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ABSTRACT
WIZO's founders in 1920 included several Anglo-Jewish feminists and former suffragists. The organisation supported the female franchise in the Jewish institutions of Mandate Palestine, but incorporated many, sometimes conflicting, approaches to developing women's roles. Attempting mass membership in hopes of influencing the male-dominated world Zionist movement, WIZO represented women with widely differing views, both within and between national branches. Disagreements were particularly open between British and Czechoslovak WIZO leaders regarding the provision of welfare services as opposed to establishing training for economic independence, particularly in agriculture. Deep rifts and resignations by 1930 were healed as the rise of Nazism demanded a new focus. The embedding of a formal party-political system in the Mandate and State of Israel, together with the consolidation of an orthodox Rabbinate, left little space for these pioneers to speak on women's issues.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andy Epstein and the staff of WIZO’s London office for their generous assistance at all times, and Jaclyn Granick, Abigail Green and the anonymous peer reviewers of this article for their stimulating questions and helpful suggestions. Any remaining faults are the sole responsibility of the author.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 The secondary literature on WIZO is somewhat sparse and largely celebratory in tone. Beyond Gassman-Sherr, The Story of the Federation of Women, readers can access biographies of individual women Zionists online and in a number of conventionally published sources; these biographies are rather rarely based on documentary research. An undated and unpublished source (inscribed “Written in the 1930s”), a draft with the title “History of WIZO” by B[erty] Gudansky, (hereafter “History”) offers a more “warts and all” account than most other sources: see London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) 4175/03/02/04/006. Gudansky was Secretary to the WIZO Executive in London from 1930.
2 Summers, “Gender, Religion”; Sieff, ‘W.I.Z.O. Beginnings’ (in WIZO: Ten Years), 11–14. It is notable that WIZO’s founding conference featured a presentation by Lizzie Hands on “some Legal Difficulties Which Beset the Jewess,” detailing the unequal treatment of women in Jewish religious law, particularly in regard to divorce: LMA 4175/02//01/006.
3 Blond and Turner, Marks of Distinction, 15. The suffragette sisters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst had attended the same school, the non-denominational Manchester High School for Girls. See also Marks and Spencer Company Archives (henceforth M&S) R/1/3, biographical notes on Mrs Sieff, 1949; International Women’s News Vol. 35, October-November 1940, 11. Rebecca Marks married Israel Sieff, director (with her brother Simon Marks) of the Marks and Spencer company. The family’s shared commitment to Zionism and considerable wealth made them pillars of the movement in Britain and internationally.
4 There were, as will be seen, overlaps and co-operation between these two umbrella organizations. See Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project.
5 Within a vast literature, the classic elaboration of gendered “separate spheres” in the Victorian period remains Family Fortunes: Men And Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall. First published in 1987, the introduction to its 3rd edition (London, Routledge, 2018) explores the many challenges to and modifications of the authors’ original theses on the construction of women’s private and public lives.
6 Recent publications on interwar British feminists include: Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone; John, Turning the Tide; Holmes, A Working Woman. Earlier synoptic works include Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries; Alberti, Beyond Suffrage.
7 The Verband Jüdischer Frauen für Kulturarbeit in Palästina had a British branch of which Romana Goodman had been a member; Goodman, Zionist Women’s Work. See also Vilmain, “Femmes juives en Palestine à l”aune du sionisme, à la Belle Époque,” 384 reference 2; Gudansky, “History.”
8 Kysela, “Die Journalistinnen,” 196, 198, 200–4; Resolutions of Prague Congress of WILPF 1929, 18.
9 On Hungarian Jewish women’s overrepresentation among female university students pre-1920, see Szapor, “Sisters or Foes,” 202; for the continuation of this phenomenon between the wars, see Karady, “The restructuring,” 129–30.
10 Even within the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, “national” sections could be strongly divided: in 1932, the Czechoslovakian section was divided into Czechoslovak, German and Jewish groups. See WILPF Report, 7th Congress at Grenoble, 16–19 May 1932, 71.
11 For an overview of WILPF and other international women’s organizations of the period, see Rupp, “Constructing internationalism.” On some of the many obstacles to equal relations within women’s international organizations, see Takahashi, The Development of the Japanese Nursing Profession, Chapter 6; Ingram, “Gender and the Politics of Pacifism,” 267–86; Snider, “Creating a Transnational Identity,” 193–213.
