Feminist identifications across the ethnic-national divide: Jewish and Palestinian students in Israel

By: Sa’ar A., Lewin A.C., Simchai D.
Published in: Ethnic and Racial Studies
SDGs : SDG 05  |  Units: Social Sciences  | Time: 2017 |  Link
Description: This study explores young Israeli Jewish and Palestinian women’s gender ideology and their readiness to endorse the labe l ‘feminist’. Using data from a large-scale survey among students in the northern periphery of Israel, we found that feminism has become a source of identification for both Jewish and Palestinian young women in Israel, and that Palestinians are more inclined to endorse the self-label ‘feminist’ than Jews. We also found that each group invests the term with different meanings. Jewish students who identify as feminists tend to hold a relatively egalitarian gender ideology whereas Palestinian students who are more readily inclined to identify as feminists hold a more conservative gender ideology. These findings challenge both the liberal-modernistic perspective that perceives a correlation between feminist saliency and egalitarian gender ideology and the post-colonial perspective’s expectation that women from ethnic/racial minority groups will be disinclined to identify as feminists. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.