Multifaceted Otherness as a Source of Empowerment

Abstract

This article examines the unique story of Miriam Bat Avraham. Born at the beginning of the 20th century, a period in which women were excluded from the pages of historiography, she left a rare treasury of documents describing her life, showing how she coped with her multifaceted “otherness” in a cooperative community. She was an orphan entering a community based on family networks, a Yemenite, ethnically and culturally different from a closed society of immigrants from Russia, and a woman in an organization characterized by conservative gender perspectives and exclusion of women from the public sphere.

Qualitative content analysis of her archive, cross-referenced with official documents and other testimonies, shows that through acquiring education and knowledge, considered in feminist literature as change agents, Miriam succeeded in turning the community vegetable garden into a central economic branch and broke through ethnic and gender boundaries.