Working-class Palestinian mothers in Israel: agency, habitus, and maternal responsibility

ABSTRACT

Mothers are perceived as responsible for both their children’s complementary education and their emotional well-being, a social construction that challenges the perception of maternal responsibility among working-class Palestinian mothers in Israel in their effort to function appropriately in the face of three power structures: the school system, welfare policies, and the family. This study reveals how working-class Palestinian mothers in Israel negotiate these three axes by exploring their actions as a form of agency from a specific cultural and class perspective, based on the concept of habitus as a theoretical framework that makes possible an examination of mothers’ personal experience as an integral part of the dimension of social class. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 working-class Palestinian mothers. The findings indicate that mothers’ agency enables change within the spaces of institutionalized structures such as school and welfare services but is limited to directing change in the cultural patriarchal structure.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• emotional capital
• habitus
• maternal responsibility
• respectability
• working class

Introduction

According to Israel’s National Insurance Institute (2023) indices of poverty and inequality, the incidence of poverty among Arab-Palestinian¹ families in Israel is 37%. This percentage, a measure of the subjective sense of poverty, refers to foregoing consumption, services, and treatments due to financial hardship – i.e. foregoing medical treatment or a hot meal – compared to the percentage of poverty among Jews, which is 6.9%. The complex reality of the lives of Palestinian mothers living in poverty involves their subjection to an array of economic and cultural pressures as they attempt to meet the demands placed on them as part of their maternal responsibilities regarding all issues related to children’s education and family well-being, mainly to ensure their children’s successful integration in employment and studies. In particular, these pressures stem from their effort to meet the expectations of a cultural model according to which they must be ‘good mothers’ in the face of a lack of economic and social resources. The demands of respectability include ‘good mothering’ and providing appropriate forms of care (Vincent et al., 2010). Working-class mothers are often judged as failing in these areas (Gillies, 2006).

In light of this reality, I undertook an exploration of working-class mothers’ ways of coping and the actions they take as a form of agency. Agency refers to an individual’s capacity to act and make choices in life (Davies, 2000). Agency takes various forms, as mothers’ actions are constructed and performed within networks of social relations and structures of gender, class, and ethno-nationality (Davies, 2000; Jamal Al-deen, 2019; Mahmood, 2005).

The discourse on the agency of Palestinian mothers in Israel has been discussed as part of current changes in power and gender relations taking place in Palestinian-Israeli society (Abu Rabia-Quider, 2017; Golden et al., 2018; Herbst-Debby et al., 2020; Meler, 2017) and women agency as it is shaped by ethno-national and personal marginality (Abu-Rabia-Queder & Weiner-Levy, 2011).

The current study expands our understanding beyond the literature, of the forms of agency of working-class Palestinian mothers, illustrating how this agency is constituted within the web of social relations and identity structure. This study exposes how mothers’ capacity of action (Mahmood, 2001) corresponds to the institutional structure that they encounter, as the patriarchal cultural structure is more anchored in axes of power that limit mothers’ capacity of action compared to the educational-school structure and state institutions such as the welfare services, wherein mothers’ agency has more space for negotiating, aimed at positioning themselves and their children as respectable subjects within society. The analysis of the actions of Palestinian mothers living in poverty is based on the Gillies’ (2006) observations in her study of marginalized mothers in England in which she attempted to circumvent the conservative discourse on agency and structure. She goes beyond the dualistic framework to locate agency within its concrete materiality and show how the material, cultural, social, and personal merge to produce particular situations and experiences. Gillies suggested that ‘Bourdieu’s concept of habitus best captures the complex dynamics of personal agency and material positioning’ (Gillies, 2006, p. 161). Reay (1997, p. 9) argued that ‘feminist theory must reclaim social class as a set of intricate daily practices that, intertwined with race and gender, are inscribed on women’s bodies and played out in their social interactions’. She claims that women’s class origins and social class influence their negotiation of the social world in myriad, complex ways that feminisms have rarely addressed through Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field and asserts that class remains relevant to feminisms (Reay, 1997, p. 9). This conceptual framework enables the understanding of agency and structure as intertwined without constructing mothers’ actions and society as separate entities. Such a perspective emphasizes how gender, class, and culture shape individual lives and actions and are mutually reinforcing rather than interconnected (Anthias, 2013). Analyzing mothers’ agency from a class perspective contributes to an approach that perceives class as a dynamic aspect of identity that shapes the day-to-day interaction and nature of individual action and class as fluid and subjective (Gillies, 2006; Reay, 1997). The current study offers a wider examination of the term ‘agency’ in terms of the relationship between habitus and structural boundaries in mothers’ encounters with various institutions: family, school, and welfare services.

Palestinian women citizens of Israel

Palestinian women citizens of Israel are an integral part of the power struggles at the political level that result from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has systematically created a policy of exclusion toward Palestinian society in Israel at multiple levels. Like Palestinian society, Palestinian women are undergoing significant changes on several levels, including family, employment, education, and fertility. There has been an increase in age at marriage and first birth, and a decrease in fertility (number of children). While the overall fertility rate of the Jewish population follows the average, and gradually increased until 2015, in the Palestinian population in Israel this rate has dropped. According to Central Bureau of Statistics report (CBS, 2021a) fertility among Arab Palestinian Muslim women decreased from an estimated average of 9.2 children in 1965 to 3.3 children 50 years later. There is a significant increase in the percentage of education among the Arab Palestinian population in Israel in general. The percentage of Arab Palestinian students in higher education institutions was 19.2% of all students and 20.0% among undergraduate students, an increase of 122% compared to 2012 (CBS, 2021b). The employment rates among Arab-Palestinian women have increased since 2016, only 32% of working-age Arab-Palestinian women were employed in 2016, compared to 43.2% in 2022 (CBS, 2022). These changes in the realms of education and employment are reshaping women’s perceptions of social, family, and gender issues and maternal responsibility. Despite the transitions that have taken place in Palestinian society in Israel, some of which are related to modernization and globalization, the extended family structure has been preserved, as has the extended family’s authority over its members, especially women. In addition, women are committed to maintaining the family’s good name by adhering to values ⁣⁣and social norms and acting as expected of them as mothers who devote all their resources to benefit their children and husbands, even to the detriment of their own occupational and personal aspirations (Abu-Baker, 2016; Meler, 2020).

