From the Periphery to the Center of History: Gender and National Identity in the Yishuv (1890-1920) / מן השוליים אל ההיסטוריה של היישוב: מיגדר וארץ ישראליות (1890-1920)

Over recent years there has been considerable effort to recover the history of women in Eretz Israel. Their material experience, working-life and participation in political and social movements (or exclusion from these movements), as well as the discourse on the 'new Hebrew woman', have all been carefully mapped. Despite this project of retrieval, the study of gender in the 'Yishuv', still remains separate from that of Yishuv history and of the 'native', Eretz-Israeli, identity. Significantly, gender has been left out of the historiographic debate (both the Zionist and the so-called 'new', or post-Zionist one) on the origins of the Eretz-Israeli identity and of the Israeli. The author calls on historians to bring together the two separate fields - the study of 'gender in Eretz Israel', and of Eretz Israel. Gender, she argues, was a major component of the emerging 'native' identity. This identity was understood and debated in terms of gender. The centrality of the construction of femininity and masculinity to the evolution of a new nationalism is particularly manifest among the young elite of the urban centers and agricultural settlements (moshavot), who represented the majority, the 'civil sector', (as opposed to labor). The first generation of Hebrew speakers was not merely a socio-cultural group and a cultural 'invention', which had an iconic place in the Zionist ethos, but the creators of a local and a national culture. This generation has however been marginalized in the historiography of the Yishuv and in that of gender in Eretz Israel. Melman's main argument is that women and men of this generation developed a new gendered identity and a native culture with distinct features. She also argues that in the gendered discourse of nationalism before the end of World War I, the borderlines of femininity and masculinity were blurred and constantly crossed by women and men. The instability of gender and its mobility especially characterize the very men and women who were described as the first Hebrews, or Sabras (notably Absalom Feinberg and Ben Zion Ben-Yehuda [Itamar Ben-Avi]). This instability was related to the emergence of a new native woman, within the 'civil sector', and of a distinctly female culture in Hebrew that manifested itself in public gestures, physical culture, in women's cross-dressing and in women's writing. Elite women (for example, Zila Feinberg, Yehudit Eizenberg-Harari, Sara Aaronsohn, Meira Belkind and Shulamit Levin) constantly challe