"Why Don't You Go to Nursing School?": Hebrew University Medical School as a Gendered Experience, 1950–1970

abstract:The article analyzes the gendered experience at Hebrew University Medical School in its first two decades, 1950–70. Contrary to earlier studies on women in medicine, which focused on immigrant doctors to late Ottoman and mandatory Palestine, gendering the future cadre of doctors in post-1948 Israel has not been discussed. Based on archival documents, newspapers of the period, and interviews with the school's graduates, the article argues that the school maintained a consistent though informal quota policy, which also differentiated between country-born and immigrant students. It examines students' interactions with the school, beginning with their decision to apply for medical school and going through the interview process, the experience of student life, and their attempts to balance medical school with marriage and motherhood.

mid-1950s to 8.2 percent in 1974 (see fig. 1), owing to an unofficial quota policy, which could not be traced in the school's archive. 3This policy, moreover, accounts for the decrease in the ratio of female doctors in Israel from 29 percent in 1948 (Levi  and Levi 2017) to 24 percent in 1964 (Smit 1964).Given that Hebrew University had the only medical school in Israel until 1964, this policy had a direct impact on Israel's cadre of doctors for decades to come.The school's graduates in this period, moreover, were particularly influential, as they came to occupy high positions in Israel's health system and faculties of medicine (Notzer and Brown 1995: 378).
Second, we argue that informal mechanisms and modes of conduct enabled the minoritization and marginalization of women at the medical school.Admission interviews, rather than standardized tests, allowed the school to screen candidates based on gender.We also show that female students' experience of medical school was characterized by sexist slights (what we now know as microaggressions) rather than by formal discrimination.These included jokes, subtle sexual harassment, comments on the way they dressed, and the distribution of long-hour shifts, which lay unequal burdens on young mothers.
Finally, we argue that students' experiences were mediated and shaped by women's status in Israeli society, whether as immigrants or Jews born in Mandate Palestine.The closer our interviewees were to the hegemonic group, that is, Palestineborn Jews of European descent, the more they tended to frame their experience through gender, while migrants and non-Jewish women used individualistic and gender-neutral narratives and prioritized their ethnicity.Those who belonged to hegemonic Jewish culture either declared a gendered analysis of their experience to be irrelevant or articulated a radical feminist critique of the school's patriarchal culture, which objectified and marginalized women.Histories of medical education in the Middle East concentrate on the schools' foundation and the personality of their founders (e.g., Ihsanoglu 2002; Niederland  1988; Sonbol 1991).When students are mentioned, they are usually either passive recipients of medical instruction or are analyzed in statistical or demographic terms (Blecher 2002; Verdeil 2008).Sara Farhan's (2019) work is pioneering in placing medical students at the center of her analysis and reconstructing their experience.More generally, histories of higher education in the Middle East, with few notable exceptions (Anderson 2011), pay little attention to student experience (Erlich 1989).
At the same time historians of women physicians and medical students focus on medical schools' policies, on a handful of pioneers, or on the early generation of female medical professionals (e.g., Bashford 1998; Bonner 1995; Morantz-Sanchez  2000).In the US context, Walsh (1977) demonstrates that an increase in the percentage of women in the medical profession led, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to a conscious effort to minimize the number of women physicianssuggesting that women's presence in the medical profession has faced setbacks and backlashes.
Few works provided a social history of female medical students.An important exception is Kelly (2012, 2018), who examines students' motivation, background, experiences, and interrelations.She also looks at educational and extracurricular activities, which helped preserve medicine as a predominantly male sphere.Farhan's work (in this issue) and our own are the first to focus on the history of female medical students and physicians in the Middle East and to question how cohorts of women physicians were formed and transformed.Contrary to works centered on medical-school policies or individual success stories, focusing on the daily life experience of students enabled us to ask how cohorts of physicians were formed-from the first encounter with medical school to the end of their studies: in the admission interviews, in classes, through the clinical years, in their interactions with other students, and even in their experience as parents.
As for the Israeli context, histories of Jewish women in late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine have focused on a handful of pioneering female practitioners-Eastern and Central European immigrants who worked in Zionist medical institutions or in private practice (Shehori-Rubin 2014; Shilo 2020).In the late 1960s sociologists studied the composition of the student body and the different career choices of male and female students (Meir, Camon, and Sardi 1967; Shuval 1973,  1978).
By filling the chronological gap in the existing literature, this article explores the consolidation of the medical profession decades after women had entered the profession, and in which the medical school strove to limit their numbers.Following Walsh's (1977) argument regarding American women physicians and Swirski and  Safir's (1993) edited volume,which debunked the Israeli equality myth,we challenge the linear narrative of progress toward gender equality still common in histories of women in the professions.We rely on both interviews and archival documents and call for more bottom-up histories of higher education and of educational experiences, mindful of gender, class, and ethnicity.
Our sources include in-depth interviews, the Israeli press, the Hebrew University Archives, the Israeli State Archives, the Hadassah documents at the Central Zionist Archives, and the medical students' magazines.We conducted twenty-four interviews, with thirteen men and eleven women, all medical students at Hebrew University in the 1950s and 1960s.The interviews with men provided a point of comparison: for the different atmosphere in admission interviews, for example; in their silence on themes that women elaborated on (such as discrimination and family life); and for testimonies about their spouses' experience.We recruited the interviewees using the snowball method, and we interviewed them together.We used a semistructured interview method (each interview lasted between forty-five minutes and three hours), asking our interviewees about their choice to study medicine, the admission process, and their student experience.Most interviews were held at the interviewees' homes, some in our office at Hebrew University, one at the interviewee's clinic, and two in coffee shops.We interviewed two women together with their male spouses, one of whom was also a medical-school graduate.In two other cases, we interviewed a couple (both graduates) separately.
There were fourteen interviewees of European Jewish origin, one Mizrahi Jew, four African guest students, and five Palestinian citizens of Israel.Three were born in Eastern Europe and immigrated to Israel in the 1950s.All started their studies in the period from 1956 to 1966.Two pursued medical studies after beginning a BA in another discipline, and one started her medical studies abroad.One interviewee left medical school and graduated abroad.Four of the eleven women interviewees were doctors' daughters; nine got married, and four had children during their studies.Most were born and raised in Mandate Palestine and admitted to the school, since they had been fortunate enough to study in one of the few dozen high schools in Israel at the time.We assigned all interviewees pseudonyms to protect their identities.
The article starts with a discussion of the gender quota and its representation in the Israeli press, school documents, and our interviews.We then examine the interviewees' social background and their route to medical school.Next, we describe the admission process and then the student experience in the classroom and in hospital wards.Finally, we examine students' struggle to reconcile studentship, romantic relationships, and parenthood.

