A ‘New Woman’ for a New State? Dr Anne Summers

Mar

08

Time: 7.30 pm start
Location: Hashomer House, 37a Broadhurst Gardens, London NW6 3QT

Meretz UK and Spiro Ark invite you to mark International Women’s Day

with an illustrated talk by Dr Anne Summers on

A ‘New Woman’ for a New State?

WIZO’S founding dilemmas

  • Sunday, 8 March, starting 7.30 pm
  • Hashomer House, 37a Broadhurst Gardens, London NW6 3QT

Dr Summers, Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, will reveal the fascinating untold story of interwar Jewish gender politics; questions of nationalism, feminism and identity; and how Anglo-Jewish suffragettes struggled with – and sometimes against – fellow female Mandate Palestine pioneers.

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  • The British launch of the Federation of Women Zionists in 1919 and of WIZO in 1920 represented a challenge to a male-dominated Zionist movement.  But the former Jewish suffragists who founded these organisations faced an uphill task, needing to recruit a mass membership among women who were, in the main, neither feminist nor Zionist. 

Women and shrubs

Meanwhile, the women who were, literally, on the ground in Mandate Palestine contested the social and economic roles proposed for them by their would-be benefactors; and the international dimension of the movement soon revealed that some nationalities were ‘more equal than others’.  This lecture details the debates and struggles surrounding these gender issues during the Mandate and beyond, leaving room for (rueful?) reflections on the current state of play.

 

Dr Anne Summers is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and a former Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library.  Her latest book is Christian and Jewish Women in Britain, 1880-1940: Living with Difference (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Learn more about Anne here.