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American feminist concept of motherhood: Test practice in Israel as evaluated through oral history research, The
Frontiers, 1999 by Weinbaum, Batya
The American Feminist Concept of Motherhood: Test Practice in Israel as Evaluated Through Oral History Research
Between 1989 and 1991, I interviewed women in Palestine/Israel to explore the theoretical perspective that claims women are often in favor of peace and peaceful negotiations to resolve conflicts as a result of their experiences of motherhood.' From the oral history interviews I conducted with women concerning their lives, political opinions, and relation to the protracted nationalist conflict, I concluded that the notions of motherhood that are so central to the theoretical stance of many American feminists are culturally defined and directly bound up in notions of national political identity. Any easy reliance on a universal idea of "maternal thinking" is further complicated by the model of motherhood that has been presented under this cover of "universal" rhetoric that is actually middleclass, white, and heterosexual. Some comments I collected from these women illustrate Sara Ruddick's critique that the creation of a mother identification is often tribal-promoting women to position themselves against the Other, the alien-and is therefore a hostile and racist act rather than an invitation to bond across race and national lines.2
When I began this research, the intensity of the Israeli response to the Palestinian Intifada was prominent in international news. In five trips I gathered material from women in an interview sample that included grassroots organizers, workers, mothers, students, and grandmothers. Geographically, the interviews included women throughout Israel from north to south, in both urban and rural settings. The women were from Jerusalem, including settlements in East and West Jerusalem as well as from the suburbs3; Haifa; Maalot; Nazareth Miz ah Ramon; Kibbutz Lotan; Kibbutz Gan Schmuel; Kibbutz Kinneret; Hadera; and small Arabic villages within Israel's borders (where some interviewees preferred to use pseudonyms and which therefore I cannot name). The women ranged from their early twenties to mid-seventies and were both Israeli and Palestinian. I interviewed holocaust survivors; children of survivors; family members of those who had refused to serve in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory; secular Jews; religious Jews; recent immigrants; sabras (native-born Israelis); Ashkenazi; Sephardic-Midrachi; Muslims; born-again Jews; born-again Christians; Palestinian Christians; converts from Catholicism to Judaism; Jews of Portuguese descent; and Jewish immigrants from Russia, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Tunis, Turkey, Morocco, western European (Switzerland, Holland, France, and Poland), eastern European (Latvia and Lithuania), and the United States. Participants ranged politically from completely anti-Arab Jewish settlers on the West Bank to Jews who worked with Arabs in organizations to achieve peaceful coexistence. On the Palestinian side, I did no interviews of women in Hamas or other militant anti-- Israeli groups; I was dependent on women of Arabic background who came to protest demonstrations with Jewish Israelis and who were willing to talk to me, frequently because they were friendly with the Israeli organizers who had helped me make contact. Although I selected interviewees according to their ability to dramatically tell their stories in a way that shed light on political occurrences and events, I did work through networking of various political and ethnic groupings to ensure that my work covered a diverse range. The women selected in this particular article are those who spoke about motherhood in particularly dramatic and insightful terms.4
Although my fieldwork was extensive, I focus in this necessarily brief article on a few select Jewish-Israeli women.5 I chose to conduct oral history because I thought that a qualitative approach might help me understand in women's own terms their emotions, actions, and perceptions in relation to motherhood, maternal thinking, and peace. I searched for feminist insights on women's lives from the transcriptions of more than forty hours of tape I had gathered in thirty-five interviews.6 Hoping to undertake consciousness-raising of all those participating in the process, including myself, by collecting the opinions of diverse women, a method that other feminist scholars have attempted, I approached each subject or group of subjects with a list of prepared questions to see what was important to them.7 I listened for what the women felt most strongly about in terms of social change, then probed along those lines even if these lines had nothing to do with my initial questions. My interviews included questions about the relationship of motherhood to peace and politics, as well as the influence of books written by women and the feminist movement from abroad. I was also interested in politics and wanted to know how the women felt, for example, about seeing an Israeli Army presence everywhere, how they viewed the Intifada, how they felt about the housing loans that the United States had promised to underwrite for new immigrants, and whether they thought that political parties could help with problems of daily life. I asked women what they thought of a range of women political leaders, about strategies and tactics of other women organizers, and about their personal connections to various aspects of the area's warring history, such as how the situation of Jews in Muslim countries was affected by the founding of Israel. From those who were immigrants, I was also interested in discovering why they had chosen to move to Israel. In doing the interviews, I presented myself as a feminist writer from the United States, interested in recording a greater diversity of voices regarding these larger political issues, and as an American Jew who identified with Israel and who wanted to understand the people to whom I was closely related ethnically.8 Using such a self-presentation and questions like these, I hoped to discover unique dimensions of a complex situation through gaining in-depth understandings of the subjects' lives in my small but heterogeneous sample. I agree with other scholars that, despite obvious limitations, qualitative research can reveal much about the social processes women experience, thus allowing for more effective evaluation of feminist theoretical debates.
