Word: hazleton
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...other, reality is more prosaic. After 30 years in a progressive democracy, one of whose founding precepts was sexual equality, the women of Israel are still clearly second-class citizens, severely restricted by law and custom. "The liberation of Israeli women is a myth," says Journalist Lesley Hazleton in her new book, Israeli Women. "They move in a male world of reality in the false guise of equals...
...Hazleton, 32, was raised in England, and is both a British subject and an Israeli citizen. She has lived in Israel for twelve years, teaching psychology at the Jerusalem Experimental High School and at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, writing for the Jerusalem Post and serving as a stringer for TIME...
Despite the fighting Amazon image in American movies like Exodus and Judith and in a stream of popular novels, women in the army are not allowed in combat-or anywhere near the fighting. Instead, they serve mostly in support jobs as typists, clerks, nurses and teachers. The reason, says Hazleton, is that Israel is committed to paternal protectiveness toward women: "The army exists to protect Israel's women, not to endanger them in its ranks...
...such inequality? Hazleton believes that 30 years of anxiety about war has sapped all energies for reform. Says she: "It is too much to fight against in a country that has plenty of wars already." Feminism is judged a curious American import. Asks Tamar Eshel, head of the working women's organization Naamat, "Should we demand far-reaching changes at this time, at the price of splitting the nation, when we are involved in a national struggle for our existence...
More important, says Hazleton, the shock of the Holocaust, followed by a generation of intermittent wars, has produced a hunger for the normality of traditional sex roles-man as protector and breadwinner, woman as mother and comforter of men. Marriage and childbearing are "national priorities" that produce social prejudices against the widow and the unmarried woman. "To be single," writes Hazleton, "is considered the greatest misfortune that can befall an Israeli woman." In primary schools, she says, youngsters absorb "a shocking degree of sex stereotyping" that takes its toll on Israeli females. One kibbutz psychologist finds that girls are consistently...