.1

In 1918–19, a group of women in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine) formed the Palestine Jewish Women’s Equal Rights Association (ERA) on the model of bourgeois feminist organizations of Central Europe. Unlike the Jewish suffrage feminists in Great Britain, these feminists did not have a model of Jewish participation in parliamentary democracy. They wanted to achieve in Palestine the emancipation that their communities had never experienced in Europe. Their ideal was full participation as citizens in a liberal national state. But at the same time, they shared a nationalist ideology born in the midst of a rejection of liberal values.2 Their Zionist ideology was contradictory: they wanted to create a modern, Western state and simultaneously to renew a mystical national spirit. The demand for voting rights in a communal organization became bound up in a contest between the democratic and theocratic elements in society.

Before 1918, the level of participation by Jews in Palestine’s local government was minimal. Under Ottoman rule Jewish immigrants to Palestine often chose to remain citizens of their countries of origin, so that they would be protected by their local consulate. The small Jewish community was therefore indifferent to local elections.3

In November 1917, when Britain was committed by the vague promise of the Balfour Declaration to “a national home for the Jewish people,” the prospects for Zionism changed. When the League of Nations gave Palestine to the British as their mandate at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Zionists saw the possibility of building a Jewish nation-state. Jews had the opportunity to interact with the British Mandate through Jewish representative bodies, and the right of women to vote in the first Jewish Constituent assembly became the subject of debate. Orthodox Jews who were part of the non-Zionist “Old Yishuv” were not committed either to liberal democracy or to the full participation of women in public life. Most of the Zionist parties were committed to women’s equality on paper but had not made it a priority. Zionist women, who had taken part in the first waves of Zionist immigration, the First Aliyah (1881–1903) and Second Aliyah (1903–14), now seized the opportunity to advocate for their own rights, but also for their vision of a Jewish homeland as a means for Jewish self-emancipation.



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