Gender and Culture

Kibbutz Women Revisited

Melford E. Spiro, Wilbur Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351518161
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on a study of the Israeli kibbutz movement, Gender and Culture discusses the differences in male and female orientations to marriage, the family, and work. Spiro describes the counterrevolution in the kibbutz movement as it evolved over a quarter century period. The kibbutz Spiro first studied, Kiryat Yedidim, was thirty years old at the time, and he returned there twenty-five years later. Spiro initially found that the pioneers of the kibbutz movement, in their attempt to implement their vision of a society based on sexual equality, had created a revolution in the character of marriage, the structure of the family, patterns of child rearing, and the sexual division of labor.The counterrevolution he found twenty-five years later was no less fascinating: a return to certain important features of the prerevolutionary forms of these social institutions. This return to tradition has been the work primarily of the young women who, born and raised in the kibbutz, had been inculcated with the revolutionary ideology of the kibbutz pioneers. Studying the same community after a twenty-five-year interval enables readers to observe the children of the first study as adults in the follow-up study. This longitudinal dimension provides the most important basis for the interpretations offered in Gender and Culture. A new introduction discusses additional, even more radical changes that have occurred since the book's original publication in 1979, situating the kibbutz experience in the context of contemporary gender studies and feminist thought. The book will be of continuing importance for sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and women's studies scholars.

Chapter 1. The ideology of female liberation

Introduction

Although seldom included in any set of basic human characteristics, the imaginative projection of ideal states of existence is nevertheless, I would submit, one of the unique characteristics of our species. Whether expressed in the private fantasies (day dreams and night dreams) of ordinary individuals, articulated in the sophisticated creations of philosophers and novelists, or represented in the myths and eschatologies of social groups, these imaginative projections indicate—or so it seems to me—that most individuals and groups, finding their immediate reality wanting, have a need to construct an imaginary state of affairs—an ideal reality—in which the perceived deficiencies of the immediate reality are temporarily overcome, if not permanently transcended. Now that primate research is discovering protosymbols, protolanguage, and prototool traditions—in short, protoculture—among many species of infrahuman primates, perhaps protoprojected ideal states of existence will also be discovered among our primate cousins. At the moment, however, it seems safe to assume that the symbolic capacity (if not the emotional need) to construct an imaginary reality which represents an improvement of many orders of magnitude over an actual reality is a species-specific characteristic of Homo sapiens, in short, a distinctive attribute of human nature.

When this ideal state of affairs is projected as a group rather than merely an individual goal, when it is conceived as attainable by human rather than divine action, and when it is believed that its actualization can occur in the natural order rather than in some other order, such as heaven or paradise, such an ideal reality is designated as a Utopia. Most Utopias share three rather interesting, though unrelated characteristics. First, the Utopian vision (as distinguished from other visions of an ideal reality) seems to be peculiar to Western culture. Why this is so is a fascinating question, but one not germane to our topic. Second, although many individuals and groups have had Utopian visions, few attempts have been made to actualize them, and—if I may be permitted another sweeping generalization—these attempts have occurred only since the industrial revolution. Third—and this may tell us as much about human nature as about the need to project ideal states of reality—the vast majority of actualized Utopias are short-lived, coming to an end if not during the lifetime of their founders, then shortly thereafter. It is because the kibbutz movement—the Utopian movement in Israel—is an exception to this latter generalization that it is (among other reasons) of particular interest for any theory of human nature and its social and cultural vicissitudes.

Founded in 1910, the kibbutz movement has already been witness to its grandchildren growing into adulthood as members, workers, and leaders of their respective kibbutzim. Moreover, although it has had to abandon its self-image as the vanguard of and the model for the next stage in social evolution, the kibbutz movement has been successful not only by virtue of its survival, but by any other criterion by which the success of social systems is evaluated. Growing from one kibbutz with a few score members, to 240 kibbutzim with 100,000 members, this movement has proven to be highly creative in a variety of social, economic, and cultural domains. Comprising only 3 percent of the total Israeli population, the kibbutzim produce 33 percent of the gross national farm product, 5 percent of the gross national industrial product, and 12 percent of the total gross national product. During the last decade for which information is available (1957— 1967), their average annual economic growth was 2.5 percent, the average annual growth of their property value per economic unit was 11 percent, and the average annual increase in their net income was 3.8 percent. (French and Golomb 1970:21). Again, the kibbutzim provide a disproportionately large percentage of the officers of the Israeli army, members of parliament, and cabinet ministers. One-third of the cabinet of the last government, for example, were kibbutz members. Finally, the kibbutzim have by all odds the best schools in the country, a disproportionately high percentage of the country's novelists, poets, painters, and sculptors, and—on a different note—a disproportionately low percentage of its criminals. One murder and one embezzlement comprise the total recorded crime committed by kibbutz members in the history of the kibbutz movement.