12 LMA 4175/02/01/017, The Federation of Women Zionists of the United Kingdom, Report of 2nd Conference, May 1919.
13 British Commonwealth League, Report of Conference on “The Citizen Rights of Women within the British Empire” 9, 10 July 1925. Foreword by Millicent Fawcett, n.p.; Report from Margery Corbett Ashby, p. 24.
14 LMA 4175/02/01/004 (now MF X041/074), letter of Leo Merrman, 1 December 1919.
15 LMA 4175/01/01/002 Meetings of Federation of Women Zionists Council (now MF X041/062), 31.12.1930.
16 LMA 4175/01/02/02 (now MF X041/073), 24 September 1931.
17 Gudansky, “History,” 102.
18 LMA/4175/02/02/003, Federation of Women Zionists 14th Annual Report, Oct 1934- Sept 1935.
19 http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org, “Zionism and Zionist Parties.”
20 Sieff, in W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 12.
21 LMA 4175/02/01/017, S. Aronovich, Hon Corresponding Sec. of the Manchester Daughters of Zion to “Madam”, 5 July 1921. (Oddly, the meeting to which delegates were so abruptly invited was at 6.00 pm on Saturday 9 July, when the Sabbath still obtained).
22 LMA 4175/02/01/017, typescript histories of WIZO.
23 Jewish Chronicle (hereafter JC), 15 July 1921, p. 24. Other provincial representatives took part in this debate, but their opinions have not been reported. Gudansky, “History,” 22, asserts that this attempt at disbandment was quashed by a letter to the conference of Chaim Weizmann dated 8 July 1921. The episode might repay further research at a local level; it appears not to be covered in official organizational reports.
24 See Jasmine Donahaye, introduction to Lily Tobias, Eunice Fleet (Dinas Powys, Honno Classics, 2004), x–xi. Tobias was a novelist, and she and her husband Philip Vallentine Tobias were socialists and pacifists as well as committed Zionists, who made aliyah in the mid-1930s. Tragically, her husband was murdered in Palestine in 1938.
25 JC 22 July 1921, 23. Tobias added: … “It would be impossible to attach the same importance to the position of any lady member of Parliament, if she were accorded her place exclusively on a womens vote, and absorbed herself in women’s questions.” As a matter of historical fact, many women MPs in this period did consider it their primary mission to cover women’s issues, without neglecting the interests of their electoral constituencies: see Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries; Alberti, Beyond Suffrage; Pugh, Women and the Women's Movement in Britain 1914–1959.
26 See, e.g. Spielmann, 35.
27 LMA 4175/02/01/062, Fifth Annual Conference of the Federation of Women Zionists, 12 June 1923.
28 See, e.g. Burman, “‘she looketh well to the Ways of her Household”; Marks, Model Mothers; Burman, “Middle-class Anglo-Jewish Lady Philanthropists”; Tananbaum, “Philanthropy and Identity,” 937–61.
29 This was also a feature of American women’s Zionism. See Hirsch, “Interpreters of the Occident to the Awakening Orient,” 233: “Hadassah donors in America … preferred to donate money for philanthropic projects, and not to the rural sector, which was identified with socialist ideology.”
30 LMA 4175/02/01/017, The Federation of Women Zionists of the United Kingdom, Report of 2nd Conference, May 1919.
31 JC 4 June 1920, 28.
32 JC 5 November 1926 20–1, interview with Rebecca Sieff.
33 W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 24–5.
34 Goodman, Zionist Women’s Work, 1–3.
35 W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 18–19.
36 Ibid., 44–5.
37 See, e.g. Herzog, “The Fringes of the Margin”; Elboim-Dror, “Gender in Utopianism”; Simmons, Hadassah, Ch. 4; Maksymiak-Fugmann, “Ich lerne Steine behauen.”
38 W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 27.
39 Weizmann, The Impossible Takes Longer, 91.
40 Rebecca Marks did not complete her degree course at Manchester University, discontinuing it to marry Israel Sieff: M&S R/1/3, biographical notes on Mrs Sieff, 1949.
41 The following account of the suffrage struggle in Palestine, unless otherwise specified, is drawn from: Shilo, Girls of Liberty; Fogiel-Bijaoui, “On the Way to Equality?” 261–82; Abrams, “Jewish Women in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance”; Ibid., “Pioneering Representatives of the Hebrew People.”
