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The founders of the kibbutzim wanted to farm the land and live closer to nature while implementing equality and collectivity. In the beginning, the kibbutz was an agricultural village in which all property, with minor exceptions, was collectively owned, work was collectively organized, and in living arrangements (including the rearing of children) were collective. “all the essential interests of life are satisfied in a cooperative way… (Here) cooperation becomes a new way of life.” Spiro, Melford E. Kibbutz Venture in Utopia. 4th ed. New York: Schocken, 1970. Print. The kibbutz communal ideology was held by the statement “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” An example would be a man with children works the same job as a man without children, they are each provided for by the kibbutz, but the man’s children are also provided for. In that sense members without children are subsidizing the ones with children. Also if someone needs glasses to see, he or she is given the money for the glasses by the kibbutz but they don’t have to work harder for in exchange for them.

Communal life
The principle of equality was taken extremely seriously up until the 1970s. Kibbutzniks did not individually own tools, or even clothing. Gifts and income received from outside were turned over to the common treasury. If a member received a gift in services—like a visit to a relative or a trip abroad paid for by a parent—there could be arguments at members' meetings about the propriety of accepting such a gift. Up until recently, members ate meals together in the communal dining hall. This was seen as an important aspect of communal life.



Children
When the first children were born at the kibbutz there were inevitably some ethical dilemmas that needed to be solved. One of these was that the kibbutz was striving for equality which included the equality of the sexes. Women were only seen as separate because they gave birth to children which automatically tied them to the domestic sphere. In order to liberate women and promote gender equality, they could not be tied to solely domestic duties and child care giving. The Kibbutz wanted to give women the opportunity to continue their work in the agricultural sector and industrial sector. As such "Communal education is the first step towards woman's liberation." Chayuta Bussel

Along with gender equality, the issue of parenting under the communal way of life was a concern. The parental tendency is to view the child as a personal possession and to dominate them. The founding members of the kibbutz agreed that this was not conducive to community life. They also thought it was selfish of parents to want to control their children and that this did not give room for the child to grow as their own person. .

To solve these issues the founders created the communal Children’s Houses where the children would spend most of their time; learning, playing and sleeping. Parents spent 3 to 4 hours a day in the afternoon with their children after work and before dinner. This is actually a lot more quality time for parents to spend with their kids than in other societies. .

Collective child rearing was also a way to escape the patriarchal society that the founders came from. Children would not be dependent on their fathers economically, socially, legally or otherwise and this would eliminate the father’s authority and uproot the patriarchy. .

In the children’s houses, trained nurses and teachers were the care givers. Relationships of the children and their parents would be better because parents would not have to be the sole disciplinarians. Children grew up in the community environment and grew up with children who were born in the same year as them. The financial responsibility of the children was shared by the community.

The founders of the Kibbutz sought a dynamic education for their children, that can be summed up in this statement from the founders of Kibbutz Degania “ From formal education to knowledge acquired from life, From the book to the physical work. From a discipline based on blind obedience to a regime of activity and creation in an atmosphere of freedom.”

The adults in the community did their best to make the children’s house into a children’s home. They fully furnished them to accommodate every age group. “It is surrounded by a courtyard, well equipped for the growing child’s needs, with flowers and bushes, hiding places, and playgrounds.”

Under Freud’s influence, the importance of the early years of childhood development were understood by the Kibbutz and much emphasis was put on fostering the child’s sense of individuality, creativity, and basic trust.

Although, for many of the original founders of the Kibbutz, the arrival of children was a sobering experience: "When we saw our first children in the playpen, hitting one another, or grabbing toys just for themselves, we were overcome with anxiety. What did it mean that even an education in communal life couldn't uproot these egotistical tendencies? The utopia of our initial social conception was slowly, slowly destroyed."

Child rearing
From the 1920s until the 1970s, most kibbutzim had a system whereby the children would sleep in communal children's homes, called 'BeitYeladim' (ביתילדים), instead of in their parents' apartments.

Although the children were not raised directly by their parents, they of course knew who their parents were and formed close bonds with them. Throughout the morning, parents looked forward to the end of the work day when they could go to the children’s house and pick up the children to play with them and dote on them. .

Children's Societies were one of the features of kibbutz life that most interested outsiders. In the heyday of Children's Societies, parents would only spend two hours a day, typically in the afternoon, with their children. In Kibbutz Artzi parents were explicitly forbidden to put their children to bed at night. As children got older, parents could go for days on end without seeing their offspring, other than through chance encounters somewhere in the grounds.

