Let Us Help Them to Raise Their Children into Good Citizens": The Lone-Parent Families Act and the Wages of CareGiving in Israel (original) (raw)

The Legitimacy of Single Mothers in Israel Examined through Five Circles of Discourse

This study applies critical discourse analysis to examine the relationship between the imagery and the legitimacy attached to single mothers, as well as the social policy designed for them. The correlation between images, legitimacy, and policy was examined during three decades (the 1970s, 1990s, and 2000s) of extensive legislation pertaining to single-parent mothers. The data have been drawn from a diversity of sources, including Knesset debates, Knesset committee discussions, women's organizations, the media, and semi-structured interviews. The study shows that welfare policy necessarily encapsulates cultural perceptions and basic assumptions pertaining to certain segments of society. These beliefs anchor justifications for the expansion or limitation of social rights and reveal how the development of social rights is linked to cultural and social apprehension.

LOW-INCOME "SINGLE MOMS" IN ISRAEL: Redefining the Gender Contract

This article on low-income " one-parent mothers " in Israel is based on 32 in-depth interviews and supportive data from a longitudinal study. Findings problematize scholarly treatments of " single mothers " as a universal category, showing it to be culturally specific and polysemic. It is argued that low-income one-parent mothers embody a central tension in the Israeli male-breadwinner/ female-caretaker gender contract, as its initial class bias is exacerbated by the dissolution of marriage. By simultaneously adopting and reformulating the hegemonic schema that frames their femininity as deficient, they expose the dual character of the contract as resistant to change and dynamic.

Enemies, allies or citizens? The subject positions of men in the making of birth leave for fathers in Israel

Families, Relationships and Societies, 2020

Gender equality-oriented policy-making adopts a complex attitude toward the role of fathers. While some branches of the legislative branches see the potential in engaging fathers in the household for promoting gender equality, others see the risk in men appropriating women’s few sources of power. In this article, the subject positions given to men in the legislative process of the birth leave for fathers programme in Israel are examined. I show how, in accordance with this division, fathers are given two subject positions – that of the enemy and that of the ally. However, policy-makers fail to put fathers in the role of citizens, seeing them as entitled to rights based on their own status. This situation mirrors the citizenship of Israeli women, who are, in turn, limited to their motherhood. While the claim that fathers are not seen as citizens, and that their rights are not protected enough, might sound absurd, I claim that such a position is required in order to promote a radical ...

It was a Zionist Act: Feminist Politics of Single-Mother Policy Votes in Israel

Womens Studies International Forum

The notion “political opportunity structure” serves feminist scholarship to analyze the conditions under which achievements are gained in the realm of social policy. This framework has drawn attention to the configurations of access to state institutions, stability of political alignments and relationships with allies. Using this framework, we examine whether Israeli parliamentary feminists relied on a political opportunity structure in two historical periods in the shaping of Israeli social policy regarding allowances to single mothers. Our analysis shows that feminist MPs created a political opportunity structure in 1992 by left–right cooperation and a third discourse, in between the misery discourse and the rights discourse, constituting single mothers as Zionists. In 2002, feminist MPs maintained left–right cooperation but have not developed an in-between discourse. We argue that, in neo-liberal times, feminist parliamentary activism has to become more sophisticated by using discursive leverage to create political opportunities in order to protect past achievements.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Rethinking the Family in Israel

Israel Studies Review, 2013

In post-industrial societies, the individualization of the family process, which puts the individual at the center of the family, is changing this institution beyond recognition. As part of this evolution, individuals and their human rights, together with their obligations and responsibilities, become the basis for the family institution and for its legitimization. Consequently, family frameworks, whose roles and legitimate boundaries were established in the past in ways that served the interests of society and ensured its biological and cultural continuity, are becoming frameworks in which the individual is at the center. At the same time, thanks to ethical and political changes and the achievements of medical technology, for the first time in human history an individual can separate marriage, fertility, parenthood, and the establishment of a household to the extent that the socio-cultural climate allows. Consequently, the phenomenon of singleness is taking hold, and new family frameworks are forming. These include, inter alia, single-parent families, same-sex families, cohabiting families, and transnational families. Such families, known in the literature as 'new families', exist alongside nuclear families (the normative modern families) and more traditional family frameworks, such as extended families-multi-generational, monogamous, or polygamous families-whose members live under one roof. At the individual level, these processes generate many possibilities and broaden the autonomy of the individual, but at the same time they also may create lack of clarity, instability, and confusion. Moreover new and unresolved issues in the areas of education, social policy, and the welfare state, as well as in the juridical sphere, are raised. These issues stand at the heart of public debates and at the center of 'the battle over the family' in

