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Russian, Palestinian and Jewish Middle-Class Mothers in Israeli Society
Deborah Golden · Lauren Erdreich Sveta RobermanDeborah Golden Faculty of Education
University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel
Lauren Erdreich
Levinsky College of Education
Tel Aviv, Israel and Beit Berl Academic College
Kfar Saba, Israel
Sveta Roberman
Gordon Academic College of Education
Haifa, Israel and
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Israel
ISBN 978-1-137-53630-3
ISBN 978-1-137-53631-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53631-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938542
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Deborah’s parents
Abe and Aviva Golden, and to our children Daniel, Maayan, Gefen, Bustan, Adi and Liza
First and foremost, we wish to thank the women who generously shared their lives with us and who are the bedrock of this study.
We are grateful to our colleagues and students who took time to offer insightful readings, useful suggestions and encouragement along the way: Eyal Ben-Ari, Edna Lomsky-Feder, Afnan Masarwa, Hadas NetzerDagan, Galia Plotkin Amrami, Amit Rottman-Tzur and Chen Yaari.
Thanks to Michal Mor-Milerman for her wide range of indispensable research skills and to Sophie Richmond for her experienced editorial eye and sound advice.
We are also pleased to have had the opportunity to present parts of the study at various academic forums where we received timely questions and comments, among these: 2nd Annual Conference of the Israel Comparative Education Society (Bar-Ilan University, 2016), Parenting and Personhood Conference (University of Canterbury, 2016) and the Education and Inequality Summer Workshop convened by Annette Lareau (Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 2016).
The University of Haifa provided initial seed money that enabled us to set this project in motion, as well as contributing towards the cost of editing and indexing; the Department of Leadership and Policy at the Faculty of Education, University of Haifa made available some resources for research assistance.
Finally, we thank each other for such a good mix of lively, thoughtful and convivial collaborative work.
This study began on a sunny summer day over coffee and conversation between two anthropologists—Deborah and Lauren—a conversation that turned into the frst of many, and was subsequently joined by a third anthropologist, Sveta. At the time of that frst conversation, Lauren had moved to the town in Israel where Deborah was living with her son, then 13 years old. As Lauren’s daughter toddled around the table, we discussed our past work and interests. Sometime later, Deborah called Lauren with an idea. When we met this time, Deborah brought with her a stack of fiers that had been shoved into her postbox—advertisements for after-school activities, private tutoring, and leisure activities for mothers and children. ‘Let’s do something about this—about how mums are inundated with educational goods and services that tell them how they should be taking care of their kids,’ she suggested. This hit home with Lauren, who had just given birth to her second daughter and had spent a lot of time checking out possibilities for child care for both daughters. The town in which we lived offered many options—for a price. We noticed almost immediately how our particular locale shaped our experience as mothers—the abundance of educational goods and services required that we make choices among them, choices that were decisions about what sort of mothers we are or would like to be.
From the perspective of this study, mothering must be understood in relation to perceptions and practices of what constitutes a proper education for children—since the two are inextricably interwoven. In today’s world, education plays an increasingly important role in equipping
© The Author(s) 2018
D. Golden et al., Mothering, Education and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53631-0_1
children with knowledge and practical and social skills, as well as defning social location and potential social mobility. With the onset of industrial society and the burgeoning of nation-states, education of children was removed from the home and replaced by a formal system of compulsory schooling. Schooling was deemed necessary to adequately prepare children with basic skills, knowledge, values and sentiments requisite for a future citizen in the modern nation-state (Gellner 1983) and was put in the hands of professional educators. In this form of social organization, the family fulflled a supporting role; in this supporting role women were viewed as the most appropriate caretakers of home and as primarily responsible for the children’s upbringing and education.
Education—within school and without—is a major arena in which parents—primarily through the gendered work of mothers—reproduce their own class and cultural sensibilities. Although family life has undergone changes, and men are increasingly involved in the upbringing of their children, recent decades have seen the ‘transformation of women’s domestic labour to include extensive educational work in the home’ (Reay 2005a, 113); mothers take prime responsibility for the ‘complementary education work’ around schooling (Griffth and Smith 2005) and for decision-making relating to educational matters (Ball 2003). Perceptions and practices of mothering are culturally embedded and produced in response to changing requirements and expectations of what mothers can and should be doing in relation to their children’s education and the demands produced by educational institutions. In seeking to ensure a proper education for their children, mothers are obliged not only to make decisions regarding their children’s schooling but also to negotiate a market of ‘extra-curricular’ ideas, goods and services, all of which hold out the promise of ensuring a proper education for the children. This negotiation requires knowledge, fnancial resources and time—putting the middle class at a distinct advantage and, in turn, positing middle-class mothering as something to be emulated and as a widely disseminated cultural model of what is considered to be proper mothering.
In a landmark study entitled The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, published in 1996, Sharon Hays coined the term ‘intensive mothering’ to describe middle-class motherhood—a ‘gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children’ (Hays 1996, x). With its roots in western middle-class sensibilities and values, this model has evolved
into a dominant cultural model and benchmark for proper mothering among other mothers elsewhere (Arendell 2000; Ennis 2014; Faircloth et al. 2013; Lee et al. 2014; o’Reilly 2014). But how far could this construct take us in understanding diverse social realities? We wondered how middle-class mothers, far removed from the context of the American mothers who formed the basis of Hays’ study, interpret and implement ‘intensive mothering’? How are these perceptions and practices elaborated in ways of educating their children?
This study looks at how women refect upon and make sense of this task. Grounded in an approach that brings together ideas of class, culture and social positioning, our study is a comparative, ethnographically informed interview study of Israeli middle-class mothers’ understandings and modes of engagement in their children’s education. Focusing on middle-class mothers from three Israeli social-cultural groups—Russian immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis and Jewish native-born Israelis1—the book examines the ways in which these mothers both share and differ in their understandings of a proper education for their children and of their task as mothers in ensuring this. Propelled throughout by a comparative thrust, our study is guided by four main questions:
• What are mothers’ understandings of a proper education for their children and of their role in ensuring this?
• What perceptions and practices of mothering and education do women share and in what ways do they differ?