Some children who went through Children's Societies said they loved the experience, others remain ambivalent. One vocal group maintains that growing up without one's parents was very difficult. Years later, a kibbutz member described her childhood in a Children's Society:

"'Allowed to suckle every four hours, left to cry and develop our lungs, we grew up without the basic security needed for survival. Sitting on the potty at regular intervals next to other children doing the same, we were educated to be the same; but we were, for all that, different… At night the grownups leave and turn off all the lights. You know you will wet the bed because it is too frightening to go to the lavatory.'" Examples of children raised under the Kibbutz system of equality are given by Yosef Criden. When an aunt from a nearby city comes to visit her niece or nephew and brings a box of chocolate as a present for them, the child will excitedly open it up and eat a few of the chocolates. Then the child will go over to the rest of the group and give the rest of the chocolates to their peers. This is the ideology instilled in the children, to value the self but also to always think about others. Another example Yosef gives is that when his son, who was born and raised on a kibbutz, went into the army, he and his fellow bunk mates asked their supervising officer for a box. They wanted to keep the box in the middle of the room and whenever they would get care packages, they would put the items into the box and share them communally. They did not want to be like most of the units of officers from towns and cities, where each officer would hide their packages under their beds.

In a 1977 study, Fox compared the separation effects experienced by kibbutz children when removed from their mother, compared with removal from their caregiver (called a metapelet in Hebrew). He found that the child showed separation distress in both situations, but when reunited children were significantly more attached to their mothers than to the metapelet. The children protested subsequent separation from their mothers when the metapelet was reintroduced to them. However, kibbutzim children shared high bonding with their parents as compared to those who were sent to boarding schools, because children in a kibbutz spent three to four hours with their parents every day.

In another study by Scharf, the group brought up in a communal environment within a kibbutz showed less ability in coping with imagined situations of separation than those who were brought up with their families. This has far reaching implications for child attachment adaptability and therefore institutions like kibbutzim. These interesting kibbutz techniques are controversial with or without these studies.

Higher Education
In the beginning, higher education was not valued as very important to the Kibbutz as most of the work was in agriculture. As the kibbutz changed and moved towards manufacturing and industry, simultaneously more young people went into the cities to earn degrees. Originally the Kibbutz paid college tuition in full, but in the 1980's with the kibbutz crisis, they began to only partially pay for tuition. By the time kibbutz children are done with grade 12, enter the army and spend a year volunteering, they weigh the options of going to college and sometimes opt out in order to return to the kibbutz and settle down. In Israel, Grade 1 to Grade 12 is more equivalent to 14 years of school in the United States. Children attend school six days a week and have longer school days. Students graduate at age 18 from school and then immediately are enlisted in the army Israel Defense Force. After serving for three years in the military, kibbutzniks are required to do a service year called “national kibbutz service,” where they either work for youth groups or political campaigns in the cities. Once they are finished they are 21 or 22 years old. see Education in Israel

The total percentage of members studying at universities among kibbutz students rose from 38 percent in 1978 to 54 percent [in 1990].

Gender Equality
The role of gender equality on the kibbutz is very complex and has gone through cycles since the founding of the first kibbutzim. Since there were many different kibbutzim, women had different experiences at each particular one. Some say that women were and are completely equal to men on the kibbutz while others insist there has always been inequality. In the early days of the movement, kibbutzim tended to be male-dominated with significantly more male members. Nevertheless, women performed many of the same tasks as men. Both men and women worked in the fields, performed guard duty, and heavy labor. . However mostly women filled the traditional female roles, such as cooking, sewing, and cleaning.

In the first couple decades of the kibbutz there was not traditional marriage. If a man and woman wanted to get married, they went to the housing office and requested a room together. Not having traditional marriage was seen as a way to dissolve the patriarchy and give women their own standing without depending on a man (economically or socially) and was also viewed as a positive thing for the community as a whole, as communal life was the main aspect of the kibbutz.

When the first children were born at the kibbutz, the founders were worried that this would tie the women to domestic service. They thought that the only difference between a man and a woman was that women gave birth and thus were automatically tied to the children and domestic duties. The communal dining and laundry were already a part of the kibbutz from the start. Of course they were implemented for reasons of living communally, but also to emancipate women from these duties so they were free to work in other sectors. With the arrival of the children, it was decided that they would be raised communally and sleep communally to free women to work in other fields. The desire to liberate women from traditional maternal duties was an ideological underpinning of the Children's Society system. Women were “emancipated from the yoke of domestic service” in that their children were taken care of, and the laundry and cooking was done communally.

Interestingly, women born on kibbutzim were much less reluctant to perform traditional female roles. Eventually most women gravitated towards the service sector. The second generation of women who were born on the kibbutz eventually got rid of the children’s houses and the Societies of Children. Most found that although they had a positive experience growing up in the children’s house, wanted their own children at home with them.

The documentary, Full Circle, summarizes the change in the women’s view of equality on the kibbutz. The original Utopian Utopia goal of the founders was complete gender equality. Children lived in the children’s houses. Freed from domestic duties, women participated in the industrial, agricultural and economic sectors alongside men. However, in the 1960s, while the rest of the Western world demanded equality of the sexes and embraced feminism, the second generation of kibbutz born women began to return to more traditional gender roles. They rejected the ideal achieved by their grandparents and returned to domestic duties such as cooking, cleaning and taking care of children. Today, most women do not participate in the economic and industrial sectors of the kibbutz. They even embraced traditional marriage.

Another example of the change in the original egalitarian nature of the kibbutz is that the founders of the kibbutz did not use the traditional Hebrew word for husband, ba'al baal, pronounced BA-al (בעל), because of the connotations of the word as the wife being submissive and the husband being a master or lord. The granddaughters of the founders use ba’al for husband to their grandmother’s disgust. The granddaughters insist the grandparents are too caught up with terminology. The original egalitarian principles of gender equality have been compromised.