Sa’ar (2017) attributed the nature of the changes in Palestinian society in Israel to the rapid transition from a gender regime that is concentrated in the domestic space to one that is concentrated in the market space. This transition to a market-oriented regime as part of neoliberal economic policies has created pressure on women to integrate into paid employment and begin earning a living and contributing financially to the household. Sa’ar argued that among the Palestinians, in contrast to the Jewish population, this transition involves little mediation on the part of the welfare state, a situation that exacerbates the pressures to which families and, in particular, women, are subjected. These changes in turn reshape the ‘gender contract,’ the cultural scenario that determines what is considered the proper way to be a woman or a man. More Palestinian women in Israel today are required to participate in the labour market and earn money independently while they are simultaneously expected to fulfill the maternal role. The fact that Arab-Palestinian women have assumed the role of breadwinner has changed the gender contract to their detriment, as they have lost the right to economic security under their husbands’ patronage without the labour market enabling them economic independence (Sa’ar, 2017). Meler (2020) pointed to factors that affect economic patterns in the Palestinian family, including civil status, a dual judicial system in Israel (civil and religious), the cultural and gender context in general, and, specifically, patriarchal perceptions embedded in social and family structures. She showed that despite women’s increasing contribution the household income, their right to equality is not adequately reflected within the family framework, as they are mainly employed in low-paid, part-time positions; remain in an inferior economic position; and lack autonomy. In societies with ethnic and racial minorities, women have a double burden because they must replicate the culture through their maternal roles (Abu Rabia-Quider, 2017; Sabbah-Karkabi, 2020). Moreover, the State of Israel perpetuates Palestinian society’s patriarchal structure by maintaining ethnic and geographic separation, reinforcing male domination, and perpetuating Palestinian economic dependence on the Jewish economy. These in turn are mechanisms for class and gender reproduction, as Hasan (2002) exposed in her article ‘The Politics of Honor’, wherein she cited circumstances that lead to the murder of women in Palestinian society in Israel, by discussing the state’s responsibility therefor, and why it allows this phenomenon to exist. Hasan claimed that doing so is consistent with the interests of the state that sacrifices women in order to preserve the status quo in Palestinian society, thereby perpetuating the narrative of the enlightened Jews versus Palestinian society by using the claim of relativism to ignore what is happening in Palestinian society.

Agency, motherhood, and habitus

Agency is a concept through which we can understand how practices affect structures (Ahearn, 2001). In feminist theory, the question of women’s agency in the context of patriarchy, male domination, power, and culture has long been critically important and continues to generate debate (Frank, 2006). Feminist anthropologist Saba Mahmood, explored the religious practices of the female pietists in Egypt, examining the concept of agency concerning Muslim women’s religious practices (Mahmood, 2005, 2006). She claimed that the political feminist project tends to seek out agency as a practice of resistance and subversion, and ignore other practices that are not perceived as part of the logic of subversion (Mahmood, 2005). According to Mahmood, women’s agency should be theorized through the specific history, culture, and power context, as we should conceive of agency not as a ‘synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create’ (Mahmood, 2006, p. 33). The capacity for agency is entailed not only in acts that resist norms, but also in the multiple ways in which one settles norms (Mahmood, 2001, 2006). Mahmood suggested thinking of ways in which we can understand how social norms and values are assimilated into human activity, and refuted how feminist scholars have interpreted the concepts of freedom and agency that are incompatible with an analysis of cultural contexts. Mahmood (2005, p. 34) defined agency as moving ‘from the personal level to the action level within institutional networks, agency through which women negotiate with power structures more than engaging in resistance and subversion’.

Jamal Al-deen, who conducted a study among Muslim women in Australia (2019), noted that the poststructuralist analysis of women’s agency enables us to expose the subject’s constitution since it enables a dynamic analysis of power as constraining and as constituting a conception of agency without normalizing categories. Like Mahmood, she argues that the discourse around Muslim women’s agency should move away from exploring agency as a fixed notion mainly used as a synonym of resistance. Instead, we should consider the complexity and fluidity of constructions of subjectivity as informed by multiple discourses, including Islamophobic and patriarchal discourses, that shape Muslim women’s identities. Abu-Rabia-Queder and Weiner-Levy (2011) argued that the unique manifestations of agency of Palestinian women who are citizens of Israel reflect cultural sources of power derived from their ethno-national status. They examined how Palestinian women conduct constant negotiations with both Arab-Palestinian society and Israeli society in the face of social and political power structures and point to three main sources of power through which Palestinian women negotiate with the mechanisms of power that produce oppression. The first is the Arab-Palestinian community’s cultural tradition, which they use to evade control and create degrees of freedom regarding norms such as wearing a veil or being married according to tradition in exchange for permission to continue studies. The second consists of power bases that originate in the Israeli space. Thus, for example, women may use the geographical and cultural spaces that surround Arab-Palestinian society, living in mixed cities as a way to evade patriarchal supervision. The third source consists of self-derived power bases such as the management of emotions and perceptions and the separation of external personality from internal attitudes and feelings.

This article extends our understanding of the nature of the actions of working-class Palestinian mothers from a cultural and class perspective and reveals how their agency emerges as part of maternal responsibility, producing dynamic experiences and patterns within poverty and patriarchal culture. To conduct an integrative analysis of working-class mothers’ agency, I employ the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 1990a), following Wilson and McGuire (2022), Gillies (2006), and Reay (1997). This concept relates to the resource of knowledge (Bourdieu, 1990a) of a specific culture of an individual that can help us understand behaviours and actions. Habitus is created through a social process, as opposed to an individual one, leading to patterns that are enduring and transferrable from one context to another, but that also shift in specific contexts and over time (Bourdieu, 1984). Habitus ‘is not fixed or permanent and can be changed under unexpected situations or over a long historical period’ (Navarro, 2006, p. 16). Habitus describes how social class is embodied from an early age within our unconsciousness, which is shaped by the accumulation of social, economic, and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1990a).