• How do class, culture and social positioning conjoin in shaping perceptions and practices of educating children and of what it means to be a mother?
• How do global discourses about proper education and competent mothering interweave with local concerns and possibilities?
The three groups of mothers in our study currently participate in the Israeli middle class, albeit with different relationships to major social institutions and resources, as well as access to educational goods and services. Note that we use the verb ‘participate’ in the middle class advisedly, rather than the word ‘belong’, which is both more fxed and more passive. The use of the term ‘participation’ gives a sense of the ongoing work of class and its forward-moving thrust. In a discussion of the constituents of class, Conley (2008, 370) highlights what he calls the
imagining of ‘possibility, expectation, probability’. This process of ‘envisioning possibility step by step’ (2008, 370) is particularly apt for describing and understanding the ways by which mothers seek, over time, and through ensuring what they view as a proper education for their children, to ensure the future social positioning of their children, even as this may not be fully in place in the present moment. Moreover, all the women in our study have the economic means and social and cultural capital with which to seek out and take advantage of educational resources. Under these circumstances, in which these women are relatively less constrained, we assumed that cultural underpinnings of what is deemed to be proper mothering would be more easily discerned. That is, by holding class constant across the three groups, we sought to allow issues related to culture and social positioning to come to the fore. As the study shows, mothers in each group share certain ideas about mothering; yet their modes of engaging with their children’s education refect distinct, but changing, cultural models of both mothering and education, as well as being shaped by their different, and evolving social positionings in Israeli society.
CHAPTER 2
In this chapter, we outline the theoretical, contextual and methodological knowledge that sets the scene for the empirical fndings to be presented in subsequent chapters. The chapter comprises four main sections. In the frst (‘Conceptual underpinnings’), we present the conceptual underpinnings of our study—the ideas and concepts that inform our understanding of the issues at hand; in the second (‘The Israeli context’), we provide some background information on Israeli society necessary for making sense of and contextualizing our empirical fndings; in the third (‘The study’), we present the women in our study and the mode of research; fnally (‘Reading the book’), we present the structure and style of subsequent chapters.
conceptuAl underpinnings
Women’s domestic activity, including child care, has long been conceptualized by feminist theorists as a form of gendered work, albeit a special form of such work. It is special because it entails the fostering of profound, complex and affectionate bonds of love (Arendell 2000; Ramaekers and Suissa 2011); it is based in virtues and values that make it other-directed—oriented towards the production of another’s emotions, feelings and sense of self in society; it requires attentiveness, receptivity and responsiveness, all the while arousing intense emotion on the part of the mother (Bubeck 2001). Thus, there is a special texture to the relationship between mothers and children which lends this work its
© The Author(s) 2018
D. Golden et al., Mothering, Education and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53631-0_2
intensity and sense of import. Yet the particular forms that this love and care take are shaped in broad sociocultural contexts (Barlow and Chapin 2010). It is to these broader contexts, and the ways they inform mothering among middle-class mothers, that we turn.
In this study, we adopt a number of premises regarding class. our frst premise is that class matters—it is a ‘fundamental organizer of social experience’ (Weis 2008, 3, emphasis in original), though not the only one. This is the case objectively—that is, people may be affliated to class in terms of objective parameters, with class serving as a major axis of stratifcation, though exactly what those parameters are and what the links are between them is a matter of ongoing debate, both theoretical and empirical (Lareau and Conley 2008). It is also the case that class matters subjectively—people may have a sense of class belonging— what Reay (2005b) terms a ‘psychic landscape’ or ‘affective lexicon of class’. However, a subjective sense of class as a fundamental constituent of social identity may itself vary according to context (ortner 2003); moreover, there may be a disjuncture between objective measures of class affliation and subjective experiences of such affliation (Sayer 2002). our second premise is that class is not a fxed category, or a ‘ready-made’ reality (Skeggs 2004). Rather, class formation is ‘lived out’ (Weis 2008, 8): class boundaries, positioning and belonging are dynamic—constantly produced and reproduced, made and remade through lived social practices (Skeggs 2004, 5). our third premise is that one of the prime arenas in which such class work takes place is childrearing and education, as parents seek to create and maintain future class belonging for their children. To this third premise, we now turn.
More than two decades ago, Brown discerned the emergence of a ‘parentocracy’, in which ‘a child’s education is increasingly dependent upon the wealth and wishes of parents, rather than the ability and effort of pupils’ (1990, 66, emphasis in original). Since then, the spread and entrenchment of neoliberalism (Apple 2001) and the concomitant expansion of choices in the educational system, have shifted responsibility for a child’s future prospects from the state onto families. In this scheme of things, middle-class families are at a distinct advantage. A proliferation of studies shows how middle-class families secure class advantage by bringing to bear the various forms of capital—economic, social, cultural and emotional—on their children’s education.
Bourdieu was primarily concerned with the mechanisms by which class advantage is reproduced across generations in major social institutions—particularly family and school. His work focused on the interactions between three different forms of capital: economic (money and assets), social (relationships, networks and connections) and cultural (goods, embodied dispositions and institutionalized qualifcations), examining how these are activated in different institutional felds and may be converted into each other (Bourdieu 1997). Informed by Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, studies show how middle-class parents—whose meritocratic and individualist values and attitudes towards education mesh with those of the school, and who have at their disposal resources of time and money, as well as appropriate cultural capital—are better placed to further their children’s education (Horvat et al. 2003; Lareau 2003). Broadly speaking, studies of parenting,2 education and middle-class advantage cover four, partially overlapping, spheres: school choice, parental involvement in schools, after-school enrichment activities and the inculcation of habitus.