42 Abrams, “Pioneering Representatives of the Hebrew People”, 128–9; Ibid., “Jewish Women in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance 1899–1926,” 240, 251–3. Abrams posits “complicated reasons,” which included Orthodox religious concerns over the growing influence of Liberal Jewish women. Her statement p. 253 that “WIZO’s [sic] took no public position on the issue of woman suffrage in Palestine” is not, as will be shown, strictly correct. It is possible that Abrams has overestimated the extent of the Orthodox Lizzie Hands’s influence.
43 Simmons, Hadassah, Ch 4.
44 The scholarship of, e.g. Janaki Nair and Kumari Jayawardena offers ample evidence of this phenomenon in South Asian movements for decolonization and has shown that pro-independence supporters like Annie Besant and Sylvia Pankhurst were suffragists at home but hostile or at best indifferent to the issue outside the western world. See, e.g. Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries, 222; Nair, “On the Question of Agency,” Gender and History, 82–100; Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden, 10, 129–32. 151.
45 Shilo, Girls of Liberty, 94; JC 21 November 1919, 27.
46 Abrams, “Jewish Women in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance,” 233, 239. I have found little evidence of any collaboration in the intervening years between British-based WIZO members and ERA. Ginsberg, who had qualified as an attorney in France, was supported by ERA in her struggle to gain women’s admission to the bar in Palestine, which was successful in 1930: Shilo, Girls of Liberty, 109.
47 LMA 4175/03/02/01/001, Report for the Period 1927–29 presented to the Fifth Conference in Zurich 22nd-27th July 1929; Simmons, Hadassah 96–8; W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 33. Additional biographical material from the online Jewish Women’s Archive.
48 LMA 4175/02/01/017, “The History of the WIZO.”
49 LMA 4175/03/02/01/001, Report for the Period 1927–29 presented to the Fifth Conference in Zurich 22nd-27th July 1929.
50 Simmons, Hadassah, 98, states that HNI was launched by Henrietta Szold in 1924. However, the date is given as 1920 in other sources: see McCune, The Whole Wide World, Without Limits, 236 reference 43; and Shvarts and Zipora Shehory-Rubin, 182–3.
51 W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 17.
52 Gudansky, History, 122–3. Unless otherwise stated, the narrative of this episode is based on this text.
53 Relations between Maisel Schochat and WIZO had been unhappy in the recent past: she was criticized for failing to account for her expenditure of WIZO funds, or to report that she was actually in surplus, or to distinguish between building and other expenses: see Central Zionist Archive F49/141, letter of Vera Weizmann to Maisel Schochat of 3 November 1926.
54 The opposition countered that these individuals were joint heads of WIZO’s Agricultural Department; as such, they were members of the Executive; but as, in effect, employees, they could not vote on matters affecting their own institutions.
55 According to “W.I.Z.O. 1920–1940: Brief Summary of Activities (in particular Training Work); Distributed at the Nahalal Anniversary Celebration January 8th 1941,” WIZO had assumed the bulk of financial responsibility for these small training farms for girls in the year 1927–28, maintaining them jointly with MH and the Jewish Agency; see LMA 4175/02/01/013, 2. An undated and unsigned “Memorandum of Agreement” [1932?] claimed to be the ultimate authority in the management of these farms, stating that they were established by the Jewish Agency: see LMA 4175/02/01/015 [jpgs 0012 and 0013]. This more than somewhat underplays the role of founders such as Hannah Chizhik of MH, and indicates a potential area for disputes with the Agency.
56 There were also resignations at the Palestine end: Shoshana Persitz, “Mrs Berger”, a Miss [Hedwig?] Gellner, a Mrs [Ruth?] Kisch and Esther Smoira: LMA 4175/01/01/01/002, (now LMA Microfilm X041/062), Minutes of Federation of Women Zionists Council 8 July 1931. “Mrs Berger” may refer either to Mrs Sari Berger or Miss Sophie/Sophia Berger, both of whom were closely associated with Hadassah; Esther Smoira was a key figure in HNI.
57 LMA 4175/01/01/01/002, (now LMA Microfilm X041/062), Minutes of Federation of Women Zionists Council Council 8 July 1931.
58 LMA 4175/03/02/01/001, “Analysis of the Memorandum presented to the W.I.Z.O. Conference,” roneo document, unsigned, undated [1931?].
59 See LMA 4175/02/01/062, Fifth Annual Conference of the Federation of Women Zionists, 12 June 1923.
60 LMA 4175/03/02/01/001, “Analysis of the Memorandum presented to the W.I.Z.O. Conference,” roneo document, unsigned, undated [1931?].