Statistical data proves that the majority of women work in the service and domestic sectors while men work in the production sector. According to data from the 1940's, gender equality existed neither in the domain of work nor in the area of politics in the kibbutzim of the time. For instance, in 1948, in eight kibbutzim of the Ihud, a kibbutz federation with a pragmatic socialist orientation, 78.3 percent of the women worked in services (services for adults, child care, education) as compared with 16.7 percent of the men. That same year, 15.2 percent of the women worked in production as distinct from 58.2 percent of the men The situation was the same in political life.

By 1979 only 9 percent of the women were engaged in some type of farming activity. “[In 1979] only 12 percent of the female labor force is permanently assigned to productive branches, compared to 50 percent in 1920.” Females comprise 84 percent of the service workers and the educational workers.

Also, although there was a "masculinization of women" at one point, there was no corresponding "feminization" of men. Women may have worked the fields, but men did not work in childcare.

Social life
Along with property and ideology, social lives were also held in common. As an example, most kibbutz dining halls exclusively utilized benches, not as an issue of cost or convenience, but because benches were construed as another way of expressing communal values. In the beginning, some kibbutzim husbands and wives were discouraged from sitting together, as marriage was an expressed form of exclusivity. In The Kibbutz Community and Nation Building, Paula Rayman reports that Kibbutz Har refused to buy teakettles for its members in the 1950s; the issue being not the cost but that couples owning teakettles would mean more time spent together in their apartments, rather than with the community in the dining hall.

In the beginning, members were not allowed individual items, like teakettles and everything was strictly communal. Starting around the 1950s and 1960s, people were entitled to individual property, like teakettles, books, radios etc. According to Criden and Gelb “The equality problem only becomes serious when there are gross deviations from basic principles.” Having a few books was fine, but having a private car was unacceptable. Items like cars were communally owned and had to be requested in advance by members or used for work related duties.

Communal life proved hard for some. Every kibbutz saw some new members quit after a few years. Since kibbutzniks had no individual bank accounts, any purchase not made at the kibbutz canteen had to be approved by a committee, a potentially humiliating and time-wasting experience. Kibbutzim also had their share of members who were not hard workers, or who abused common property; there would always be resentment against these "parasites." Although according to Criden and Gelb, the vast majority of people on kibbutzim are not free-loaders. They state that their chief weapon against free-loaders is public opinion. People who do not pull their own weight in the community are frowned upon and their opinions are not taken seriously by the community and they are not given any responsibility. Finally, kibbutzim, as small, isolated communities, tended to be places of gossip, exacerbated by lack of privacy and the regimented work and leisure schedules.

Although major decisions about the future of the kibbutz were made by consensus or by voting, day-to-day decisions about where people would work were made by elected leaders. Typically, kibbutzniks would learn their assignments by consulting the duty sheet at the dining hall.

Kibbutz memoirs from the Pioneer era report that kibbutz meetings varied from heated arguments to free-flowing philosophical discussions, whereas memoirs and accounts from kibbutz observers from the 1950s and 1960s report that kibbutz meetings were businesslike but poorly attended.

Kibbutzim attempted to rotate people into different jobs. One week a person might work in planting, the next with livestock, the week after in the kibbutz factory and the following week in the laundry. Even managers would have to work in menial jobs. Through rotation, people took part in every kind of work, but it interfered with any process of specialization.

Aversion to sex was not part of the kibbutz ideology; to this end, teenagers were not segregated at night in Children's Societies, yet many visitors to kibbutzim were astonished at how conservative the communities tended to be. In Children of the Dream, Bruno Bettelheim quoted a kibbutz friend, "at a time when the American girls preen themselves, and try to show off as much as possible sexually, our girls cover themselves up and refuse to wear clothing that might show their breasts or in any other fashion be revealing." Kibbutz divorce rates were and are extremely low. Unfortunately from the point of view of the adults in the community, marriage rates among communally raised children were equally low. This conservatism on the part of kibbutz children has been attributed to the Westermarck effect—a form of reverse sexual imprinting whereby even unrelated children, if raised together from an early age, tend to reject each other as potential partners. The children who grew up together in the children’s houses considered their peers brothers and sisters and had close lasting bonds with eachother.

From the beginning, kibbutzim had a reputation as culture-friendly and nurturing of the arts. Many kibbutzniks became writers, actors, or artists. Kibbutzim typically offer theatre companies, choirs, orchestras, athletic leagues, and special-interest classes. In 1953 GivatBrenner staged the play My Glorious Brothers, about the Maccabee revolt, building a real village on a hilltop as a set, planting real trees, and performing for 40,000 people. Following kibbutz work practices of the time, all the actors were members of the kibbutz, and all were ordered to perform as part of their work assignments.

Crime
There are very few issues of crime on the kibbutz. Since everyone has their basic needs taken care of and shares everything communally there is no reason for theft. The kibbutz crime rate is well below the national average.