Of course the schema varies among different groups of low-income women, according to the particular gender regimes that dominate their lives. It depends on whether the organization of women’s work is primarily domestic centered or public centered, on whether the available substitutes that allow them to seek out a paid job are primarily state based or market based, or on the implications for their lives of gender-specific legislation (issues of personal status, taxation, or employment contracts). In all the existing versions gender, as a structural and symbolic mechanism of distinction and domination, affects the degree to which women can actually respond to the discourse of economic self-sufficiency.
Lastly, analysis of the actual language that actors in the field use to make practical sense of economic citizenship shows the embedment of this idea in consumer capitalism. The ways participants talk about acquiring productive skills (learning to earn more money) are inextricably bound up with consumption practices. More specifically, they are drenched in the lingo of emotional capitalism. Here again the gender contract emerges as a constitutive framework, particularly in the tendency of participants in economic empowerment projects to make extensive use of a terminology of love when talking about work and about the task of becoming economically independent. The ethnography explores the manifold contradictions of this discourse: its apparently self-defeating effects for women whose care work is devalued to begin with; its seemingly unsophisticated ring as compared with emotional narratives of more successful economic actors; or the glaring disproportion of effusive love-care terminology as against deliberate avoidance of mentioning self-interest or commercial worth. At the same time, I point out the qualities of this discourse, which cannot be reduced to its “utility value.” By using a terminology of love and care to talk about work, low-income women engage in an energetic recharging that makes them feel less alone in their daily struggles, gives them emotional relief and a sense of inherent worth, and allows them to experiment with middle-class cultural style, a not insignificant asset in and of itself. On a more theoretical level, in their persistent invocations of care in a discursive environment replete with tropes of success, individuality, and self-interest, the women are not simply being silly. Rather, the somewhat uncanny ring of their love-work talk brings the discourse of economic citizenship to bear on an aspect of attachment, in the universalistic, humane sense of the obligation to give personal support and to contain vulnerabilities, an aspect that it mostly tends to eclipse. As such, it therefore presents, if not in so many words, the visceral and awkward aspects of civil participation that the abstract, legalistic articulations of economic citizenship generally leave untouched.
Notes
1. For readers’ convenience, I use a different font to distinguish the ethnographic sections from the main analytical text.
2. For a comprehensive review of this literature see Walby 1990.
3. Economic Empowerment for Women, accessed September 2013, http://www.womensown.org.il/en/template/?mainCatId=2&catId=34.
4. Al-Tufula Center, the Nazareth Nursery Institute, accessed September 2013, http://www.altufula.org/media-eng/.
5. “Atida, Your Gate to the Workforce,” accessed September 2013, http://atida.altufula.org/articles.aspx?catid=1&id=1.
6. Mahut Center, Information and Training for Women, accessed September 2013, http://www.mahutcenter.org/index.php?tlng=english. See also http://mahutcenter-hebrew.blogspot.co.il/.
7. For several decades, Hebraizing names in Israel was common practice. It emanated from the Jewish exile complex, which led Israeli Jews of certain generations to attempt to reinvent themselves as the antithesis to their exilic ancestors. For many Ashkenazim, the motivation would have been primarily to disguise the marker that identified them with the generation of the Holocaust; for many Mizrahim, it would have been to disguise the marker that identified them as Arabs. In the early years of Israeli statehood, the absorbing authorities pressured or coerced new immigrants to change their first names too. Otherwise, new immigrants commonly chose—and continue to choose—modern Hebrew names for their newborn offspring, and young immigrants chose to change their own first and/or last names. In my family the initiative to Hebraize our surname was mine and my brother’s, both of us Israeli-born. In recent years this trend has been subsiding, and sometimes even reversed as some people tend to resurrect their original non-Hebrew surnames.
PART I
Paradoxes of the Pursuit of Solidarity amid Polarizing Social Inequalities
CHAPTER 1
Social Economy
The Quest for Social Justice under Neoliberalism
The miracle of EEW is the tension that you see here between the business approach and the ideological attitudes. Women come to work here for ideological reasons and use business tools to promote their ideology. Here’s an example: I was sitting with Amit1 when she got a phone call from Phillip, one of our donors. He called to consult her on something that was not directly related to his support of EEW. There’s this American billionaire who wants to invest in Israel and his representatives are now exploring the terrain to help him decide where to invest. So Phillip, who was preparing for his meeting with these representatives, invited Amit to give him tips on how to include the idea of women’s empowerment in his recommendations, so that despite the fact that we are too small to get into the frame of this major investor, some of the money may eventually trickle down to us as well. I sat there listening to her and could hear how she led him, literally giving him words, to change the way he was thinking, all in a 15-minute conversation. She knows his world and understands that she needs to give him bonuses—to tell him what his foundation, and he personally, may get out of this. She used his business language to insert some of EEW’s ideology into his narrative.
—Ya’el Toledano, a freelance business consultant at EEW. (Interviewed by Amalia Sa’ar in 2003.)
This chapter describes the setting in which economic empowerment—as a practice and a vision—takes place, namely, the Israeli field of social economy. I portray encounters between actors with seemingly very different subject positions, such as the CEO of a philanthropic foundation and the feminist activist in the opening example, and the novel discursive tokens that are created as a result. I treat the accumulation of projects that aim to get low-income women out of poverty as a field of forces, in Bourdieu’s sense (Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990), in which actors struggle for positions using diverse strategies and negotiating the value of their assets by imbuing them with meaning. I set out the gaps and ideological inconsistencies among the people who operate the projects, as a precursor for the larger project of this book, which is how the idea of economic citizenship—the conditioning of civil inclusion on economic self-sufficiency—has come to make sense to people as remote from each other as radical feminists, minority rights activists, business philanthropists, and state agents.
I begin by outlining the history of structural inequalities in Israel and their culmination, at the present phase of aggressive economic liberalization, in extreme gaps and overlapping disadvantages. This review provides