The Utopian vision of the founders of the kibbutz movement comprised no less than the creation (as they put it) of a "new man." Viewing human beings as essentially good, but as having been corrupted by bourgeois culture and urban civilization, they believed that it was only necessary to strip them of their bourgeois and urban excrescences for their true nature to emerge. In the words of one of the founders of Kiryat Yedidim, "We came here to discover man," that is (he went on to explain), to uncover that love and kindness, that sense of fellowship, that altruistic concern for others which the kibbutz pioneers believed to comprise man's basic nature. To uncover these qualities, they wanted to create a social system in which science ("reason") rather than religion ("superstition") was to inform its world view; in which cooperation, based on the sentiment of brother-hood, was to be the dominant mode of social relations; in which goods and services were to be produced and distributed according to the guiding principle of "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs"; in which radical egalitarianism, both social and economic, was to be practiced; in which everyone was to be a worker (and hired labor repudiated); in which the means of production (including land), as well as all other capital goods (including housing), were to be publicly owned; in which pure democracy was to be practiced, and to be institutionalized in a manner which would preclude anyone from acquiring power over anyone else; in which children were to be freed from the domination of parents and raised with a maximum of freedom in a community of peers; and—to come to the topic of this book—in which women were to be fully emancipated. The last aim was to be achieved by a radical transformation in the traditional systems of marriage, the family, and sex-role differentiation.

The ideology

Some three generations prior to the rise of the contemporary women's movement, the founders of the kibbutz movement proclaimed as one of their historical missions the total emancipation of women from the "shackles"—sexual, social, economic, and intellectual—imposed on them by traditional society. In 1950, some forty years after the founding of the first kibbutz, an important kibbutz journal proudly claimed that the goal of sexual equality had been achieved.

We have given her [the woman] equal rights; we have emancipated her from the economic yoke [of domestic service]; we have emancipated her from the burden of rearing children; we have emancipated her from dependency on the husband, her provider and commander; we have given her a new society; we have broken the shackles that chained her hands.

In order to evaluate these claims, it is necessary to examine the explanation offered by early kibbutz ideology for sexual inequality in traditional society, as well as its conception of the meaning of "sexual equality."

Kibbutz ideology, formulated jointly by males and females, rejected the two most frequently offered explanations for the existence of sexual inequality. On the one hand, it rejected the usual innate explanations—those that assume the genetic inferiority of women, as well as those that attribute the social differentiation of men and women to their biological differentiation. On the other hand, although hardly blind to the advantages reaped by males from the traditional system of sexual inequality, it also rejected a currently prevalent social explanation that represents this system as a conscious or unconscious attempt by men to exploit women. Rather, kibbutz ideology took a somewhat different tack, attributing sexual inequality to what it termed "the biological tragedy of women."

This rather dramatic expression refers to the social and cultural restraints imposed on women by virtue of their mammalian reproductive system. Since females bear children, and since as mothers they have the major responsibility for caring for them, they are tied to what kibbutz ideology termed "the yoke of domestic service," while men are free to work in extradomestic domains. This system of sexrole differentiation was held to be the core of sexual inequality, and from this core all of its other facets were believed to follow. First, since men work in the higher status, extradomestic occupations, while women are restricted to low status domestic work, women are inferior to men in the social domain. Second, restricted to nonincome-producing work, the wife is economically dependent upon her husband, so that women are subordinate to men in the domestic domain. As still another consequence of her economic dependence upon him, the wife's social status is merged with that of her husband's, so that the woman's identity as a social person is submerged in his. Third, because domestic responsibilities consume all their time and energy, women have neither leisure nor motivation to pursue positions of political leadership. Hence, they are subject to the authority of men in the political domain. Finally, and for the same reasons, women rarely have the opportunity to express their intellectual and artistic talents and are therefore inferior to men in the cultural domain.

