Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how the formal marginality of pioneer female welfare workers of the early statehood of Israel later turned into subversive oral personal narratives about past institutional policies.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I analyze archive interviews of two women who belong to a group that so far did not receive much scholarly attention, namely, educated women who immigrated to Israel from Morocco in the 1950s, the first decade of the state, and who worked in welfare professions although they had not acquired professional training beforehand but rather learned the profession while working.

These women have a unique and dual positionality: on the one hand they represented the Welfare Ministry, and on the other hand they belonged to the same ethnic group that most of their patients belonged to. Thus, their narratives express critique toward bureaucratical policies at that time. Their critical point of view motivated them to become agents of change and to found various local welfare institutions, even though they forever remained "anonymous founders" who never received due recognition of their projects.

In the presentation I analyze the women's employment of two sub-genres that appeared frequently in their oral-history narratives: constructed dialogue (or direct speech) and work incidents, to show how these shorter stories add to the women's self-justification and even glorification of their real-time actions and perceptions.

In retrospect, the ethics of the two women can be seen as the roots of today's feminist approaches to the profession of social work and may illustrate the claim that women's marginality can lead them to innovations and creative action.