GENDER ROLES

Until the mid-1960s, most Palestinians lived as part of an agricultural collection of fellaheen (farmers). People lived off the land’s blessings as a way to supplement what little income they could earn in the professional market. Most Palestinians needed to grow what they ate. Eighty-eight-year-old Um Omar says, “Lentils for breakfast, lentils for lunch, and lentils for dinner. That’s all we had to eat.”

Seventy-one-year-old Um Basil remembers her mother working the fields, but she adds:

The farmer life started phasing out for us. However, I used to walk to the village well to collect water, and that was water for the whole family. We would bathe, drink, wash, and cook with this water every day. We used to put it on our heads and walk back to the house. It wasn’t until later in life that we had running water in the house. When I was young, we didn’t have electricity—we had to use candles. Only cities had electricity.

“Do you think we could eat cucumbers in the winter?” says Um Hasan, an eighty-five-year-old from a nearby village. “No. And whatever we harvested had to last us until the following harvest. And we were lucky to eat meat during Eid.”[1]

Um Omar affirms, “Since men worked all day outside the home, we spent all day in the field doing it all. We planted, tilled, harvested, and cooked. Do you think there was a mechanical press back then? No, we had to do it by hand.”

SELF & SOCIETAL PERCEPTIONS: half of society?

Over time, a Palestinian woman’s role expanded within the marriage and outside the home.  Women such as Rania, an urban twenty-seven year old mother of two earned her Master’s Degree before getting married.  She works at a media company and is straightforward in saying:

The roles aren’t different for a Palestinian man or woman. In life and life’s demands, we find that a woman can live with or without a man. She can do all the things that a man does and more—working and taking care of her household. Today’s woman has two roles; she brings in money like a man and makes decisions like a man. The “soldier” way of life is no longer inside the house—there are only soldiers outside.

[1] Meat was usually available during the two annual holidays,Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.