one basic practice of reproducing educational advantage is school choice. In his book Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, Stearns (2003) claims that since the late nineteenth century school and schooling emerged as a major arena of anxiety for parents. New ideas about the vulnerable nature of infants and children, alongside parents’ increasing awareness that their children’s futures were dependent on a proper education, led to an expanding realm of parental anxiety in relation to schooling—spanning a range of issues from concern about the suitability of the social milieu to the learning process itself. From the slightly different angle of the literature on the risk society, sociologists have further identifed the contemporary phenomenon of ‘parent anxiety’ as a particular manifestation of the notion of risk. Middle-class parents fnd themselves confronted with increasing responsibility for their children’s education, a burgeoning market of educational services and goods, at the same time as they are dogged by ‘fear of falling’ (Ehrenreich 1989), namely, the potential loss of educational advantage. Parents approach the educational market from a perspective of identifying and managing perceived potential risks, including the perceived inadequate quality of schooling, misrecognition of children’s needs and abilities, and physical and/or social environments deemed
unsafe or unsuitable (Ball 2003; Cucchiara 2013; Lareau and Goyette 2014; Rollock et al. 2015). It is middle-class parents who enjoy the ‘privilege of risk’ (Kimelberg 2014)—that is, they have the cultural and fnancial capital and wherewithal to invest in the ongoing, time-consuming defnition of what constitutes the risks of schooling. The management of risk becomes a moral keystone of middle-class parenting, both informed by, and yet arousing further anxiety (Furedi 2002; Stearns 2003). Middle-class parents are equipped with the personal knowledge and resources to best negotiate the educational market, as well as to tap into the resources embedded in social networks of like-minded middleclass parents (Ball 2003; Ball and Vincent 1998). Bringing different ideologies into their defnitions of what constitutes risk, middle-class parents develop strategies of school choice and risk-management that reproduce middle-class advantage and identity (Cucchiara 2013; Lareau and Goyette 2014; Reay et al. 2011; Vincent and Ball 2007).
Sociological studies of parental involvement in schooling focus on classbased inequalities in access to the various forms of capital (economic, social, cultural and emotional) and the impact of this unequal access on parental involvement in children’s schooling. Taking a lead from Annette Lareau’s Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education (1989) in the USA and Diane Reay’s Class Work: Mothers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Primary Schooling (1998) in the UK, studies show that middle-class mothers are actively involved and intervene in schooling, while working-class mothers tend to leave schooling to professionals, and to depend on and trust their decisions. Specifcally, studies have found that the lower and middle classes differ regarding the extent and mode of intervention in educational decisions (Lareau 1989; Lareau and Horvat 1999), including speech styles when dealing with teachers (Lareau and Calarco 2012) and responses of teachers to parents from different classes (Reay 1998; Vincent and Ball 2007). Studies consistently show that it is middle-class mothers who are most adequately equipped to actively manage, mediate and negotiate the home/school boundary (Crozier 1998, 1999; Cucchiara and Horvat 2009; Griffth and Smith 2005; Horvat et al. 2003; Lareau and Horvat 1999; Lareau and Lopes Muñoz 2012; Reay et al. 2011; Wanat and Zieglowsky 2010). Moreover, the active navigation of this boundary serves to construct what is deemed to be appropriate middle-class
mothering and proper parental involvement in schools (Erdreich and Golden 2017; Gillies 2006; o’Brien 2008; Posey-Maddox 2013).3
The complementary educational work that mothers do for their children on a daily basis also includes the organization and supervision of their children’s extra-curricular activities. on this account, too, the literature is replete with distinctions between the work of middle-class and workingclass mothers. In her infuential book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life (2003), Lareau, addressing the ways in which modes of childrearing refect and contribute to the reproduction of class, proposed the terms ‘concerted cultivation’ and ‘accomplishment of natural growth’. According to this distinction, middle-class parents engage in concerted cultivation as they ‘deliberately try to stimulate their children’s development and foster their cognitive and social skills’ (2003, 5), primarily through organized activities, leading to skills in interacting with adults on an equal basis and a strong sense of entitlement. By contrast, while working-class parents provide comfort, food, shelter and support for their children, they do not engage in the deliberate cultivation of children and their leisure activities: ‘In the accomplishment of natural growth, children experience long stretches of leisure time, child-initiated play, clear boundaries between adults and children, and daily interactions with kin’ (2003, 3). The array of choices with which middle-class children are presented is aimed at allowing them to tap into a wide range of inherent capabilities and talents, to develop the wide-ranging tastes of ‘cultural omnivores’ (Peterson and Kern 1996) and ‘life skills’ from an early age (Vincent and Ball 2007), and to prepare children for competition and stringent selection procedures at a later stage in their educational career (Friedman 2013).
The furnishing of middle-class children with what are deemed to be vital qualities, modes of being and behaviour is further nurtured at home. Bourdieu termed this ‘habitus’—namely, the processes whereby cultural capital, primarily cultivated in family settings, is embodied in such a way as to become an enduring part of mind and body (Bourdieu 1997). In middle-class families, these include the ‘feting’ of individualism through material goods and of individual achievement through praise (ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2015); ‘fun morality’ attached to the way in which
mothers play with their children (Sirota 2010); a democratic style of childrearing, in which children are encouraged to choose how to act, think and feel, and to act on these choices (Sirota 2010); shared enjoyment of joint activities among parents and children that serve as a means for cultivating focus and persistence in children or ‘enriching intimacy’ (Stefansen and Aarseth 2011); and mutual sharing of authentic feelings between parents and child (ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2015). Through these mutually resonating practices, mothers inculcate in their children the basic sensibilities and skills of the middle class.
These mothering practices that instil a certain class culture or habitus reproduce advantage in other spheres of social interaction, particularly at school. Expanding on Bourdieu’s notion of capital, a British school of researchers has conceptualized women’s complementary educational work as a means for communicating what they call ‘emotional capital’ (Gillies 2006; o’Brien 2008; Reay 2000). They argue that the work done by both middle-class and working-class mothers for their children is emotional and involves caring, albeit in different ways and with different aims. Middle-class mothers’ care communicates support and encourages well-being in ways that mesh with the emotional support expected of parents. While middle-class mothers nurture a strong ‘sense of entitlement’ among their children as unique individuals (Lareau 2003), working-class mothers emphasize attributes of ‘“ftting in” rather than standing out’ (Gillies 2005, 845). In a study of childrearing and social class in three neighbourhoods in the USA, Kusserow (2004) further elaborated the middle class/working class distinction. In her view, the ‘soft individualism’, characteristic of upper middle-class modes of childrearing, emphasizes the delicacy and uniqueness of the child’s self and the need to provide a protective environment so as to allow the child’s self to fower; ‘hard individualism’, emphasizing the need to develop a tough and resilient self, characterizes the working classes. There are two types of hard individualism—the one more geared to survival (‘hard protective individualism’) and the other towards social mobility (‘hard projective individualism’). The specifc type of individualism is instilled in children by parents at home and in interaction with the dominant institution of school.
