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Melford Spiro's Gender and Culture: Kibbutz Women Revisited is a sequel to his anthropological account (Spiro, 1955, 1958) of a group of pioneers who created a new system in an old country; who, beckoned by the promise of a meaningful life, survived the dangers of the environment; who idealized and rationalized the necessary substantive changes in their social organization as they unconsciously repeated familiar forms and processes. In Gender and Culture, Spiro reviews the sociohistorical backdrop of the first kibbutz generations' striving to achieve equality for women and the current kibbutz ideological explanation for the now existing seeming inequality.
As presented, the early kibbutz members' logic was very sophisticated in that it encompassed both biological and social factors while it seemed to avoid the nature/ nurture trap. The early kibbutz ideology rejected genetic inferiority of women as well as the “social explanation” of male exploitation. Instead, the proffered explantion for sexual inequality included both the biological and social aspects of women's lot as they were subsumed under the label “the biological tragedy of women.” This expression referred at once to women's responsibilities for bearing and tending children, and the socioeconomic consequences of their low status, non-income producing domestic work. According to Spiro, kibbutz ideology rejected “the notion that anatomy … is destiny.” Strictly speaking, of course, a repeal of biological determinism was hardly possible; to date, at least, only anatomy's psychosocial and cultural sequelae may be altered. And that is what the kibbutz movement attempted to do. It was hoped that, by relieving mothers of the obligation personally to care for the children they bore, the social consequences of reproductive biology — beginning with economic role differentiation — would be averted.
In this context, Spiro discusses the connotations of “equality.” Although the alternate meaning of equality, that is, equiva