Although the female reproductive system, according to this analysis, is the cornerstone of the entire edifice of sexual inequality, kibbutz ideology rejected the notion that anatomy (to employ a currently fashionable metaphor) is destiny. For although it is a biological imperative that women bear children, it is not a social imperative that mothers care for them. Hence, if a social system were created in which mothers were relieved of the burden of child rearing, the chain of social consequences set in motion by women's reproductive biology, so it was believed, would be reversed. Its first effect would be the dissolution of the sexual division of labor—hence, the attainment of sexual equality—in the economic domain, which, in turn, would assure sexual equality in the domestic, political, and cultural domains. The abolition of economic sex-role differentiation—both the hallmark of, and the means to, full sexual equality—required in the first instance radical changes in two core institutions of traditional society, marriage and the family, and this is precisely what the kibbutz movement proceeded to do. Before describing these changes, however, it is important to explicate with greater precision the conception of sexual equality espoused by the kibbutz ideology.

Equality, it is obvious upon slight reflection, has at least two meanings, both in popular as well as in technical usage. According to one view, people are said to be equal if, but only if, they are similar if not identical with respect to one or more criterial attributes. This might be characterized as the "identity" meaning of equality. According to a second view, people are said to be equal (even if they are dissimilar with respect to the criterial attributes) so long as their differences are held to be of equivalent value. This view, which might be characterized as the "equivalence" meaning of equality, is based on a pluralistic system of values, one in which the different forms assumed by the criterial attributes are viewed as having (more or less) the same worth. Applying these two meanings of equality to the problem of sexual equality, then, according to its "identity" meaning, men and women are not equal if, with respect to the attribute of occupation, for example, they are dissimilar. According to the "equivalence" meaning, however, the sexes may be said to be equal so long as their differences with respect to this attribute are held to be equally valuable.¹

It is clear, from our capsule description, that the ideology of the early kibbutz movement (like certain aspects of the ideology of the contemporary women's movement) subscribed to the "identity" meaning of sexual equality. Viewing the domestic activities that are related to women's reproductive biology, and that are traditionally conceived as "feminine"—child bearing, child rearing, homemaking, and the like—as inferior to and of lesser value than those extradomestic activities that are traditionally viewed as "masculine," this ideology held that women could achieve equality with men if, but only if (economically at least), they became like men.² Indeed, for the pioneer women any kind of sexual differentiation—including sexual dimorphism—was viewed as a symbol of female inferiority, and hence to be minimized as far as possible. Consequently, the artificial enhancement of this dimorphism was viewed as a demeaning substitution of sexual attractiveness for personal achievement as the means for attaining status and power. For this reason, the women discarded dresses and skirts in favor of the baggy trousers and shorts worn by men, and they disdained the use of other traditional means of enhancing feminine charm. Cosmetics, beauty care, perfume, jewelry, and feminine hair styles were all rejected as stigmas of an inferior status. To be the equals of men, women were to become like men not only in their occupational roles, but in their external appearance as well. It was as if the women felt that to achieve equality with men, they had to reject their femininity.

Whatever the personal motives for the women's view of sexual differentiation as tantamount to sexual inequality, the historical and ideological roots of this view are clear. The founders of the kibbutz movement, most of them emigrants from eastern Europe, were greatly influenced by the Russian Revolution on the one hand, and the European youth movement on the other. The "ideal heroine" of the progressive young Jewish women of Poland and Russia, as Tsur (1975:51) has observed, was

the young Russian woman revolutionary who severed relations with her middle-class home and values in order to dedicate herself to changing society and woman's condition. The Jewish daughter no longer identified herself with her mother the homemaker, but with the woman who chose prison, was exiled, or was condemned to death in her struggle as a nurse in the villages, helping the peasants, preparing herself and others for the new world which would be born in the victory of the Revolution.

Some of these Jewish women attempted to actualize these new images as revolutionaries in eastern Europe; others—those who helped found the kibbutz movement—as chalutzot, pioneers of the Jewish national liberation movement in Palestine.

