THE AMERICAN SETTING

ZIONIST WOMEN'S SOCIETIES appeared in Europe and the United States even before the First Zionist Congress of 1897, and between 1907 and 1912 national Zionist women's groups emerged in Germany, eastern Europe, Russia, and Britain. By 1914 the German Zionist women's organization, Verband Jüdischer Frauen für Kulturarbeit in Palästina (Society of Jewish Women for Cultural Work in Palestine), which had been founded in 1907 during the Eighth Zionist Congress, had approximately 6,500 members, both men and women, in various branches in Germany, in most of the other countries of western Europe, and also in Romania and Canada. Among its activities in Palestine were the establishment of the Girls’ Farm at Kinneret in 1911 for the agricultural training of girls, aid to the Sha'ar Zion hospital in Jaffa, and the establishment of lace-making schools for young women in various locations in Palestine. Attempts that had begun in 1903 to establish a broad regional organization in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia were finally realized in 1910 when the Zionist Women's Society of Galicia was formed in Lwów. In Britain, a Zionist women's organization was established in 1912 known as the Federation of Women Zionists of Great Britain and Ireland, out of which the Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO) developed a decade later.

The establishment of a separate Zionist organization for women in the United States and its mode of operation are directly related to the nature of the American Jewish women's arena, as well as to the Zionist ideas that had penetrated the United States along with Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Hadassah emerged against the background of the development of women's organizations both in American society at large and in the German Jewish community that was already established in the United States.

Women's organizations themselves were not, of course, unique to the United States. There were numerous such groups in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany and Britain, developing for the most part in line with the predominant views about gender roles and identities, and the proper realms of involvement for women and men respectively: public life for men and home life for women. In the United States, the development of such groups was fostered and accelerated by the impulse towards voluntary and philanthropic activity that has characterized the American way of life.