Women's Parties in Israel

Women's parties have formed an important, if poorly acknowledged, part of the political history of the Yishuv and Israel. They have promoted women's participation in political power centers, supported women's rights to vote and stand for election, raised issues including violence against women and religious discrimination, highlighted economic inequality, and helped bring feminist discourse about gender equality into wider public discussion.[1]

These parties and lists are distinct from mainstream parties that happened to be led by women. They were organized specifically around women's representation or women's political interests, although their names, platforms, organizational forms, and electoral fortunes varied substantially across different periods.[1]

Women's electoral organization predates Israeli statehood. Women's parties participated in all four elections to the Asefat HaNivharim, the Yishuv's elected assembly, between 1920 and 1944. Two women's parties won seven seats between them in 1920, while the united Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Eretz Israel gained thirteen seats in 1925. A united party headed by Henrietta Szold elected three women in 1931, and a joint women's list won four seats in the final assembly election in 1944.[1]

Two women's lists contested the 1949 Constituent Assembly election. A religious women's list formed in protest against the lack of female representation in HaPoel HaMizrachi failed to cross the one-percent threshold. The other list, succeeding the pre-state WIZO and Union of Hebrew Women organizations, won one seat, through which Rachel Cohen-Kagan entered the first Knesset.[1] The WIZO-linked party did not run independently again after the Knesset dissolved in 1951.[4]

The renewed growth of Israeli feminist organizing came after the 1973 Yom Kippur War exposed the gendered division of roles in Israeli society. Feminist organizations and movements expanded after the war, with organizing intensifying through the late 1970s and later developing into a more diverse field that included Mizrahi feminism.[5]

Women's parties have operated through pre-state assembly lists, independent national candidate slates, municipal lists, and campaign organizations. Their local electoral activity produced representation in Jerusalem, Petah Tikva, Haifa, Umm al-Fahm, Ashdod, Osafiye, and Bedouin local government, demonstrating that the phenomenon extended beyond campaigns for the Knesset.[1]

Nationally, later examples included Bezchutan, a Haredi women's party headed by Ruth Colian that ran unsuccessfully in 2015, and Kol HaNashim in 2020. Electoral participation itself also served as a means of publicizing women's exclusion from established party lists, even when a women's party did not cross the threshold.[1]

Marcia Freedman entered the Knesset in 1973 as one of three representatives of the Citizens' Rights Movement, which was supported by feminist groups but was not formally a women's party. In 1977, a women's party supported by Freedman and headed by Shoshana Ellings contested the election. It received about 6,000 votes, approximately one-third of the number then required to enter the Knesset.[1]

During her Knesset service, Freedman initiated the first parliamentary discussion on domestic violence against women, reported in Maariv on July 15, 1976.[6] She argued that domestic violence was concealed by a "conspiracy of silence" and said that the estimated number of battered women in Israel was "in the thousands rather than in the hundreds."[6] She also challenged the assumption that violence against women was confined to poor neighborhoods or development towns. Her proposition was accepted by a vote of 20 to 9 and referred to the relevant Knesset committee.[6]

Shortly after her unsuccessful Women's Party candidacy, Freedman asked Judy Hill, "Do you want to open a shelter for battered women?"[7] Freedman, Hill, Joyce Livingstone, Cholit Bat-Edit, and Barbara Swirski subsequently established Israel's first shelter for battered women. It opened in Haifa in the fall of 1977, with November 3, 1977 also given as its opening date.[7]

The shelter offered stays of up to three months, legal, personal, and medical assistance, and barred men's access. Its founders had studied shelters in England and the Netherlands and consulted professional literature on abuse. After a February 3, 1978 Yedioth Ahronoth article publicized the shelter, more than one hundred women applied in the following months, and the founders established a hotline for women seeking assistance.[7]