But their decision to become Zionist pioneers had important consequences for the women's notions of sexual equality. Since the kibbutz was (and to a great extent remains) a farming community, its important, economically required occupations were agricultural, and since it was also a socialist-Zionist community, these occupations were simultaneously those that were culturally prized. That the founders of the kibbutz movement, urbanites all, should have instigated one of the few reversals of an evolutionary sequence—from rural to urban settlement and from farm to industrial production—is a paradox that demands a brief explanation since it has important implications for our subsequent analysis.

According to socialist-Zionist ideology, the national liberation of the Jews required not only their return to their ancient homeland, but the wholesale transformation of their historically conditioned diaspora mentality. This transformation, moreover, entailed a return to farming, for by tilling the soil they would (a) learn once again to identify with nature, (b) become physically productive, and (c) discard the superficial and corrupting culture of urban life. Hence, although the founders of the kibbutz movement had emigrated from a society in which physical labor was symbolic of low status, physical (and especially farm) labor became for them the mark of the highest status. Conversely, business, commerce, the liberal professions, and the like, were disdained as self-seeking (if not exploitative) "careerism."

Since, then, farm labor represented the cynosure of Zionistsocialist ideology, and since the pioneer women of the kibbutz movement subscribed to the "identity" meaning of sexual equality, whose core was economic equality, they—no less than the men—insisted on performing strenuous farm labor. That, traditionally, the latter was a male specialty did not deter them because, as good cultural determinists, they were convinced that sex-role differentiation (like any other dimension of the social system) is culturally determined, and therefore historically alterable. This is not to say, however, that the pioneer men supported them in their resolve. Although the formal ideology of the kibbutz movement was unequivocally feminist, this ideology was formulated by a second generation of kibbutz pioneers who had been trained in various socialist-Zionist youth movements prior to their emigration from Europe. Within the first generation—those who had migrated to Palestine prior to World War I—women encountered strong opposition from the men when they attempted to enter agricultural and other types of physical labor that had formerly been male monopolies. It was only through strong determination and firm resolve (see Shazar, 1975, and Maimon, 1962) that this first generation of pioneer women was able to overcome the resistance of their male comrades. Hence, when the later pioneers, including those who founded Kiryat Yedidim, founded their respective kibbutzim, the women's feminist aspirations were not only articulated in a well-formulated ideology, but the groundwork for their implementation had already been laid by the efforts of their predecessors.

Institutional implementation

To attain its goal of sexual equality, it was necessary, according to kibbutz ideology, to radically change the institutions of marriage and the family. It should at least be noted, however, that the attainment of this goal was not the only motive for these institutional changes. Thus, the changes introduced in the family were intended to achieve at least two other goals. First, they were viewed as a means for the liberation of children from the "patriarchal authority" of the father. Second, based on the premise that the welfare of the group is an ultimate value (and that competition and concern for private ends are inimical to this value) and on the belief that group participation is a consummatory goal (and the pursuit of privacy is a moral defect), changes in the family were also instituted in order to create a new human being, one for whom these values are internalized as essential characteristics of human nature. So far as the latter goal is concerned, the sentiments of love, affection, and cooperation, which traditionally were associated with the family, were to be transferred from the family to the collectivity; that is, the kibbutz itself was to become a "family." Zvi Shatz, a founder of the kibbutz movement, put it this way:

The family of the past, or the kvutzah [kibbutz] of our future life—that is the real and permanent refuge that will save the soul of man. . . . In the life of the kvutzah may be found the special atmosphere within which the characteristics of the new man can be formed. . . . The family is being destroyed. . . . But the eternal life values will remain and only their form will change, because the need for family environment is very deep and organic. . . . On the basis of spiritual, not blood ties, the family will be reborn—and in the form of small, modest work groups. (Quoted by Emi Hurwitz, in Neubauer 1965: 355-56.)

This could be achieved, so it was assumed, if the children were raised in peer groups, rather than in family groups. Hence a system of "collective socialization" w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction edition
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1. The ideology of female liberation
• Chapter 2. The vicissitudes of institutional change
• Chapter 3. The reality of sexual equality
• Chapter 4. The determinants of the counterrevolution
• Chapter 5. Conclusions
• References Cited
• Index