Limits of male maintenance: females as breadwinners

Before exploring the processes of compensation, a brief examination of the victims and their families allows a glimpse into the realities of family survival that legal reform should address.

The fourteen young women lived in twelve households, mostly in the same neighbourhood in the village of Dura, with four women living in another village, Halhoul. Five belonged to the same family grouping (two were sisters), a fact which may have encouraged resort to customary law. Almost all were single and none had any previous skill or received any training qualifying them for the job. Most had been recruited in the previous two weeks by a factory representative knocking at the door looking for young women workers. Almost all were first-time workers and the first female member of the family to work outside the home. Most of the families were large and relatively poor, with nine of the households numbering more than ten members. In several cases, fathers were dead or elderly or disabled, although a number of families had brothers working as unskilled and irregular labour inside Israel. The young women’s participation in family income generation is a reminder that ‘male maintenance’ cannot necessarily guarantee family survival in the difficult circum­stances of contemporary Palestinian society - and that compensatory processes based on traditional views of males as breadwinners will not be responsive to these circumstances.

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