Habitus is identified through access to particular kinds of social and material resources, and represents a combination of personal and social dimensions. It is acquired through lived practice and deeply ingrained in material dispositions such as thinking, talking, and feeling (Bourdieu, 1984). Through the actions of habitus, agency is connected to the field (i.e. structure).² This framework enables us to understand working-class mothers’ agency as a dynamic of habitus and the field that contains the external environmental factors of class and culture that are central to their subjectivity (Gillies, 2006). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus enables us to understand how class is acted out in mothers’ agency regarding their children’s schooling, welfare policies, and their families.

Maternal responsibility from the perspective of working-class mothers

The discourse on the nature of maternal responsibility leads to the conventional discussion of the definition of the ‘good mother’ and the ‘bad mother.’ Sevón (2009) and Chase and Rogers (2001) argued that this dichotomy prevents us from identifying the structure that creates motherhood as a female ideal according to gender standards. Sevón (2009) proposed four aspects in terms of which to analyze the question of maternal responsibility beyond the good/bad dichotomy. The first is the concept of motherhood as filled with ideals and high values according to our own standards. The second, as Hays (1996) argued, is that today’s mothering is intensive, child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, and financially supportive, and demands time, emotional work, and energy, versus the construct scripts of ‘extensive mothering’ (Christopher, 2012) wherein mothers delegate substantial amounts of the day-to-day child care to others, and reframe good mothering as being ‘in charge’ of and ultimately responsible for their children’s well-being. Third, motherhood has a specific meaning for society’s functioning in general in that society depends on how mothers (and fathers) raise their children. The fourth aspect, which is related to the current study, is that responsibility involves morality (Gilligan et al., 1982), which becomes part of mothers’ ethical perceptions of their maternal role. According to Sevenhuijsen (1998), care brings moral dilemmas into everyday lives and interactions. It is considered a rational phenomenon, while the value and morality of mothering come through the action of caring. The ‘ethics of care’ (Sevenhuijsen, 1998) explain gender differences in caring as navigated through social practices, as women do more caring work than do men, so they have different attitudes theretoward and perceptions thereof. The ‘ethics of care’ also emphasize the moral nature of human agency, and the responsibility of mothering as caring work brings moral reasoning into the processes of making decisions and taking actions. Hobart and Kneese (2020) described care as essential to the survival of marginal communities because it is intimately connected to modern radical politics and activism. Caring is an ethically and politically charged practice. According to them:

[Care is] a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds. … Because radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect, and even to position some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not. (Hobart & Kneese, 2020, p. 2)

Motherhood is also a site of creative forms of radical care that are mobilized as a response to neglect and institutionalized marginality. Hobart and Knesse’s (2020) interpretation enables a re-examination of what drives caregiving practices against normative political generalizations.

‘Maternal responsibility’ is a social, class, and cultural conceptualization of the definition of ‘good motherhood’ (Golden & Erdreich, 2014), which includes not only scholastic assistance but also involvement in decision-making processes at school and children’s future academic lives (Bourdieu, 1984). Recent studies have mapped the ways in which expressions of maternal responsibility among middle-class mothers are socially understood as standards and as defining what is appropriate (Gillies, 2006; Vincent & Ball, 2001). The maternal responsibility of the middle class reflects a class culture that serves the production of habitus through the intergenerational transfer of cultural capital, which is an advantage in social interaction, especially in school and academia (Bourdieu, 1984). Wilson and McGuire (2022) argued that habitus provides a useful framework to explain mothers’ engagement in their children’s schools. They accordingly proposed a conceptualization of values, attitudes, and social competencies that lays a clear groundwork on which to interpret and understand the interaction between working-class mothers and schools, and claims that cultural capital describes the assets that parents feel that they possess (or lack) in supporting their children, informed by their own childhoods. They viewed mothers’ values, bound up in protecting and caring for their children, as being at odds with those of the school, which is focused on academic achievement and behavioural control.

Scholars who have expanded upon Bourdieu’s conception of forms of capital have suggested that the complementary educational work of motherhood is productive not only as an aspect of cultural capital, but also as a means through which mothers transfer ‘emotional capital’ (Reay, 2000; Vincent & Ball, 2001). They viewed mothers’ involvement in children’s education as an expression of their emotional responsibility in that it is focused on the child’s well-being and involves emotional and moral decisions, not only rational ones. As per Gilligan’s claim that corresponds to her (1977) theory of ‘moral development’, women tend to think and speak differently than men when confronting ethical dilemmas. Gilligan accordingly outlined how a woman’s morality is affected by relationships, as well as by how the moral and ethical foundations of their decisions will affect others. ‘Emotional capital’ is a cluster of social and cultural resources, that is produced primarily by women, especially mothers, and enhances children’s emotional resilience and coping with environmental demands, including those of the school environment (Reay, 2004). Scholars emphasize mothers’ intervention at school as a condition for children’s optimal functioning and mental well-being and indicate that it is achieved through the emotional work they do, which is conceptualized as ‘emotional capital’ (Reay, 2000, 2004; Zembylas, 2007).

Working-class mothers are stigmatized for being responsible for delaying their children’s development by not meeting the demands placed on middle-class mothers. They are seen as failing to negotiate the relationship between home and school and are always at risk of being judged by middle-class ideals (Lawler, 2005). Several poverty-focused studies have examined the question of how mothers’ harness emotional resources as a tool for coping with their distress and poverty through involvement with their children’s schools (Athamneh & Benjamin, 2021; Gillies, 2006; Lavee & Benjamin, 2015).

This study attempts to expand our understanding of working-class Palestinians’ agency in their encounter with institutional and cultural spaces through their perception of maternal responsibility. By illustrating how these spaces interact with mothers by limiting or enabling them to promote action as a means of ensuring a more dignified and respectable existence for their children and their families.

Methodology

The current study seeks to reveal the experiences and voices of ‘ordinary’ women as a legitimate source of knowledge, as the discussion of feminist research as a method addresses the epistemological viewpoint (Feminist Standpoint Epistemology) (Harding, 2012) according to which daily actions are related to power structures of opportunities and individuals’ perceptions are shaped by their position in the hierarchy. Accordingly, in order to understand feminist action within the structures of power, it is necessary to understand reality through the eyes of the subjects living therein. This perspective enabled citing the exclusionary social attitude toward women, and also enabled documenting and ‘naming’ the harm that occurs against women (Benjamin, 2003; Brooks, 2007).

Semi-structured interviews: The data were collected through semi-structured interviews of approximately 90 min each conducted in Arabic, the authors’ and participants’ mother tongue, in the participant’s homes, as per their choice, to enable the participants to choose the interview venue to enable them to make their voices heard in their natural environment. The questions focused on the life story of mothers and their perceptions about their ways of action in dealing with economic and cultural barriers in the different areas of life. In the context of family research, qualitative interviews, which consist mainly of open-ended questions, enable people to explain in their own words what they think, feel, or believe about their family contexts. This possibility is especially critical when researchers seek to understand the meanings that family members attach to experiences, how they perceive and value their relationships, and how they experience belonging to the family, i.e. lived experience, in phenomenological terms (Ganong & Coleman, 2014).

Palestinian society as a field of research is familiar to me, as I am a researcher of local culture. I reside in the region known as the Triangle, where the research was conducted, and am familiar with the cultural and social characteristics of most cities and villages therein; and aware of the differences between locales in terms of customs and norms. My familiarity with the field contributed to the forging of a relationship of trust and affinity between myself and the participants, as they did not feel alienated or disconnected because of my native language or my Arabic accent (as they likely would have if being interviewed by a member of the Jewish majority). As the discourse on experiences and stories related to customs and traditions was familiar to me, I required no clarifications about such issues and easily understood them. At the same time, as Shkedi claimed (2003), in qualitative studies, when a researcher is a member of the population being studied, there is a risk of over-involvement in the research topic. Being keenly aware of this risk, I attempted, to the extent possible, to approach the interviews from a position of learning and listening to the interviewees’ life experiences, my goal being to develop a dialogue there around.

Participants

The study population included 20 mothers aged 38 to 57 years from Muslim families living in poverty in cities and villages in the Triangle, whose entire population is Muslim. The focus on the Triangle is due to the characteristics of the labour market as an ethnic enclave market, and its cultural-religious homogeneity. To preserve participants’ privacy, pseudonyms are used throughout this article. Cities and villages in the Triangle, which has unique support centers for families living below the poverty line, were selected. The social workers at the centers provided me with lists of mothers who met the study’s participation criteria – women who have school-age children and adolescent daughters in high school – as this study is part of a larger study examining the relationships of support and interdependency between Palestinian mothers and daughters living in poverty in Israel. I asked to contact the mothers directly as I suspected that a social worker’s mediation might cause them to feel obligated to participate. The social workers have been working with the women for several years, so that a close relationship formed, giving way to concern that if the request to participate was through the caseworker, the women would not feel comfortable declining, as it would come from a close professional source and therefore liable to feel like an obligation stemming therefrom.

Most of the mothers I contacted agreed to be interviewed after I presented myself and the research goals. Of the 30 mothers on the list whose families met the study inclusion criteria, 22 agreed to participate in the study with their daughters; the rest were wary of taking part in the research. Of these 22 mothers, there were two whom I was unable to contact due to their work and time constraints. After analyzing 20 interviews of mothers, I felt that participants repeated the same themes and no new themes arose, and so I realized that I had reached the point of saturation (Hennink & Kaiser, 2022; Small, 2009) and stopped interviewing. Five mothers were divorced, and one was a widow. Nine mothers did not work for wages and eight worked in precarious jobs, which identified with low-quality and low-income jobs that accrue neither benefits nor professional development, such as cleaning work through outsourcing, catering services, and cashiering (see Table 1).

Table 1 . Participants’ demographic data³.

Place of residence	No. of children	Age	Personal status	Employment status	Pseudonym	Participant no.
City (1)	5	42	married	casual jobs	Iman	1
City (2)	5	54	married	not employed^4	Ghadir	2
Village (1)	4	57	married	not employed	Inas	3
City (1)	5	44	married	elder care and catering	Amtiaz	4
City(1)	5	42	divorced	Cleaning	Gamilah	5
City(2)	2	38	married	works occasionally as an assistant at a nursery	Areen	6
City (2)	9	51	divorced	not employed	Monira	7
City (2)	5	45	divorced	cashier	Samirah	8
Village (1)	3	57	married	not employed	Hanan	9
City (2)	6	42	married	casual jobs	Amira	10
City (2)	4	37	married	tutors at home	Laila	11
City (2)	6	53	widow	pastry catering	Rafif	12
Village (2)	5	40	married	not employed	Reham	13
Village (3)	3	40	married	cleaning	Mariam	14
Village (3)	4	42	divorced	cleaning	Thamar	15
City (2)	5	54	divorced	not employed	Manal	16
Village (2)	5	47	married	waits tables at weddings; works at catering at a factory	Nehaya	17
City (1)	5	40	married	not employed	Halimah	18
Village (3)	4	46	married	not employed	Maysoon	19
Village (2)	5	50	married	cleaning	Noha	20

Thematic analysis

Thematic analysis of subjects that emerged from the interviews with the mothers was conducted. This method relates to the words and descriptions of the informants as reflecting their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. Thematic Analysis is a method of identifying and analyzing patterns of meaning in a dataset (Braun & Clarke, 2006). It profiles which themes are important in the description of the phenomenon under study.

It is conducted by means of categorization in a six-phase analytic process (Terry et al., 2017, p. 23) –

‘1) familiarizing [oneself] with the data through deep reading; 2) generating codes to create the building blocks of analysis by identifying similarities and noticing patterns across the data; 3) constructing themes; 4) reviewing potential themes; 5) naming themes; 6) producing the report – that strengthens the analysis and effectively communicates the analyst’s story of the data’.

‘The result of a thematic analysis should highlight the most salient constellations of meanings present in the dataset. Such constellations include affective, cognitive and symbolic dimensions’ (Joffe, 2011; p. 210). In conducting the thematic analysis, I followed the inductive guidelines of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) in a process that began from the data collection stage and ended in making a theoretical contribution to research in the field to reveal patterns of action among Palestinian mothers living in poverty.

Findings

The interviews with the mothers revealed the practices in which they engage as a form of agency in their attempt to take control over their lives and make decisions (Davis, 2000) facing a neoliberal economic model that pushes them toward autonomy and responsibility as they face of social risks alone, without material resources or social support. According to Bourdieu (1990b, p. 116),

‘it is through the workings of habitus that practice (agency) is linked with capital and field (structure), that habitus becomes active in relation to a structure, and can lead to very different practices (agency) and stances depending on the structure’.

Each mother’s habitus is specific to her position and circumstances and constructed through collective experience (Gillies, 2005) shaped by an intersection of class, gender, and ethno-nationality.

Mothers’ actions take place at three levels. Firstly, they become involved in their children’s lives at school, accumulating emotional capital for their children to ensure that they complete their studies. Secondly, they negotiate social services according to their material, personal, and emotional needs, promoting their effort to position themselves as respectable subjects. Thirdly, they cope with patriarchal social structure manifested in abusive relationships. In what follows, I analyze each of these levels through excerpts from the interviews.

Accumulating emotional capital by becoming involved in schools

Mothers perceive education as a means of dismantling social stigmas and improving their children’s social positions. Mothers’ agency is revealed when they challenge the conservative perception of mothers in poverty as passive and dependent on others (Krumer-Nevo & Benjamin, 2010). Mothers’ involvement in school is aimed at strengthening their children’s resilience and ability to cope with school conflicts and is reflected in the transfer of emotional capital, as Amira emphasized:

I am everything … all the responsibility is on me. Ask all the teachers and principals … Everyone knows me. I must monitor my children at school. It’s my job. If I don’t do it, my children will be lost. There’s no one to take care of them except me. You see Nisrin [her daughter]? … She’s in high school now. Her father doesn’t know the location of the school, has never visited there. But I? Everyone knows me, and I keep track of her grades. There is no chance she will finish without matriculating and receiving a diploma! Or not proceed to university studies. What will she be in the future without her diploma? You know, even with my little son [with special needs], I was on the parents’ committee at school and was very active … [Amira, 42, married, mother of six, works at casual jobs]

Amira sees herself as fighting the battle for the future of her children alone and perceives her involvement in school as an expression of her maternal responsibility and commitment, which no one in the family in particular the father shares with her. This position is consistent with the findings in Sano, Richards, and Zvonkovic’s (2008) study that working-class mothers experienced frustration and distrust toward partners when they perceived that the fathers were not fulfilling their expected parental role. Education becomes a condition for a valuable life, as her question ‘What will she be in the future without her diploma?’ implies. Through her constant connection with the school and involvement in her daughter’s education, she attempts to compensate for the difficulties and barriers associated with a lack of economic and social resources (Reay, 2004). Amira’s pride in her involvement in her daughter’s school life and in her own activism shows maternal involvement as an alternative value criterion in her world. Amira’s case is a good example of how emotional politics and the use of alternative value criteria can be used to defend against the social judgment of mothers living in poverty (Skeggs, 1997).

In the following excerpt, Nehaya described her involvement in school life as an action through which she attempts to protect her children from reproducing a life of hardship and distress like hers:

S:

Is it important for you that your children receive higher education?

N:

Of course. My little son is in seventh grade, and he makes me worry about him. The little daughter I was able to control her from the beginning. But my son doesn’t want to study, and it kills me. I am in all the phone [WhatsApp] groups, of the parents, teachers, and the school counselor to encourage him to study. But he doesn’t want to. When he comes home from school, he throws his bag down. And I ask, ‘What did you learn today?’ He doesn’t answer me [but] then through the teacher I know everything.

S:

Is it hard for you that he doesn’t want to continue his studies?

N:

Of course, very hard. I studied until tenth grade. I don’t want my children to experience what I experienced, especially my girls. [Nehaya, 47, married, mother of five, waits tables at weddings and works at catering services at a factory]

Nehaya’s involvement in the school is an example of the actions she takes to protect her children from the uncertainties of the future. She describes how difficult it is for her to accept the fact that her son does not want to learn: ‘it kills me.’ She is aware that only through education can a different reality be created for her children. Her monitoring of the child at school is intense and she enlists his teachers to encourage him to learn. Through her actions, she attempts to transfer emotional capital to her children (Reay, 2004) that emphasizes the importance of acquiring an education now and in the future, as a path through which she can prevent her children from reproducing her life history (she was compelled to leave school in 10th grade) as without education they will stay trapped in the same low socio-economic position. In this context, Maysoon related the following:

My little daughter (eight years old) was hospitalized for a long time. She didn’t attend school for almost a year because of the intestinal disease she has. I called the school all the time and the people in charge so that she could get a teacher at home, which she is entitled to by law. I even called the supervisor. I didn’t wait for the school. I called everyone – the principal, teachers. I didn’t want her to miss study material. It’s important to me that she study because she is a good girl. [Maysoon, 46, married, mother of four, not employed outside the home]

Maysoon acts with autonomy vis-à-vis the education system. She is unwilling to accept the lack of implementation of school procedures and initiates action vis-à-vis the relevant bodies that should support her daughter. She is aware of procedures and laws and strives to implement them to support her daughter academically. Despite claims regarding the difficulties of working-class mothers in equipping their children with social and emotional capital (Reay, 2004), Maysoon presents a form of agency that consists of both knowledge and action.

In Maysoon’s account, the form of agency is expressed in her involvement in her children’s school lives through accumulated emotional capital. Her agency vis-à-vis the school as a social-educational structure reflects the set of relationships between the habitus that is expressed in mothers’ understanding of the existing reality through the values, attitudes, and emotional capital that they convey to the children and the school staff about the centrality of education in their lives and their access to material and social resources. This relationship between the structure, the habitus, and the access to resources defines the boundaries of mothers’ actions facing the school as an institutional structure. Involvement in school life is a central principle of maternal responsibility for children in the absence of sources of support and assistance, through which they manage to draw the boundaries of their relationship with the school to contribute to their children’s scholastic future.

Negotiating with welfare policies. Mothers’ agency is also expressed in the nature of their relationships with the welfare authorities. Mothers who receive support and assistance negotiate with welfare agencies and social workers in a way that enables them to be valued subjects within the community without undermining their social position (Skeggs & Loveday, 2012). They perceive receiving support and assistance as a violation of their dignity. They refuse to be passive in the face of the support system and set conditions for the nature of the assistance they need and are willing to accept. In this context, Laila related the following:

After my husband’s work accident, he was unable to continue working and received disability benefits that were really not enough for us to survive on, so I turned to the welfare services, but told them I didn’t want … assistance and donations, I wanted … training so I could work … And … that’s what happened. They helped me get a training course as an assistant. I told them I wouldn’t work in shops or factories [because] it doesn’t suit me. And my husband wouldn’t agree to it … My dream [is] to be a teacher  …  I received training at college and two certificates. And I finished the training, but it didn’t work out because I needed a car to get to [pupils’] homes. Then I posted on Facebook that I can teach private lessons to elementary school pupils and today I have three pupils that I teach at home. [Laila, 37, married, mother of four, tutors at home]

Laila’s case demonstrates that she approached formal sources of support to cope with her hardships, although occasionally members of minorities may avoid seeking professional help or underutilize such services for many reasons, including wariness, distrust of treatment by the dominant society, or fear of linguistic and cultural misunderstanding (Strier et al., 2020). Also, changes in welfare laws, combined with caseworkers’ negative attitudes toward women, create a difficult climate for women seeking assistance (Baker et al., 2003). Laila’s words illustrate how the neoliberal system has forced her to act independently to ensure a dignified life for herself and her family, receiving assistance and donations impair her self-perception as a respectable subject. She describes what she considers respectable, acceptable jobs and what kinds of jobs she will not accept, a statement that differs from Herbst-Debby et al.’s (2020) findings on Palestinian women who participate in welfare-to-work programs, as Palestinian women imagine that employment, even in low-paying jobs that do not allow for mobility, will give them not only a degree of economic independence, but also a sense of identity, satisfaction, respect, and interest.

Laila has a set of criteria for the jobs at which she agrees to work. Her agency is expressed in her taking the initiative for action independently despite the barriers she faces by refusing to be passive and attempting to identify solutions that suit her social and economic situation. Laila’s agency is apparent in her attempt to achieve economic autonomy in a dignified manner. In contexts such as the one Laila found herself, working-class mothers apply emotional politics (Skeggs, 1997) to cope with exposure to emotions such as insecurity, self-doubt, shame, guilt, and anxiety that they experience under the judgmental gaze of middle-class women. They advocate the adoption of values that turn humiliation and shame into pride, respect, and a sense of self-worth that are considered central principles of their lives.

Reham, too, described how she negotiates welfare policies, demonstrating her agency as directed towards action that encourages her daughter to continue on the path to higher education:

My daughter graduated from high school, but her grades were not high. I went to the welfare department and our support center  …  to help [her] continue her studies and to help me find her a professional training track that suited her. They helped me and asked me to bring [price] quotes from colleges where she wanted to study so they could help me pay tuition. I said okay and that’s what I did … well I initiated contact with them. [Reham, married, 40, mother of five, not employed outside the home]

Aware of the importance of education, despite her awareness that her daughter’s grades were not high, Reham did not abandon the idea of her daughter continuing to higher education. She took the initiative and requested financial support for her daughter’s studies. Reham also spoke of her daughter’s difficulty in applying to colleges in the Hebrew language. She asked for help from a Hebrew-speaking relative. Reham refuses to give in to her current situation, and her drive to help her daughter in school stems from her understanding that education is a means of survival. Her actions highlight the counternarrative (Krumer-Nevo & Benjamin, 2010) that opposes conservative approaches among mothers in poverty that advocate passivity rather than proactivity and provide an example of active maternal action taken on behalf of children’s futures.

Mariam, too, negotiated for occupational training and support from the welfare department, as the following excerpt demonstrates:

M:

My situation deteriorated  …  financially, and I had to find a job, and then I started working as a caregiver for the elderly.

S:

How did you get the job?

M:

Through the welfare department. They helped me a lot, provided me with training. That was what I asked for. The social worker asked me to tell her what I needed at home, what was missing. I was just worried about the children. I lacked beds, closets, appliances. I asked for these, and covered a small portion of the cost  …  [Mariam, married, 40, mother of three, cleaning]

Mariam’s financial situation forced her to seek paid work. She refused to give in to the status quo. By directly addressing her need to work consequent to her deteriorating financial situation, she enlisted the welfare authorities to help her find employment and provide what her children lacked. She placed her children’s needs at the center and her negotiation with the welfare department ended in her being able to provide them with a normal home environment. Thus, Mariam’s job became a form of maternal commitment to her children. When a spouse fails to fulfill the role of breadwinner in accordance with the social model, mothers take on this role as part of their maternal responsibility.

This section cites mothers’ efforts and strategies in negotiating with welfare agencies in the framework of their perceptions of maternal responsibility, which include a demand for decent employment that meets social standards. Meler and Benjamin’s (2021) study on Arab-Palestinian women in Israel examined how women position themselves by crossing boundaries, focusing on the resource of quality jobs relevant to women with academic degrees. They revealed that women’s struggles present specific barriers to women’s occupations, and their willingness to break gender, spatial, and occupational boundaries increase their ability to pursue quality jobs and become financially independent. Financial independence protects women from having to preserve the patriarchal family structure by reducing or preventing their dependence on patriarchal structures. Mothers’ economic decision-making processes involve negotiating with the welfare authorities. At the center of this process is their aspiration to work at respectable jobs. According to Duncan and Edwards’ (1997) conceptualization of gendered moral rationality, when we become parents, the process of making decisions in the context of entering the labour market is highly gendered and characterized by the principle of childcare as a moral aspect of maternal responsibility. This section shows that mothers’ habitus regarding the type of work they are willing to do and their negotiation with welfare services to provide for their children’s needs reflect their perception of maternal responsibility, mothers’ habitus thereby providing perspective regarding what is proper or common-sense behaviour (Maguire, 1997), which in turn is determined by their class and social position, and through the structures that they encounter, as they perceive who can act in a way that determines what kind of support they want the welfare institution to offer them.

Coping with a patriarchal cultural structure. The agency of working-class Palestinian mothers in Israel is also reflected in the ways in which they cope with the patriarchal social structure, their exclusion from decision-making processes regarding their futures, and their exposure to abusive relationships. When they become mothers, they must act in accordance with their cultural precepts of what it means to be a ‘good mother’ by acting to protect their children. They are waging a struggle against power relations that oppress them financially and emotionally. Their agency is aimed at warding off feelings of vulnerability, shame, and humiliation, as Amtiaz described in her interview:

I grew up in a family with uncles who are good people. We had no debts or financial problems. We were ordinary people, and then you know how marriage in our society [was]  …  twenty years ago  …  like jumping into the water without knowing how to swim. I found myself with a violent person, an alcoholic who didn’t work and shouted at me and humiliated me in front of his relatives and the neighbors. For me, it was very hard. It hurt me, everyone is close to our house, and everyone knows you, so I had to take control and start working. I am not only working!! I die at work, from five a.m. to four or six p.m. at the factory. [Amtiaz, 44, married, mother of five, elder care and catering services]

Amtiaz’s account reveals a paradoxical picture: Society excluded her from the process of choosing a spouse, so she entered the relationship without knowing much about her partner, as she described it, ‘like jumping into the water without knowing how to swim.’ She had to cope with physical and economic violence, but she took control and went out to work, refusing to succumb to the humiliation that comes with being in debt. Society allowed her to take control of her life and doing so was part of her maternal responsibility. In this context, society imposes less supervision on women’s behaviour when they are married, and their actions are part of the maternal role. Amtiaz’s actions were intended to reduce her sense of vulnerability and humiliation within the extended family, enabling her agency to become a principle of action that produced emotional politics (Skeggs, 1997). Palestinian women in Israel today are required to participate in the labour market and earn money independently while simultaneously fulfilling the maternal role. Entering the labour market enables working-class Palestinian women in Israel economic independence when they lose the right to economic security under the husband’s protection and contradicts the cultural model that positions the husband as the source of a respectable livelihood for the family. The actions that mothers take to integrate into respectable work derive from social shifts that lead them to accept this change in the gender contract (Sa’ar, 2017) as part of their maternal responsibility. In the following excerpt, we see how Areen’s agency is expressed in the actions that she takes to ensure a better life and home for her children despite her disappointment with her husband. She does not accept her situation and initiates action despite a severe lack of resources:

Because I’m a second wife to my husband, I’ve gone through many difficulties. You know what it’s like to live in only 38 square meters with two children? And I’m not used to it. I didn’t want it. He promised me many things and didn’t keep his promises. His family supported us a lot. So I started saving from income support and his mother left him 300 square meters of land. I told him, ‘Let’s start building a house.’ He asked me how. I told him not to worry. You would not believe how I saved and how I divided the amounts slowly … the main thing is that I [now] have a house where you can breathe. It’s true that I’m still lacking a lot of stuff, but the main thing is that our children will feel like the others, even though I thought he [the husband] would use the first floor for his business, but no! He doesn’t want to! I’ve already become apathetic, and I don’t trust him. I’m the one who moves things even though I’m not working. [Areen, 38, married, mother of two, not employed outside the home, works occasionally as an assistant at a nursery]

Areen’s disappointment with her husband, in addition to her dire financial situation, led her to stand alone in taking control of her life. Her words reflect how neoliberal policies (Fudge, 2005) combined with cultural values led her to believe that she is the source of her problems, and must make every effort to protect herself from social risks. She expresses a feeling of loneliness and frustration in how she must take care of her family by securing a safer future for herself and her children and a more comfortable home atmosphere, ‘a house where you can breathe.’ She managed to take action and save from the little she had, making decisions and changing her family’s lifestyle despite the paucity of her resources. Her words ‘ …  but the main thing is that our children will feel like the others’, reflect Gillies’s (2005, p. 40) claim that ‘class constitutes far more than an economic relationship. Nevertheless, at the fundamental level, lifestyles and opportunities are tied to an everyday material reality’. Areen thus ensures that her children grow up in a material environment no different from others, by enabling them to feel that they have the same opportunity structure that is reflected in their physical environment.

Iman works in low-quality jobs under abusive conditions (cleaning, factory work, waiting tables at weddings). Moreover, she struggles under domestic violence. Iman described her actions in the patriarchal space as follows:

I have been suffering for 16 years. I have five children, and he doesn’t work or help me with household and children’s expenses. He hasn’t helped me with anything … When I gave birth to my youngest son, I had labor pains and he wouldn’t take me to the hospital. At three in the morning, I rode alone on the bus. The driver was very frightened, seeing me in pain and screaming. I went into the delivery room and gave birth alone by Caesarean section. There was no one with me … if my dad was alive, he would not dare do these things to me. But I learned not to give up and continue for the sake of my children … I ignore him. It’s true that we live together but only because of society and my children  …  but I will never forgive him. [Iman, 42, married, mother of five, works at casual jobs]

This excerpt describes a difficult reality that requires Iman to cope in the patriarchal space. Her dependence on her husband reflects the nature of the cultural power relationship that blames divorced women and stereotypes them and their children (Meler, 2013). As a woman, Iman fails to defend herself, expressing these claims in accordance with the social context wherein she lives, that only a masculine power parallel to that exerted by her husband can protect her, as she lacks the protection of her deceased father. Iman’s maternal responsibility to her children takes the form of coping with an abusive relationship out of a desire to protect the children from negative social labeling if she divorces her husband. Children’s well-being is the uppermost priority in the decision-making processes of women, especially mothers (Vincent et al., 2010).

Iman’s account reveals that mothers’ agency within the patriarchal cultural space wherein they are excluded from decision-making processes and perceived as passive subjects who must act according to cultural conventions, is limited, Mothers’ habitus is determined through their agency, which is driven by their perception of material responsibility, but also determined by the cultural structure that is strongly anchored within patriarchal gender patterns that constrain mothers’ actions, and through these patterns, the family holds and reinforces the cultural perception of maternal responsibility. When the cultural conception of maternal responsibility is combined with neoliberal values, mothers are left alone to face challenging economic and cultural forces; their agency is thus rooted in economic, cultural, and social values and structures (Mahmood, 2006) that determine the capacity of their actions.

Discussion

This study sought to expand our understanding regarding the forms of agency of working-class Palestinian mothers, in presenting how their capacity of action (Mahmood, 2001) is dynamic and changed according to the institutional structures they encounter, by exposing the structures wherein these mothers’ agency is limited, and which enables mothers to produce change through their negotiations actions that aimed at positioning themselves and their children as respectable subjects within society. Mothers’ agency is highly gendered and embedded in maternal responsibility towards their children. It is also activated by the cultural model that transfers responsibility to mothers in times of crisis and difficulty. From the perspective of the intersectionality of class, gender, and culture, mothers endeavour to produce a sense of self-worth and dignity and reject feelings of shame as they formulate their subject positions. The use of habitus as a theoretical framework enabled examining mothers’ agency from an integrative perspective and analyze their actions within the contexts of culture and class. The mothers in this study developed an embodied habitus that enabled them to act and negotiate with cultural and state institutional structures as part of their perception of maternal responsibility. Their choices and actions were prompted by habitus and practices that ensured their being perceived as respectable moral subjects.

The findings show that mothers’ agency and their capacity to act is given more leeway in social institutions (school and welfare services) as they demand to change the existing order, as opposed to the patriarchal cultural structure, which continues to limit their capacity for action and change. Until now, researchers have cited how patriarchal norms may have lent Palestinian women a measure of power and authority, but only in areas that sought to reproduce the patriarchy, such as the domestic arena, wherein mothers have been entrusted with the proper conduct of the home and family relations (Lavee et al., 2018). This study reveals that accepting this authority structure may enable women to develop their agency in the public sphere and manage their negotiation with the patriarchy in an attempt to realize their motherhood through a process of empowerment. It also reveals that mothers’ demands for respectability comprise not only ‘good’ mothering (Gillies, 2006), but also responsible mothering that involves providing appropriate forms of care that comprise radical care (Hobart & Kneese, 2020). The maternal responsibility expressed in mothers’ agency challenges neoliberal models of institutional conditions that place the responsibility for children’s future solely upon mothers. Mothers’ agency within welfare institutions opposes the idea of charity and demands institutions’ support to enhance their self-respect and self-worth by enabling them to work in appropriate jobs. These findings reinforce Hobart and Knesse’s (2020, p. 10) claims that:

‘Charity relies on neoliberal discourses of moral obligation and individual character. Solidarity, however, relies on working with communities and asking them what they need rather than making paternalistic assumptions. Instead of following neoliberal, colonialist development models around innovation and the mining of hope, mutual aid offers space for true collaboration.’

The form of agency among working-class Palestinian mothers differs from that of middle-class mothers. As Golden et al. (2018) showed, middle-class Palestinian mothers’ efforts regarding children’s education are directed toward ensuring that their children will be a part of the new generation of the Palestinian Israeli middle class that they are creating, wherein mothers’ perceptions of maternal responsibility are influenced by a concern not only for their children’s futures, but also for the future of Palestinian Israeli society. While working-class mothers’ actions are based on cultural models of establishing themselves and their children as respectable subjects within the local collective as part of their struggle for inclusion in the social fabric. This effort is reflected in their involvement in children’s school lives to guarantee they achieve further education and in their negotiation with the welfare services to obtain appropriate jobs that enhance their perceptions of self-worth and dignity. The awareness of the mothers’ ability to act facing the schools and welfare services invites the development of intervention methods that will contribute to strengthening their ability to cultivate the professional and personal development process of themselves and their children.

A limitation of this study is that as the mothers were interviewed only once, it is not possible to determine whether their actions will contribute to both establishing a sense of respectability and enhancing their children’s professional and personal development in the future. Nonetheless, the findings emphasize the centrality of Palestinian mothers in their children’s worlds. Future public and social policies should focus on nurturing mothers’ skills in both occupational and family contexts as a means of coping with the challenges they face.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation: [grant number 100/22].

Notes

1 As a researcher who perceives myself as part of critical scholarship, I define the studied population as a Palestinian minority citizen of Israel, out of an effort to preserve our national identity. Throughout the article, I use the term ‘Arab-Palestinians’ whenever presenting data from Israeli databases, wherein the Palestinian population is defined as ‘Arab’, so as to remain faithful to the source of the information.

2 A field is a structure or set of relationships religious, educational, cultural, etc. People experience power differently depending upon the field wherein they are functioning (Bourdieu, 1984).

3 The research participants live in three villages and two cities in the majority-Arab region known as the Triangle. Each city and village is labeled with a number in order to maintain the anonymity of the participants.

4 Not employed outside home.