*
To sum up so far, these four overlapping spheres of mothering and education—school choice, parental involvement, cultivation of enrichment activities and the inculcation of habitus—hang together to make
a coherent whole in which the educational work mothers do on behalf of their children is tied up with class-based access to the various forms of capital. However, notwithstanding its crucial importance, we note that this lens, in focusing on differences between classes, has taken less interest in diversity within classes (Irwin and Elley 2011). Such diversity emerges as class interacts with other factors. In a study close in spirit to our own, Rollock et al. (2015) show how class and race interact as black middle-class families of Caribbean heritage in Britain endeavour to steer a successful educational course for their children in the face of low expectations, racism, discrimination, stereotyping of black parents and resistance among teens. This research indicates that the capital middle-class parents bring to parental involvement is shaped not only by class, but also by cultural history, race and ethnicity.
The educational work mothers do on behalf of their children is also inextricably intertwined with cultural perceptions of mothering. As middle-class women put these practices into action, they secure class advantage for their children; in so doing, they also shape themselves as mothers in light the of cultural models of proper mothering. It is to mothering as a cultural model that we now turn.
Anthropological research has long addressed the culturally embedded nature of childrearing,4 but only relatively recently has such research explicitly focused on what perceptions and practices of childrearing tell us about cultural notions of mothering. Hays’ Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996), presented in the Introduction, shifted the classical anthropological focus from non-western societies to the American middle class and from childrearing to mothering. What, she asked, did childrearing practices among middle-class women in contemporary western society have to teach us about cultural expectations of mothers? Hays’ study was based on the idea of looking at mothering as a cultural model—namely, one of those:
presupposed, taken for granted models of the world that are widely shared (although not necessarily to the exclusion of other, alternative models) by the members of a society … that frame experience, supplying interpretations of that experience and inferences about it, and goals for action. (Quinn and Holland 1987, 4–6)5
Specifcally, she described motherhood among American middle-class mothers as ‘intensive mothering’—a ‘gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children’ (Hays 1996, x). This model is child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour-intensive and fnancially expensive. The model of intensive mothering, with its cultural defnitions pertaining to the care and work required to foster children’s development and education, has evolved as a dominant cultural model for women in western middle-class families, even as these same women negotiate with sometimes competing cultural models of gender equity, rationality, detachment, self-interest and power (Hays 1996).
The model itself is a cultural construct—grounded in, shaped and reinforced by changing perceptions of childhood, child development, well-being and family over the last century. With the demise of child labour, there emerged a perception of childhood as a period of vulnerability, and of parents as protectors of, and emotionally invested in, their children (Zelizer 1985). The expansion of free and compulsory schooling shaped the work of childhood into learning, with women’s roles as mothers coming to increasingly focus on education (Mintz 2004; Rutherford 2013; Stearns 2003). Increased expectations put on children by schools and the evaluation of children through grading their educational achievements framed schooling as the means for future class belonging and possibilities of mobility. At the same time, psychology was in its heyday, providing a scientifc basis for an emphasis on proper child development (Burman 1994). Being a parent came to be perceived not as natural or intuitive, or even socially learned, but as expertguided. Mothers were required to comply not only with medically based injunctions of how to care for their children’s physical health, but also psychologically based injunctions as to how to care for their emotional and psychological well-being (Apple 2006; Furedi 2002; Grant 1998; Rutherford 2013; Stearns 2003; Zelizer 1985). Bringing up children had become ‘parenting’ (Furedi 2002; Lee 2014) and being a mother ‘mothering’ (Ramaekers and Suissa 2011; Suissa 2006).
As experts proliferated, a market of expert opinions on parenting expanded. Parenting shifted again to include more autonomy in the choice among experts, but also an unceasing obligation for parents to gather information and make choices, now seen as determining a child’s well-being and future trajectory (Rutherford 2013). once perceived as in need of expert advice and scientifc guidance, mothers were now
viewed as active consumers of educational ideas, products and services (Apple 2006; Rutherford 2013). ‘Parenting’ became a matter of making informed choices that would determine a child’s future and the way children were educated became a sign and statement of parents’, and particularly mothers’, competence and social identity.
Notwithstanding the specifc cultural roots of the model of intensive mothering in western middle-class sensibilities and values, the model has become a hegemonic one for other classes and cultures. Mothers across the globe are confronted by the western middle-class model of intensive mothering as a powerful cultural model, even as the very different circumstances of their lives—economic, cultural and social and political— may shape different ideas of what is deemed to be a proper education for their children.
Let us now turn to the unique context in which the questions at the heart of this study are addressed.
To grasp the nature of Israeli society today, one must understand something of its history. Jewish settlement in Palestine began in the late nineteenth century—settlers consisted primarily of young immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe seeking to participate in the quest for Jewish self-determination by establishing a national home in the ancestral homeland, then part of the o ttoman Empire. Those early decades saw the setting up of the foundations of the new Jewish society in Palestine—at once administrative, economic, military, social and cultural. It also saw the beginnings of conflict—sometimes violent—between settler Jews and indigenous Arabs, culminating in the war that followed immediately on the declaration of the state in 1948. The war— called the War of Independence by Israeli Jews and the Nakba (or “catastrophe”) by Palestinians—resulted in the expulsion or fleeing of over 700,000 Palestinians. Those Palestinians who remained within the borders of the new state—some 150,000— became Israeli citizens in the new state. Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel, distinct from Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and the Palestinian diaspora, number well over a million and constitute over 20% of Israel’s population. The vast majority are Muslim; the rest Christians and Druze. The ongoing Israeli
Palestinian political confict (for a concise history, see Beinin and Hajjar 2014), together with the defnition of the state in ethno-national terms as a Jewish state, have fundamental and ongoing repercussions for relations between the Jewish and Palestinian citizens. Although the latter are entitled to universal rights in spheres of political participation, education, welfare and health-care, still Palestinian Israelis suffer from various forms of discrimination, including in the educational sphere, and are consistently located towards the lower end of most measures of social, educational and economic well-being (Adalah 2011; Swirski 2011).
The establishment of the state saw the opening of Israel’s borders to unrestricted Jewish immigration. The (1950) Law of Return which grants the right of settlement and automatic citizenship to Jewish immigrants has meant that Jewish immigrants have continued to settle in Israel ever since. Those from Europe and America are referred to as Ashkenazi Jews; those from Asia and Africa as Mizrachi Jews. over the decades, immigrants have come in pursuit of different versions of the Zionist vision, in response to religious yearnings, and in pursuit of economic and social opportunities. From the start, this diversity has invited social, political and cultural splits, often along religious and ethnic lines. Throughout the decades, notwithstanding Israel’s offcial ideology of welcoming Jewish immigrants as returning home, in practice relations between locals and newcomers have often been strained.
one recent infux of newcomers hails from the former Soviet Union, with over a million arriving since the early 1990s (for an overview see Remennick 2007). The vast majority of these immigrants were Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Ukraine. on the whole, these migrants—called ‘Russians’ in popular parlance—were motivated more by ‘push’ than by ‘pull’ factors—notably, the crises and uncertainties engulfng the former Soviet Union after the collapse of the Communist regime, including the lack of a positive economic outlook, and an accompanying fear of an upsurge in anti-semitism. As has been Israeli policy over the decades in relation to its Jewish immigrants, these newcomers too were provided with various forms of state support. This included income support, rental and mortgage subsidy, free health care and free instruction in Hebrew language. Though relatively lacking in material wealth, the immigrants brought with them strong cultural capital, with an average level of education far above that of the local Israeli population. Due to the lack of knowledge of Hebrew, lack of ft between professional standards, and structural conditions in the local economic market, many of
the newcomers were unable to fnd employment in their professions and were compelled to earn a living in jobs far below their qualifcations (Remennick 2007, 73–93). Since those early days, immigrants from the former Soviet Union have entered different sectors in Israeli society, with a relatively high rate of employment and many following a path of upward social mobility (Smooha 2008). The immigrants maintain a strong social and cultural enclave, which also serves as a basis for political mobilization (Remennick 2007, 138–142), concomitant with a growing sense of Israeli identity (Leshem 2008).
Against this background, it is noteworthy that fundamental change is currently sweeping across Israeli society consisting of what one leading Israeli sociologist termed the ‘decomposition of hegemony’ (Kimmerling 2001). In these changing circumstances, the hitherto dominance of the Ashkenazi, secular, ruling group is increasingly being challenged by an array of upcoming social groups—including both Palestinian Israelis and Russian-speaking immigrants—as these seek full participation in Israeli society.6
Israel is an instructive context in which to address the issues that lie at the heart of this study because competing ideologies of familism and liberalism make Israel a quintessential case of the tension between intensive mothering, on the one hand, and ideologies of gender equity that are especially characteristic of the middle classes, on the other.
Familism, with its gendered expectations of women and elevation of motherhood, serves as a basic pillar of Israeli society (Berkovitch 1997; Fogiel-Bijioui 2002; Fogiel-Bijaoui and Rutlinger-Reiner 2013; Hacker 2005; Helman 1999). This fundamental tenet is reinforced by Jewish and Arab traditional cultures (Lewin-Epstein et al. 2000), a judicial system that grants authority to Jewish, Muslim, Druze and Christian religious courts in matters pertaining to personal status, including marriage and divorce (Halperin-Kaddari 2014), as well as the ongoing political and military confict and its repercussions for Jewish and Palestinian women’s standing in society (Herzog 2005b). The central importance granted to the family and to the role of women as wives and mothers is borne out by the fgures. Notwithstanding recent changes, including later age of marriage, decline in average number of children and a rising divorce rate, Israel’s birth rates remain the highest among
countries in the oECD (organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Relatively high rates of marriage, high birth rates and low divorce rates throughout the population (i.e. not restricted to traditional communities—either Jewish or Arab) indicate the continuing predominance of the family (Central Bureau of Statistics 2015). Government policies contribute to promoting high birth rates. Israel provides free coverage of in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures for all women up to age 45, for up to two children. Further supporting a high birth rate is the universal child allowance which is distributed to all families in Israel with children under the age of 17, regardless of income.7
Israel conjoins ‘a very family oriented society with a developed, modern economy’ (Bowers 2014, 1).8 The central importance accorded to family, while reinforcing the primacy attached to the role of wife and mother, does not preclude relatively high labour force participation rates among women, which continue during motherhood. These rates are similar to those of women in many industrialized countries, though participation varies according to sector and level of education (Stier and Herzberg 2013). Employment rates among Jewish women of working age are much higher than those of Palestinian Israeli women, though the rates for the latter are on the increase as education levels among Palestinian Israeli women improve (Stier 2013; Stier and Herzberg 2013).9 Policies designed to encourage employment by mothers include 26 weeks of maternity leave (that may be shared by the father) of which 14 weeks are paid by the state, as well as legislated job and benefts protection during maternity leave. Notwithstanding improvements in their position in the labour market, on the whole, Israeli women are still considered secondary breadwinners on the assumption that ‘men are responsible for supporting the family, while women are in charge of caring for it’ (Stier 2013, 114). Women’s continued employment during motherhood is also linked to the availability and use of child-care facilities. These are outlined in the next section.
As part of the mandate to encourage women’s employment, Israel has a system of day-care centres and family day-care facilities that receives public subsidy from the (now called) Ministry of Economy, which is responsible for children from birth until the age of 3. These include facilities run by community centres, local authorities and non-proft women’s organizations, as well as home-based nurseries. Although the law stipulates
licensing and supervision requirements for these frameworks, these are not enforced. Hence, supervision by the ministry is based on a voluntary agreement and many private facilities—such as private home-care settings—remain unsupervised. Despite the relatively low quality, compared to other oECD countries, infants in Israel spend the most number of hours in educational settings (Moshel 2016, 30–31). However, the spread of recognized day-care facilities is unequal—the combination of state discrimination in the allocation of resources and lack of demand means that there is a scarcity of day-care facilities in the Arab sector, although these are on the increase (Moshel 2016, 38–39).
From age 3 onwards, children’s education becomes the responsibility of the Ministry of Education. Israel’s education system consists of two years of preschool (for children aged 3–4 and 4–5), one year of compulsory kindergarten (for children aged 5–6), six years of primary education and six years of secondary education. A 1984 law expanded the responsibility of the state to provide free education to include children aged 3–4. Implementation of this law began in 1999 in neighbourhoods of low socio-economic status but was slow and uneven. In 2012, following protests against the cost of living and of raising a family, which drew hundreds of thousands of Israelis (primarily Jewish middle-class Israelis) onto the streets (Rosenhek and Shalev 2014), the government reconfrmed its responsibility to provide free schooling to all Israeli children from aged 3 onwards and has reinforced efforts to take steps to put this policy into practice. on the whole, the numbers of children attending preschools are high and on the increase, although attendance varies among different sectors of the population, particularly between the Jewish and Arab sectors (Adalah 2015; Espanioly 2015; Moshel 2016, 47).
Almost all Israeli children of compulsory education age (5–16 years) are enrolled in school. While the vast majority of all Israeli children complete secondary education, fndings consistently show that the percentage of students passing matriculation examinations varies greatly according to the socioeconomic profle of the locality (Konor-Atias and Garmash 2012). The public state school system is divided into four distinct streams: (a) schools serving the Jewish secular population; (b) schools serving religious but non-orthodox Jews—these follow the same general curriculum as in secular schools but include additional intensive religious study; (c) schools serving ultra-orthodox Jewish communities which do not follow the national curriculum; and (d) schools serving
the Arab sector, with Arabic as language of instruction (for an overview of Israel’s education system, see Wolff and Breit, 2012). Schools in the Arab sector, while institutionally separate from Jewish schools,10 remain under the supervision of the Israeli Ministry of Education, without structural, budgetary or curricular autonomy (Adalah 2011, 39–45; Pinson and Agbaria 2015).11 Exclusionary practices, including systematic under-resourcing, mean that on the whole, Palestinian Israeli children fare relatively poorly on measures of educational attainment, including matriculation rates (Swirski 2011). This, in turn, puts them at a disadvantage in relation to access to Israeli institutions of higher education, where they are under-represented, both as students and as faculty (Adalah 2011, 42–43).
The deepening entrenchment of neoliberal policies and practices in education facilitates various forms of selection and privatization, including supplemental payments to schools by parents and increasing numbers of private or semi-private schools, some of which are initiated and set up by parents. In a general climate of dissatisfaction with school standards, coupled with a strong belief in the value of education to ensure and maintain social mobility, middle-class parents across the board are increasingly turning to different forms of private education, including after-school private tuition (Dagan-Buzaglo 2010).
As we shall see, the broad and changing structure of Israeli society and fault-lines of inequality outlined above have far-reaching implications for the lives of families in the three groups in our study and for the ways in which mothers endeavour to ensure a proper education for their children. We turn now to the study itself.
Grounded in a theoretical approach that brings together class, culture and social positioning,12 our study is a comparative, ethnographically informed interview study of Israeli middle-class mothers’ understandings and modes of engagement in their children’s education.
As we saw above, class serves as a major axis around which sociologically informed research on mothering and education is organized, particularly in the UK and the USA where most of this research has been carried out. our description of Israeli society above showed that in this particular local context, ethnic, cultural, religious and political divides take precedence over class as a fundamental organizer of social
experience, with the sociology and anthropology of Israeli society, on the whole, following suit.13 This relative neglect of a class perspective holds, too, for the study of mothering and education. Research that employs a class lens in this regard includes a study of the recruitment of cultural and social capital for affecting change in schools among middle-class families in a Jewish neighbourhood (Birenbaum-Carmeli 1999a), and a number of studies that address the obstacles in the way of low-income women in Israel seeking to pursue what is considered to be good mothering in the light of the demands placed on them by schools and the cultural model of ‘intensive mothering’ (Lavee and Benjamin 2014, 2015).14 We seek to add to this body of research as we address the interweaving of ‘making mothers’ and ‘doing class’ (Donner 2008, 62) in this particular context.
Why focus on the middle class? The study of the middle class is important, not only as a phenomenon in its own right, but also in view of its implications for social inequality. Middle-class families, as they take action on behalf of their own children, ‘produce or contribute to the perpetuation, inscription and reinvention of social inequalities, both old and new’ (Ball 2003, 5), albeit unwittingly. Moreover, the focus on the middle class sprang from our interest in studying the global spread of the cultural model of ‘intensive mothering’ as a model of proper mothering. We were interested in how women, in very different circumstances, seek to align themselves with this model. Finally, middle-class women have at their disposal the economic means and social and cultural capital with which to seek out and take advantage of educational resources. Under these circumstances, in which they are relatively less constrained, we assumed that the social and cultural underpinnings of what is deemed to be proper mothering would be more easily discerned.
As anthropologists, our work is informed by a concept of culture as a living, dynamic mode of shared understandings, makings of meaning and acting in the world, constantly created and recreated through the ways people live their lives (Anderson-Levitt 2012). We are also acutely aware of the ways in which different contexts shape possibilities. Indeed, comparison—explicit or implicit—is fundamental to the discipline of anthropology which studies what is common to cultures, as well as what makes them unique (Peacock 1986). Hence, from the start, we envisioned our study as a comparative study of middle-class mothering in Israel—looking at the ways in which possibilities of mothering and education are differently shaped for women participating in the same social
class but with unique social and cultural biographies, as well as very different collective histories and possible futures. The comparative thrust informed our selection of mothers hailing from three social-cultural groups—immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis and Jewish native-born Israelis.15
We also adhere to the fundamental methodological tenet of ethnography, namely the endeavour to understand, through participation, how cultural ideas and practices are shaped and reproduced in a specifc context. In this spirit, our study took the form of what we call an ethnographically informed interview study, by which we mean that it is based on this principle of ethnography through the use of in-depth interviewing to create data for comparison.16 The study is anchored in familiarity with the contexts of study—as scholars and mothers. Both Lauren and Deborah are familiar with the town in which the native-born Jewish women in our study live and bring up their children. During a period of preliminary feldwork in the town, Lauren became privy to the activities and material resources mothers were seeking out for their children, their deliberations and choices around schooling and child care, and notions of proper mothering to which these women aspired. Sveta, too, hails from the same background as the immigrant women in the study and contends with similar dilemmas as mother. In the same spirit, we were keen to collaborate with a Palestinian colleague but could not fnd a researcher able to take on this commitment on top of her current workload (a situation that is itself echoed in the fndings presented in Chap. 3). In the event, we initially drew our Palestinian Israeli interviewees from among the women with whom Lauren was familiar through ethnographic feldwork that she had carried out for her doctoral dissertation on Palestinian Israeli women university students (Erdreich 2004). These women were now mothers. Lauren had lived with them at the university and visited their hometowns. She had kept in touch with some and knew about their lives since graduation. This understanding of their lives would be vital in the analysis of the material gathered in our interviews. In addition, we hoped that this bedrock of trust, based on prior familiarity with the interviewees at an earlier stage in their lives, meant that the women would feel relatively free to speak. This is particularly important given the complex political and social context that may affect the interaction between a Jewish researcher interviewing Palestinian women, as discussed by Herzog (2005a).
In our study, we relied on our combined history of ethnographic research among these social groups, the turning of an ethnographically observant eye on our own participation as mothers in Israeli society and context-attentive ‘engaged listening’ (Forsey 2010) to the words of our interviewees. In other words, we used interviews as a means to elicit details of the daily work of mothering around education that we could use for comparison, while relying on our combined ethnographic experience researching among these populations, as well as our personal and professional familiarity with the felds, to give contextual depth and understanding to the stories we heard.
In selecting our mothers for this study, we adopted what Lareau (2008) and Conley (2008) term an ‘umbrella’ or ‘kitchen sink’ (perhaps an apt analogy when talking about women’s work) concept of class. This refers to a broad category encompassing a wide range of forms of social hierarchy, including education, income and wealth, occupation, but also participation in social institutions, social networks, use of knowledge and other forms of cultural capital. This inclusive approach is particularly apt for qualitative research when working closely with a small number of cases (Lareau 2008). Interviewees were initially selected from among mothers with whom we had varying degrees of acquaintance (though not friends), then widening this circle as described below (for a concise group portrait of all interviewees, see Appendix). For ease of comparison, we interviewed the same number of women across populations—30 mothers in total, 10 from each group. We aimed for women with a similar profle: married, home owners, graduates of higher education, professional and in employment (unless a ‘stay-at-home mother’ out of choice), with husbands in employment.17 The focus on the ‘mainstream’ in terms of the women’s marital status was deemed important in a context in which conservative, gendered expectations of women and motherhood are deeply entrenched, as discussed in the previous section on Israeli society. Notwithstanding the complexities entailed in identifying class belonging, noted above, objective parameters indicate that the women in our study participated in the upper stratum of the Israeli middle class. In all the families, both members of the couple were breadwinners,18 both were graduates of higher education, both were employed as professionals or in managerial capacity, with earnings at average or higher than average (Dagan-Buzaglo and Konor-Attias 2013; Nisanov 2014).
We aimed for mothers with at least two children, one under 5 and one over 5—in order to trace how women chose to deal with the different educational and development needs and choices concerning preschool and school-age children. It was our premise that for these younger age groups, there is a wider range of choices, and hence decisions may be made in relation to a wider range of factors. In the event, among our interviewees were a number of mothers with older children, and one mother, in our group of immigrant mothers, with one child.
our ethnographic and participant familiarity with the felds was vital in striking the right balance between fnding the common denominator for comparison and yet realizing that we could not let comparison drown out the voice of the specifc groups. For instance, the Palestinian and native-born Jewish mothers in our study were all married. By contrast, our Russian immigrant interviewees included a Russian mother now divorced from her local-born Israeli husband and another Russian mother of two children whose partner and father of her children was living and working abroad. In this case, processes of immigration meant that many families were mixed Russian and non-immigrant couples, divorced, or had large age-gaps between siblings, and this variation in the Russian families was part of their unique social experience that had to be acknowledged in our research.
The interviews themselves informed us how wide an ethnographic scope was required, sometimes defned quite differently from the sociological defnitions of social categories. In interviews with the Palestinian Israeli mothers, we heard them continually citing knowledge they had of the educational system and ideas about children from developmental psychology. This led us to wonder if our sample of interviewees was professionally skewed towards women who worked in education felds;19 hence, we made sure that some of our interviewees came from professions not related to education. With the native-born Jewish mothers, we were aware that the ethnic divide between Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews is one major rift in Israel’s ‘deeply divided society’ (Smooha 1978). However, in the event, our interviewees, regardless of their ethnic affliation, rarely made explicit reference to ethnicity—a fnding that fts with research which shows that among Mizrachi (Mizrachi or mixed Mizrachi-Ashkenazi) middle-class families in locales serving a population with a high socio-economic profle, the ethnic dimension is relegated to the margins, as other aspects take precedence in defning identity (Cohen and Leon 2008; see also Mizrachi 2013). However, in our frst two
interviews with native-born Jewish mothers, the importance of creating an appreciation for Jewish tradition did arise—perhaps as a form of coding for their Mizrachi background. Since both women came from religious backgrounds, we chose as our next interviewee a woman from a secular background.
our three groups also differed in terms of locale. one insight that emerged out of our initial feldwork among the native-born Jewish women was the understanding that particular locales made available a cornucopia of educational goods and services that allowed for varied possibilities of mothering preferences and styles. The sensitivity to locale also meant that we looked closely at whether and how locale shaped mothering for women in the other groups. The distinction among the Palestinian Israeli women between the experience of those living in a mixed Jewish-Arab city and those living in Arab towns refects this analytical sensitivity. Thus, on a methodological level, ethnographic familiarity through participant observation served to help us fne-tune purposive sampling, interview questions and analysis.
We asked each interviewee to complete a questionnaire concerning demographic information, school attendance and educational extra-curricular activities of their children, major sources of childrearing information, etc. Not all of them complied with this request, a failure that may also be explained by the fact that the women were extremely busy. Indeed, fnding a suitable time for interviews was diffcult and most interviews could only be scheduled for late evening, at the women’s homes, after the children had been put to bed. on average, interviews lasted around two hours; all interviews were recorded and transcribed, after gaining informed consent from our interviewees. We, in turn, ensured the women that they would remain anonymous and that their interviews would be treated with discretion and care. Accordingly, in the following, all names have been changed, as well as any other details that might reveal their identity.
Most of the interviews were carried out in Hebrew. However, our knowledge of Russian and Arabic meant that both interviewer and interviewee could turn to their mother tongue during the interviews, as the need arose, for instance in order to clarify the use of key terms.20 At times, the interviews felt like just one more occasion on which mothers got together and shared opinions about a proper education for their children,
sometimes even checking each other out as like-minded mothers.21 The interviews revealed hopes, fears, aspirations and desires concerning mothering and education. In similar fashion to Lavee and Benjamin’s interview study of lower income mothers, we too assumed that in ‘talking to us, women were defning themselves as moral members of the social category of “good mother”’ (Lavee and Benjamin 2014, 10).
The interviews provided phenomenological data that refected the experiences and meanings of mothering and education from the point of view of the mothers themselves. The structure of the interviews was open-ended in order to allow the women to provide their own freefowing accounts of their daily interactions with their children, perceptions and ideas about caring for their children, past and present ideas of educational musts and milestones, sources of information about educating their children, decisions about education, fathers’ involvement, beliefs about childhood, schooling and mothering, and accounts of their own actions and inactions in relation to their children’s education. on the whole, we followed the women’s lead in their choices as to what comprised their engagement with their children’s education and what was worthy of elaboration. That said, when we noticed that certain topics did not arise in the natural fow of conversation, such as the role of fathers, we took care to ask specifc questions in that regard.
While the interviews provided us with rich data, the ethnographic underpinnings of our interviews meant that we used what we knew from participant observation to better understand our interview material. As noted above, most interviewees were not part of our close social circles, but we were acquainted with many of them outside of the interview context. This meant that we were able to better situate the phenomenological experiences articulated in the interviewees in the broader context. For instance, Lauren’s familiarity with the Palestinian Israeli mothers at an earlier stage in their lives meant that when the Palestinian mothers did not voluntarily bring up national or political issues, Lauren, who knew them as politically involved and even activists during their time at university, asked them about this difference. What happened to this important part of their lives in the choices they made about educating their children? The ethnographic background informed these interviews in a way that allowed us to situate the experience of mothering in the wider social experience of these women’s lives. We also had access to mothers beyond those we interviewed. We used this informal participant observation as a sounding board, to check if what we were hearing represented
the breadth of phenomena around us and to guide us as to what else we needed to elicit through our interviews. The interviews, which we subjected to a rigorous and collaborative process of close reading, re-reading and analysis based on the conventional constant comparative method (Ayres et al. 2003; Maykut and Morehouse 1994), provided a rich corpus of detail about the everyday reality of mothering and education, and about how mothers from differently positioned sociocultural groups experienced and viewed this differently.
This chapter has set out the conceptual underpinnings of the study, the Israeli context and the mode of the study. The core of our book consists of four chapters in which we present our research fndings. The frst three of these core chapters (Chaps. 3, 4 and 5) present the women from the three respective sociocultural groups. These chapters, primarily anchored in extensive extracts from the interviews, seek to bring to life the women’s concerns as they refect upon their notions of a proper education for their children and of their role in ensuring this. In order to avoid setting up the dominant, in this case Jewish native-born, experience as a model for comparison, the frst two of these chapters present the Russian immigrant and Palestinian Israeli mothers. In this way, their experiences stand in their own right and can be understood as unique, culturally positioned experiences. After having read how Russian immigrant mothers and Palestinian Israeli mothers go about the work of educating their children, it becomes clearer how what appears to be mundane work of the nativeborn Jewish mothers is also culturally situated.
Note that there are slight dissimilarities between the three core chapters in both themes and style. In keeping with the voices of the women themselves, each chapter highlights certain issues and is organized in a unique way that refects and best portrays the experiences of women in the particular group. This highlighting does not mean that the same theme does not appear in the other groups, but it may be more muted there. Moreover, although our understanding of the materials is the result of a collaborative effort, each chapter is written in a slightly different style, refecting the style and voice of the writer of that particular chapter. In this way, rather than blending the voices into a univocal style and mode of organization, we endeavour to preserve the liveliness and singularity of voices of mothers and researchers. Chapter 6—different
from the previous three in terms of purpose, structure and style—is a thematically organized comparative chapter which juxtaposes and integrates the fndings from the three groups. The focus of this chapter shifts from portraying the experiences of the mothers themselves to an analytical discussion of how class, culture and social positioning combine to shape middle-class mothering. Taken as a whole, these four core chapters allow for a rich, in-depth portrayal of the women and their singular understandings of the matters at hand, at the same time as revealing the common themes that bind them together, both within and across the different groups. The concluding chapter provides a brief discussion of the main fndings and their signifcance.
If you are interested in one particular population, then each core chapter may be read on its own. However, we believe that the signifcance of our study lies in the whole—its insights emerge out of the juxtaposition of the women from the different groups. Hence, we think that you may better understand each particular population if you see how middle-class mothering has turned out for mothers from groups in different social positions. Even if you choose to focus on one group, we suggest that you browse through the other sections in order to have the beneft of the comparative perspective.
In the following chapters, the voices of the women provide the heart of the description of how these mothers make sense of the task of ensuring their children’s proper education. We present the mothers’ accounts in different ways—sometimes as our synopsis of their experiences and sometimes in their own words. Writing about mothering from an anthropological and sociological perspective, it is easy to put aside the intense emotional resonance of being a mother and of taking care of one’s children. We hope that by foregrounding the words of the women themselves, and by being sparing in our academic referencing and comments along the way, we will succeed in conveying something of the spirit of these mothers’ daily, dedicated work on behalf of their children.