A Bar-Ilan University biographical profile states that feminist activist Prof. Esther Hertzog founded Shin, the Israeli movement for women's equal representation, in 1989 and founded women's parties in 1992 and 1999. It also credits her with founding the Women's Parliament in 1999 and co-founding Anuar, a Jewish and Arab women's leadership group, in 2002 and the Young Women's Parliament in 2010.[8]

The 1992 women's party was founded by Shin and led by veteran feminist activist Ruth Reznik. It received about 3,000 votes, approximately 15 percent of the votes then needed to enter the Knesset.[1] In 1999, Shin founded Equal Representation, headed by Hertzog, but financial, organizational, and personal difficulties led its activists to withdraw the party shortly before the election. A separate women's party named for its founder, Pnina Rosenblum, ran that year and finished only a few hundred votes below the electoral threshold.[1]

Kol HaNashim, composed entirely of women, ran for the Knesset for the first time in the election held on March 2, 2020.[2] Dr. Mazal Shaul, executive director of WePower, took unpaid leave from the organization to lead the party's campaign. WePower had worked for twenty years to promote women's representation in politics.[2] Elana Maryles Sztokman, an author, anthropologist, and feminist activist, ran as chair of Kol Hanashim.[9]

Kol HaNashim was reported as the first party to register with Israel's Central Elections Committee for the March 2020 election and appeared in twelfth place in the registration order.[3] The party submitted a list of 102 female candidates and said its objectives were to increase women's representation in the Knesset and address issues across Israeli society from women's perspectives.[3]

Shaul said progress in women's political representation was too slow and established parties were not placing women in realistically electable positions. She presented the party as a direct political intervention rather than a continuation of waiting for established parties to change.[2]

The campaign occurred amid concern about women's parliamentary representation. At the time of the report, women constituted 17 percent of the Knesset, 27 women had been elected to the preceding Knesset, and polling did not expect more than 28 women in the forthcoming 23rd Knesset. None of the eight parties then expected to enter the Knesset was anticipated to be led by a woman.[2]

The official results recorded Kol HaNashim under the ballot symbol נ and showed 2,773 valid votes, or 0.06 percent of valid votes cast.[10] Parties needed at least 149,004 votes, corresponding to the 3.25 percent electoral threshold, to win representation.[11] Kol HaNashim won no Knesset seats.[10]

The significance of women's parties has not depended solely on whether they won Knesset seats. They contributed to campaigns for women's suffrage and eligibility for office, brought attention to violence against women and economic and religious discrimination, and created independent political frameworks through which women could challenge their marginalization within established parties.[1]

Women-led mainstream parties provide a related but distinct measure of women's access to political leadership. The 18th Knesset, serving from 2009 to 2013, included three parties led by women, the highest number of female party chairpersons in any Knesset up to an August 2019 assessment.[12] That assessment stated that Ayelet Shaked would become the fifteenth woman in Israeli history to lead a party across the electoral threshold if United Right entered the 22nd Knesset. It also reported that only four women had led parties winning ten or more seats.[12]

The term "women's party" does not identify one continuous organization. It can refer to pre-state women's lists, the WIZO-linked party elected in 1949, the 1977 list associated with Marcia Freedman, the parties organized through Shin in the 1990s, and later parties such as Bezchutan and Kol HaNashim. These organizations should not be conflated merely because English-language sources use similar labels for them.[1]

Documentation and naming remain uneven. Some biographical accounts identify Freedman's unsuccessful candidacy without providing its election date or result, while a broader historical survey identifies the campaign as the 1977 party headed by Shoshana Ellings and records approximately 6,000 votes.[7][1] The plural phrase "women's parties" in Hertzog's biographical profile also does not establish that "Women's Party" was the formal name of either the 1992 or 1999 organization.[8]

Published totals for Kol HaNashim differ slightly. A secondary electoral compilation lists 2,777 votes, while the Central Elections Committee's official results record 2,773; the official figure is used here.[11][10] Freedman's statement that battered women numbered "in the thousands rather than in the hundreds" was a contemporaneous parliamentary estimate, not an independently verified demographic statistic.[6]