61 JC 10 July 1931, 30.
62 W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 24–5.
63 W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 8–9. Adler, the daughter of a former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Empire, was a former suffragist whose distinguished career in local government involved much work for school-age children and included a period as deputy leader of London County Council.
64 W.I.Z.O.: Ten Years, 35, 36. Hirsch, “Interpreters of the Occident,” 230, records a similar initiative by Hadassah: an infant welfare centre “was opened on the margins of an Arab neighbourhood, but its operation was short-lived. Though some of the visitors to centres in mixed towns were Arab women, the overwhelming majority were Jewish.”
65 See Shilo, Girls of Liberty, 64–7.
66 LMA 4175/01/01/01/002, (now LMA Microfilm X041/062), Minutes of Federation of Women Zionists Council 27 July 1932.
67 Gudansky, “History,” 167–8, quoting a memoir of Esther Smoira.
68 The role of the Czech activist Maria Schmolka/Schmolkova (1893–1940) is now seen as particularly important in the history of refugees from Nazism in central and eastern Europe. For details of the research project to uncover more details of her life and work, see the website https://marieschmolka.org/
69 Summers, Christian and Jewish Women in Britain, 163–7.
70 M&S R/1/3, biographical notes on Mrs Sieff, 1949, 16.
71 Summers, Christian and Jewish Women, 160.
72 For a recent statement of the view that “it was precisely in the 1930s, when Zionist leaders turned away from this possibility and became increasingly critical of Britain and its policies on Jewish immigration to Palestine”, see Imber, “A Late Imperial Elite Jewish Politics,” 71, ref 108.
73 British Commonwealth League, Report on 10th Annual Conference, June 1934, 55.
74 British Commonwealth League, Report on 11th Annual Conference, June 1935, 21–2.
75 Izraeli, “The Zionist Women’s Movement in Palestine,” 112–13; Herzog, “The Fringes of the Margin,” 295; Burkett, Golda Meir, 53–4, 58–9, 247; Stern, “They Have Wings But No Strength to Fly,” 207. Stern points out that Golda Myerson/Meir’s appointment was relatively short-lived, and actively resisted by Fishman Maimon and her supporters; nevertheless, “the more radical powers active in the movement in the 1920s became more moderate and gradually were replaced in the apparatus by female party activists much more obedient than their predecessors.”
76 LMA, MF X041/075, Rebecca D. Sieff, “WIZO’s Position within the Zionist Movement and its Relationship to the Zionist Organization.” Typescript c. 1949.
77 Sieff, “WIZO’s Position within the Zionist Movement.” Mira Katzburg-Yungman points out that “since WIZO was absolutely without political ties, its roles in the Zionist movement were in no proportion to the number of its members.” Later, in a contrasting strategy, Hadassah joined the World Confederation of General Zionists formed in 1946, which “enabled it to be represented in institutions of the World Zionist Organization as befitted its membership”; moreover, Hadassah’s success was to some extent due to the fact that it focussed less exclusively on women and children than did WIZO: Katzburg-Yungman, “Women and Zionist Activity in Erez Israel,” 163–4, 175–6.
78 An excellent summary of the history of this campaign can be found in the online catalogue of The Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, (TWL), under the code NA1139.
79 TWL 5WPP/C/1 and 5WPP/E1, files of the archive of the Women’s Publicity Planning Association, document this initiative.
80 Rozin, The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel, 109–10. Rozin, 30–32, documents the efforts of WIZO member Irma Pollack, formerly of the WIZO Czech section, to found the Israeli Women’s Consumer Protection Organization, and “to fight for the recognition of the worker at home as an important and professional worker, who must be given the same considerations as any other worker,” also with limited success.
81 Lizzie Hands, who publicized the inequities of Jewish divorce law in 1920, died in Sydney, Australia, in 1956: online communication from Terry Newman of Sydney.
82 Jaskoll, “The Dangers of Stringent Modesty,” quoting Rabbi Dov Halbertal, formerly of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, JC 23 June 2017, 37.
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Anne Summers
Dr Anne Summers F.R.Hist.Soc is an Honorary Reseach Fellow in History at Birkbeck, University of London, and Chair of the Friends of The Women’s Library. Formerly a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow and Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, her publications include Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854–1914; Female Lives, Moral States: Women, Religion and Public Life in Britain 1800–1930; and Christian and Jewish Women in Britain 1880–1940: Living with Difference.