The Hebrew Secretary: Class, Gender, and Nationalism in the Early Years of Israeli Statehood

Neither manual laborers nor soldiers, clerks were not a highly valued profession in 1950s Israel. The lack of prestige was compounded by the disdain the Zionist-socialist leadership had for the urban petite bourgeois associated with white collar occupations.  Nevertheless, the clerk was in increasing demand due to the growth of Israeli bureaucracy. Accompanying this demand was the increased rate of female participation in the workforce. The clerk profession in Israel was subsequently feminized, with the accompanying drop in prestige and pay as the title shifted from clerk to secretary to denote an entry level position meant for women.

In this presentation, I examine the Israeli secretary in the first three decades of statehood (1948-1977). For many women, whether veteran Israelis or recent immigrants, their first job, often as a secretary, exposed them to new freedoms. Popular women’s magazines covered the dilemmas of office work, whether it was the propriety of wearing pants to the office, workplace sexual harassment, or the challenge of balancing motherhood with a career. Yet the plight of the secretary was largely ignored by mainstream women’s organizations, who focused on occupations more valued in socialist Zionist ideology such as military fighters or factory workers. Frustrated with the lack of respect, a group of women founded their own professional organization for secretaries in the mid-1970s, highlighting the need for better pay and working conditions. The secretary became a stand in for the gendered anxieties of a rapidly changing workplace caught between nationalist expectations and capitalist yearnings.