Gendering the Social: Colonial Governance in Palestine and Its Lessons for the Present

This paper examines the gendered nature of colonial rule in Mandate Palestine through the lens of a transnational network of social welfare projects. Large-scale relief efforts entered Palestine in the wake of the First World War, working in partnership with the emergent British colonial administration. By examining social and child welfare schemes of the 1920s and 1930s, I argue that colonial welfare governance in Mandate Palestine was gendered in contradictory ways, both in its vision of the future of Palestinian society and in the structure of labor it employed. First, I show that colonial governance in Mandate Palestine embodied the logic of a gendered imperial social formation, in which welfare projects strove to construct girls as modern mothers and boys as productive workers. As I demonstrate in this paper, the gender logic that framed this colonial welfare work was shaped both by Orientalist assumptions about the gender structure of Muslim and Arab countries and by twentieth-century ideas about the role of gender in a scientific and progressive society. Second, I argue that the labor called upon to enact welfare schemes defied simplistic gender categorizations. Palestinian women employed in welfare industries as nurses and social workers assumed multifaceted and contradictory roles in performing affective labor, while also embodying scientific and community expertise. At the same time, the work of male Palestinian professionals engaged in child welfare advocacy challenged assumptions about the social realm as a domain gendered female. By looking at the gendered structure of colonial governance through the lens of social welfare, this paper suggests a historical and historiographic path to tracing institutional and ideological continuities to the present day, across the chasm of formal decolonization and the socio-political rupture of the 1948 war.