Rethinking the Family in Israel

Israel Studies Review, 2013

In post-industrial societies, the individualization of the family process, which puts the individual at the center of the family, is changing this institution beyond recognition. As part of this evolution, individuals and their human rights, together with their obligations and responsibilities, become the basis for the family institution and for its legitimization. Consequently, family frameworks, whose roles and legitimate boundaries were established in the past in ways that served the interests of society and ensured its biological and cultural continuity, are becoming frameworks in which the individual is at the center. At the same time, thanks to ethical and political changes and the achievements of medical technology, for the first time in human history an individual can separate marriage, fertility, parenthood, and the establishment of a household to the extent that the socio-cultural climate allows. Consequently, the phenomenon of singleness is taking hold, and new family frameworks are forming. These include, inter alia, single-parent families, same-sex families, cohabiting families, and transnational families. Such families, known in the literature as 'new families', exist alongside nuclear families (the normative modern families) and more traditional family frameworks, such as extended families-multi-generational, monogamous, or polygamous families-whose members live under one roof. At the individual level, these processes generate many possibilities and broaden the autonomy of the individual, but at the same time they also may create lack of clarity, instability, and confusion. Moreover new and unresolved issues in the areas of education, social policy, and the welfare state, as well as in the juridical sphere, are raised. These issues stand at the heart of public debates and at the center of 'the battle over the family' in

Berkovitch, N. and S. Manor. 2019. Narratives of Israeli Women in Retirement: Rewriting the Gender Contract

Sex Roles, 2019

In the present study, we analyze how older Israeli women narrate, make sense of, and negotiate their lives after retirement. By center-staging women in their life periods of after-care work and paid work, we join emerging feminist research that aims at correcting the middle-age bias in gender studies and the gender bias in retirement studies. We conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 Israeli Jewish heterosexual women of varied class backgrounds who retired in the last 10 years. Conceptualizing retirement as an embedded experience and using the concept of gender contract as an analytical tool, we highlight how retired women employed two contradictory discourses, familial and individualistic, both prominent in the Israeli context, to renegotiate and rewrite the gender contract. They did so by constituting themselves as autonomous and independent subjects whose past devotion to others alongside their arduous labor has granted them the right to space and time of their own. They also redefine their maternal role so they keep their motherly duties to help Bas much as needed^ but on their own terms. Our study shows that putting older women at the center requires rethinking existing concepts. It reveals that individualism as a meaning system is not relevant to all equally, rather it depends on the intersection of a person's gender with stage in life, and that the gender contract varies not only by geographical and social location but also across the life-course.

Welfare Mom as Warrior Mom: Discourse in the 2003 Single Mothers' Protest in Israel

This study applies critical discourse analysis to the public discourse in Israel regarding the battle of single mothers against extensive welfare cuts. Using the protest of July 2003 as a case study, the article points to parallels between Israel's neo-liberal welfare discourse and that in the US, but also reveals a competing discourse in Israel that incorporated several basic cultural motifs: motherhood, militarism, Zionism and nationalism. While the latter discourse stresses the importance of motherhood and its contribution to society, the former presents single mothers as dependents living off the country's welfare resources. The discourse analysis shows that despite the seeming legitimacy of motherhood in Israel, especially of the Zionist mother who gives birth to soldiers, the negative imagery applied by the neo-liberal ideology to single mothers who receive allowances succeeded in eroding this legitimacy.

Berkovitch and Manor. 2023. Between familism and neoliberalism: the case of Jewish Israeli grandmothers

Feminist Theory

In this article, we employ grandmothers’ childcare as a lens to explore the changing relations between familism, individualism and neoliberalism. More generally, we examine the connections between the political economy and the intimate moral economy of childcare work performed by grandmothers. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty retired women in Israel, we examine how they negotiate, comply and resist the expectations that they will help ‘fill in’ the ‘care deficit’ resulting from neoliberal policies and labour market practices. We show how grandmothers navigate between family ideologies and individualistic cultural imperatives, constituting themselves as agentive subjects who can determine the conditions in which they meet their families’ care expectations while challenging the invisibility of their work. Thus, using Israel as a case study, we argue that familism and individualism, working against each other as well as together, create tensions while mediating ...

Berkovitch, Nitza. 1997. Motherhood as a National Mission: the Construction of Womanhood in the Legal Discourse in Israel.

Women's Studies International Forum, 1997

The paper looks at the notion of womanhood that emerged from the discourse around two laws passed in the first years of the State of Israel: the 1949 "Defense Service Law" and the 1951 "Women's Equal Rights Law." Law is conceived of as "producing" the cultural meaning of "women" as a social category and defining its relations to the state. My main argument is that in this discourse, the Jewish-Israeli woman is constructed first and foremost as a mother and a wife, and not as an individual or a citizen. The construction of a distinct category of women that emphasizes women's difference takes place within an ideological context of the self-conscious myth of gender-equality. Motherhood is defined as a public role that carries national significance. And it is via this notion of "motherhood as a national mission" that women are incorporated into the state and not through the universal characteristics of citizenship. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, coupled with the central role that the family and the military play within the Israeli culture and society are the major determinants of this specific definition of Jewish-Israeli women's citizenship.© 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd