Gender, Education and Immigration in the Pre-state of Israel: Shoshana's Story - A Woman's Struggle for Education.

Western feminist discourse has overlooked a group of unique women of the first immigration waves from Yemen to Israel. They were among the pioneers of feminism in their society - although they could neither read nor write and had never heard of the term "feminism." They lived between the years 1881-1914, side by side with the "founding pioneering mothers of the Labor Movement, and with the ladies of the "Moshavot" - agricultural gentry who had transplanted their bourgeois lifestyles from Europe to Palestine. This group of women from Yemen has also been ignored by Israeli historiography, which has not yet accorded them the full attention they deserve. These independent Yemenite women were perhaps without a public voice, but with strong will power they took their own fate and that of their families into their own hands. This paper presents a feminist interpretation of the story of Shoshana Bassin's life. Shoshana was a young girl when she had arrived to the Holy Land with her parents in 1904, she wrote her memoirs many decades later. Her story serves as case study for comprehending Yemenite Women's lives that were full of crises and resolutions in Israel at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as a study of women's fight for their human rights for education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]