The women toil away in relentlessly dismal work conditions, scrubbing laundry on washing boards with raw, red fingers, faces damp and flushed from the rising steam. From a window overhead, men supervise their labour, watching the women as they exchange paperwork. One leisurely lights his pipe. Against this scene, a voiceover warns: ‘If we allow women to vote, it would mean the loss of social structure.… Once was the vote was given, it would be impossible to stop at this.
Women would then demand the right to becoming MPs, cabinet ministers, judges.’ The 2015 film Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, which began this way, told a story that concluded with a victory already known to viewers: in 1918, British women, after much struggle, achieved the right to vote. Despite the obviousness of the outcome, the film still had much to offer; turning from the towering historical figures of first-wave feminism and the women’s suffrage movement, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, who makes only brief appearance here, the film delves into the implications of enfranchisement for working-class women.
Anna Somershaf’s 2021 documentary Women of Valor, which was screened online globally by the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) this past month, with a panel discussion following, presents viewers with a far less familiar story. Like Suffragette, it is a story that ends in victory—albeit one Somershaf couldn’t have counted on when she began collecting footage. Like Suffragette, it is invested in the lives of women who might normally fly below the radar. These are Israeli Haredi women who have spent the better part of the last decade fighting for their right to run for and hold office in Israeli Haredi political parties like Shas and Agudath Yisrael (now part of United Torah Judaism). These are women who have founded a non-profit organisation, Nivcharot, dedicated to women’s leadership, education, and advocacy. And these are also women who, interestingly, have become enamoured with the film Suffragette (even though Haredi women do not typically watch mainstream cinema!), believing that they are completing the work of the British women who lived a century before them.
At the heart of Women of Valor are two Esties: Esty Shushan and Estee Rieder-Indursky. The film was created after Somershaf—a secular Russian-born woman who immigrated to Israel—met Rieder-Indursky in an MA programme at Tel Aviv University and had her ‘mind blown’ by the power and courage of these women. ‘It was like I was in the time of the suffragettes,’ Somershaf said in the panel discussion, ‘but with a camera.’ After building trust with the women involved—given the amount of sensationalising Haredi women are subject to by outsiders, it is unsurprising that Somershaf would have to win them over—Somershaf shot footage for her documentary for four and a half years. Somershaf’s film specifically addresses the issue of lack of political representation for Haredi women, but it is not only Haredi women who bear the consequences of their absence in these parties. There is a far bigger feminist problem in Israel if, of 120 seats in the Knesset, Haredi groups hold 16 (Shas holds 9, UTJ 7), and women can’t run for them; this means almost a tenth of all Knesset seats are completely closed to women.
The two Esties work together like Suffragette’s Carey Mulligan (a launderer) and Helena Bonham-Carter (a chemist), drawing on different experiences and beliefs, but coming together for a united cause. Both women wrote for Haredi journals and newspapers for many years, under male or gender-neutral pseudonyms. But the time came for them to speak up for women, as women. These women began to embrace feminism as an ideology that was neither corrosive (as many Haredi community leaders have argued and continue to do so) nor inaccessible to them as religious women. For Rieder-Indursky, feminism is a purely secular notion. It is one that she as a Haredi woman wants to apply to the workplace, to the political context—in other words, to places that she believes Jewish law doesn’t touch. For Shushan, feminism is more comprehensive and includes her right to study religious texts as Haredi men do.
Just as Suffragette gives more screen time to the working-class women than the middle-class ones, so Somershaf focuses primarily on Shushan, whose Mizrahi background makes her subject to intersectional oppression; in Israel, Ashkenazim still have disproportionate power and influence. There is a moment in the film whenf Shushan tries to use her Mizrahi background to help a fellow Mizrahi, a male politician, understand why representation matters. ‘Can an Ashkenazi represent you?’ she asks. He immediately says of course not. And yet, he still cannot understand why men can’t just represent women.
Throughout the film, we see Esty and Estee, as well as other pathbreaking women in Israeli Haredi communities, struggle against resistant male authority, verbal and online abuse, and the repeated accusation that they are not really and could not be Haredi. But nevertheless, they persisted. How, they ask, without representation, can they advocate for the things that Haredi men don’t consider important, such as accountability for sexual assault, intervention in domestic violence, and establishing fair and equitable wages for women? ‘No voice, no vote,’ is their slogan—and their vote is not insignificant. Haredim are not only Israel’s fastest-growing minority group, their turnout in Israeli elections is also strong. According to the documentary, 600,000 Haredi women live in Israel!
The Israeli Haredi women also look for allies outside of their traditionally insular communities. In a particularly brilliant scene of the film, we see the Haredi women working with Palestinian women, finding common ground with them. ‘We came to identify,’ say the Haredi women. For Shushan, collaborating with Palestinian women, including Aida Touma-Suleiman, an Israeli Palestinian Knesset member, and head of the Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, was natural; both groups of women live in traditional societies, with common values and challenges. One Palestinian woman says she understands the situation of Haredi women because, as she points out, ‘Women in the Palestinian territories have no voice or representation at all.’ We see through this alliance how widespread women’s struggle is against male domination. ‘There’s enough patriarchy for everybody,’ declares one Palestinian woman. How true that is! When the Palestinian and Haredi women go to the United Nations together, however, we see the alliance is not always easy. For both, there is fear of criticism, of being delegitimatized for appearing together; moreover, the uneven power dynamic between Israeli Jews and Palestinians doesn’t disappear simply because both are victims of the patriarchy.
While the film is mostly focused on the achievement of women’s rights within Israeli Haredi politics—in the end, they win a Supreme Court case forcing Haredi political parties to accept female candidates—viewers also get an intimate view of Shushan’s life. We see Shushan in one home, and then another; we meet her son going off to the army (like many Haredim, she does not agree with this choice) and her daughter planning her future; we hear about her first, failed, marriage, and then watch the second fall apart. On the one hand, this artistic choice allows viewers—many of whom will not know any Haredi woman personally—a chance to see a Haredi woman as a whole person. On the other hand, the dissolution of Esty’s marriage could read, certainly for Haredi women viewing this film as their very own Suffragette, as a cautionary tale.
In the last few years, Haredi women have approached the political arena in increasing numbers. In the film, Shushan says she hopes one woman will stand as a candidate for a Haredi party; in the panel, she followed up on her comment, telling us that twenty-two women are now putting themselves forward. Despite the party line (the male party line) continuing to be that politics are not a woman’s ‘natural place’ (the leader of Shas made this claim in the past year), there is no religious law forbidding women from entering the political sphere and nor is there a restriction, anymore, in the parties’ constitutions.
As soon as I heard about this film, I knew I had to see it. As it happens, I wrote a book also called Women of Valor, and it, too, challenges stereotypes and lays bare the dynamism and feminism of (Orthodox and) Haredi women; the difference is that I focused on cultural, rather than political, elements. The title Women of Valor is evocative because the Eshet Chayil, the ‘woman of valor’ of Proverbs, sung every Friday night in households across the world, praises the multitalented Jewish woman; she ‘considers a field and buys it,’ makes and sells garments, ‘extends her hand to the destitute,’ ‘opens her mouth with wisdom,’ and teaches kindness. In other words, she is skilled at commerce as well as domestic arts, is intelligent as well as kind, and cares for her community as well as her family.
For some, however, this Proverb suggests the role of the Jewish woman is to be self-less, to do only for others and not for herself. The Haredi women in Israel who are completing the work of the suffragettes are determined to do for themselves—though in doing so, they are also doing for others, helping make Israel a more democratic country.
