The Women’s International Zionist Federation feminists who fought for equality

It featured a presentation by Hands, on “Some Legal Difficulties Which Beset the Jewess”, detailing the unequal treatment of women in Jewish religious law, particularly with regard to divorce.

Rebecca Sieff, the FWZ and Wizo’s first president, of a slightly younger generation than her colleagues, took up the theme: she “hoped that their work would help to raise the women from the inferior status that the Jewish religion gave them.

She herself had not been allowed to make a speech in a synagogue”.

At the same time, Sieff raised the question that would perplex and divide Wizo and many women’s movements for more than a decade: what did it mean to be a feminist now that the vote was (at least partially) won?

Her Manchester schooldays were spent under an active suffragist headmistress, who had also taught the Pankhurst sisters.

But in 1920 the JC quoted Sieff as saying “Women Zionists were often described as Feminists — they were not — feminists thought men were inferior.

The Women Zionists thought that men were superior in some things, and inferior in others”.

Given her unshakeable determination to build up an organisation which could challenge the male dominance of the Zionist movement, this comment seems a bit mealy-mouthed.

But it may have been diplomatically astute: the FWZ and Wizo would count for nothing if they were not mass movements; and the mass of Anglo-Jewish women whom she needed to recruit to the cause were not yet even Zionists, let alone feminists.

The uncommitted mass was not the only problem. In truth, FWZ and Wizo were not first in the field.

Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Swansea and Cardiff boasted a number of societies, often calling themselves “Daughters of Zion”, which formed soon after the first Zionist Congress in 1897, and were affiliated individually to the English Zionist Federation.

The leader of a local Daughters of Zion was often married to the leader of the corresponding male organisation, part of a team which was, in effect, “Mr and Mrs Cardiff Zionism” or “Mr and Mrs Newcastle Zionism” — and one which would not take kindly to leadership from elsewhere.

Indeed, on the eve of the FWZ’s 1921 conference, a serious attempt was made at “self-disbandment”, when “several of the Provincial Women Zionist’s Associations” were said to demand that the FWZ be replaced, and that “a Committee of women should form part of the English Zionist Federation and be appointed at the Annual Conference to carry on specifically Women’s Work”.

It would seem that, behind the scenes, Sieff’s Manchester friend Chaim Weizmann threw his weight against the motion, but discontent rumbled on. And then there was the issue of putting the “International” into Wizo’s mission.

This involved incorporating the “Jewish Women’s League for Cultural Work in Palestine”, founded alongside the 8th Zionist Congress in 1907, which had recruited 7,000 members by 1914.

Given its predominantly central European membership, its work in Palestine was, inevitably, curtailed for some years by the military defeat of Germany and the Hapsburg Empire.

Jewish women in the Hapsburg successor states maintained their commitment to Zionism post-1918, and affiliated to Wizo, but the result was not always a harmonious marriage of minds.

Czech activists such as Dr Miriam Scheuer, a member of the Wizo executive, who was also active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Maria Schmolka, who served a term as chair of that organisation; and Dr Hannah Steiner, editor in Prague of Die Blätter der Jüdischer Frau, tended to be graduates and professionally trained, which was less typical of their British counterparts.

This could lead to a distinct divergence of ambitions for the lives and careers of women in both the Yishuv and the diaspora.

For this was the next big question: what were the roles for women in the new land itself? FWZ’s commitment to equality was evidenced by its protest in 1919 against Rav Kook’s refusal to countenance a female franchise in the Yishuv.

But there was more to gender equality than the vote. Dr Vera Weizmann recalled that when she, Edith Eder and Rebecca Sieff visited Palestine and encountered the pioneering women chalutzot, formed in the crucible of revolutionary Russia, they were appalled.

They saw “these enthusiastic, idealistic women mortgaging their future motherhood and even risking their health for this principle of equality: they were working ten or 12 hours a day breaking rocks and stones for road-making and mending, carrying heavy loads, performing superhuman tasks.

Their bare simple homes were neglected; their cooking was haphazard at best … dietary standards were neither known nor even considered”.

A decade later, an official Wizo report complacently claimed that “A complete change of heart has taken place … experience has proved that in the Colony as in the town, woman’s sphere lies also largely in the field of Domestic Science, and that home, food and clothing are still her indisputable domain”.

This might have been music to the ears of some British members, who were convinced that propaganda and fundraising should be limited to the provision of mother and baby clinics; it was not acceptable to those Czech members who spoke of “complete self-determination and emancipation”, nor to Wizo members in Palestine itself, such as Ada Fishman Maimon, who founded the Women’s Worker’s Council and an agricultural training farm for girls and women, both of which received Wizo funding in the 1920s.

Wizo also co-operated with Hadassah-funded projects in Palestine and, by 1929, Romana Goodman thought these urban initiatives “provided a national bond between the concepts of the bourgeois and the Haluzoth”.

This was, alas, an illusion: the Palestine Committee of Wizo stormed that “social welfare, as such, had nothing to do with Zionism … it originated in a Galuth attitude of mind … in the Golah, it was a sort of palliative and therefore not acceptable for Erez Israel”.

In 1931, an unsigned Memorandum presented to the FWZ Council brought matters to a head. It deplored the views expressed in Die Blätter der Jüdischer Frau, which advocated equal rights for women and an education for girls in Palestine guaranteeing their economic independence — and which seemingly regarded maternal and infant welfare clinics as projects of secondary importance.

This, the anonymous document stated, was not the Wizo position: “We feel that … the needs of the Jewish woman and child in Palestine, dictate what shall be undertaken and when, and not a kind of well-known feminism.”

There followed resignations, withdrawn resignations, and yet more resignations from the Wizo executive. In January 1932, a “Round Table Conference”, chaired by Rebecca’s husband Israel Sieff and Chaim Weizmann, succeeded, after a year’s work on practical issues of administration and financial control, in mending the fences.

And of course, from 1933, with Hitler in power, one thing was clear; the pull of Zionism was matched by the push of persecution.

Support for the Yishuv entailed ministering to the desperate as well as to the dedicated, to the urban as well as the rural woman and child. Wizo activists focused increasingly on the refugee crisis, and on publicising the Zionist cause to the non-Jewish world. But the commitment to equality was not abandoned.

By 1935, Rebecca Sieff was explaining how Mandate regulations discriminated against women, who were for the most part allowed to enter Palestine only as “wives, dependents and relatives”.

Wizo was pressing both the Jewish Agency and the Palestine Administration for equal treatment; it was demanding adequate female representation on Zionist committees in Palestine which dealt with the needs of these new arrivals. Shortly after the foundation of the state of Israel, she sadly recalled that Wizo representatives had been admitted on to those committees — but not as voting members.

Regardless of their disputes and difficulties, the voices of Rebecca Sieff and her contemporaries demand our respect and continue to be relevant at the present time.

We can never know what they would have thought of a state in which large numbers of men gender-segregate public transport and supermarket queues, police dress-codes for women wherever they can, and rule that “posters raising awareness of breast cancer screening” are “inappropriate”.

But I think we can guess.

Dr Anne Summers is an Honorary Research Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London