Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine.
“...A Great Episode In The History Of Jewish Womanhood...”
[Judaica]. Katzenelson-Rubashow, Rachel, editor. Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine. Rendered into English by Maurice Samuel. Illustrated. New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1932.
8vo.; photographic frontispiece; other photographs throughout; green paper-covered boards; black cloth spine with label; some pages unopened; covers lightly rubbed, tips bumped, head of spine fragile.
First edition in English of this “cooperative effort to record, in direct personal reports, the spirit and achievements of a generation of women” (introduction); preceded by editions in Hebrew, issued by the Council of the Women Workers in Palestine, and the first translation, into Yiddish, issued by the Pioneer Women’s Organization, a branch of the Poale Zion, the Socialist-Zionist Party. It is divided into six sections: In the Beginning, offering an overview of women’s labor during the Second Immigration, 1904-1914; “With the Group,” discussing issues of the individual woman in the labor movement; “At Work, and The Child in Group Upbringing,” dealing with the practical matters of individual work and family life; “Among Writers, and The Departed,” offering “representative,” rather than “exceptional” notes on the contributions of specific members of the community.
The Plough Woman contains moving oral histories by some fifty women engaged in agricultural work in the communes, settlements, and training farms of Palestine. A short history of the Pioneer Women’s Organization (PWO), founded in New York in 1925, is bound in after the half-title, and includes a detailed and impressive mission statement:
(1) To work for the re-establishment of the Jewish Homeland in Palestine along cooperative and socialistic lines. (2) To assist the Jewish working woman in finding her place in Palestine and in improving her economic and social position. (3) To aid in the training of such types of women pioneers as shall fit, ion the industrial and agricultural fields, into the cooperative life in Palestine. (4) To bring about a closer relationship between the working women of Palestine and the working women of the Diaspora. (5) To conduct a constructive cultural activity among the Jewish working women of America, with special reference to the study of the Jewish people, its history, literature and culture generally: to organize and subsidize Jewish folk-schools in America on the basis of the foregoing program.
Katzenelson-Rubashow states the motivating forces behind the preparation of The Plough Woman in her introduction:
...For the last few years the Jewish women workers of Palestine have felt a deep inner need to set down in writing the story of their movement… Four leading motives were responsible for this resolution. First, the desire to make an accounting of the achievements of the women workers of Palestine and to arrive at an accurate evaluation of their worth; second, to put into permanent form certain important incidents in the history of the new Palestine; third, to acquaint the Jewish youth throughout the world with that part of our labor history which is represented by the second and third immigration streams into Palestine (1904-1924); fourth, to achieve a greater degree of self-understanding by means of self-expression. (p. v)
A riveting document whose photos and text provide a vivid picture of female life in early 20th-century Israel.
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