Women in Medical School: Admission and Rates
Israeli journalists, physicians, and sociologists noted the low percentage of women in Hebrew University Medical School in the 1950s and 1960s.In 1956 a journalist in Davar (a Hebrew-language daily newspaper published in Mandate Palestine and Israel between 1925 and 1996) argued that the medical school "dislikes girls as students" because of "the long break from work among women doctors, for 'family reasons.'"Training women was seen as a waste of resources (R[aviv] 1956).Four years later a Maariv journalist, Tikva Weinstock (1960: 6), proclaimed the quota an "open secret."To be admitted, she argued, women candidates had to pass multiple tests from which their male peers were exempt to prove that medicine was their destiny: "The school believes that training a woman is a waste, as she would soon marry and leave the profession."As late as 1969 an article criticized the shortage in pediatricians, claiming that the annulment of the numerus clausus would solve this problem (Al-Hamishmar 1969).As Sharon Geva (2020) shows, in 1960 only one-quarter of the Israeli workforce was female, and only one in six women worked full-time.Out of those employed, most women, moreover, worked in areas considered extensions of their familial duties, such as nursing, teaching, and service professions.
In the women's press and in columns in the general press of the 1950s and 1960s, interviews with women in so-called masculine professions took care to emphasize that they were not otherwise trespassing gender boundaries and concentrated on their well-kept physical appearance or their dedication to their household and maternal duties.At the same time, Geva (2020) shows, women told interviewers that parents would take their children to see female pediatricians for trivial matters, but in severe cases would trust only their male colleagues.Overall, future motherhood was used as a pretext for limiting women's access to prestigious professions that required lengthy training.
The 1950s and 1960s saw a decrease in women's ratio in the medical profession.A shift from a profession based on immigrant doctors to one increasingly reliant on Hebrew University trainees also involved a shift in women's place in the profession.A 1964 survey by the Ministry of Labor (Smit 1964; see fig. 2) offered a gender breakdown of Israeli doctors.The data indicated relatively low figures in the youngest age group, peaking in the 35-39 age group, and then decreasing again.These data correspond to Hebrew University Medical School's student ratio.
The Women Doctors Organization and particularly its chair, Shoshana Shkop-Frenkel (Shehori-Rubin 2016), raised the quota issue in 1966 during the organization's seventh conference (Lamerkhav 1966).Shkop-Frenkel connected the lack of part-time jobs for physicians to the medical school's informal policy."They worry that women who choose the profession would drop out later," she said, but she expressed her belief that a woman who had dedicated many years to the profession would not abandon it, "if only given working conditions that would enable retention."Her vision, later incorporated in the organization's credo, included an increase of part-time jobs for physicians and then the inclusion of representatives of her organization in the medical school's admission board.Shkop-Frenkel also suggested conducting a survey of women's actual dropout rates, but we found no evidence that it was carried out (Lamerkhav 1965).
The medical school itself also expressed concern about the training of female students.A 1966 internal study examined the personal traits of women dentists and tried to predict women's career persistence.The purpose of the study was to help the dental school admissions board select "those applicants likely to have a comparatively long, intensive [work] life."Since women normally played the roles of wives, mothers, and homemakers, their work life was shorter and irregular.The research was therefore designed to provide the dental school with tools to trace motivated, "non-feminine" women candidates most likely to remain in the profession (Meir,   Camon, and Sardi 1966).
Indeed, female students' admittance rates were low in comparison to their share in the population.As shown below, in certain years (e.g., 1958-59), waves of immigration from Eastern Europe included advanced medical students, some of whom were integrated into the school.Since the ratio of female medical students was higher in Eastern Europe than in Israel, their integration increased the ratio of female students at the relevant cohorts.As numbers of medical-school graduation lists show (see fig. 1), in the first year of medical school (1949-50), female students represented 31 percent of the student body.By the late 1950s admission rates of first-year students had decreased; graduation rates remained at a similar level, 29 percent, but this was owing, as mentioned, to the admittance of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the more advanced years of study.The ratio decreased to 19 percent in 1960-61 and to 15 percent in 1965-66.
The situation in the United States at the time was far worse.The female student rate was 5 percent, because of similar concerns of "waste of resources."In England, however, the rates were higher, ranging between 12 percent in the London area to 36 percent in peripheral medical schools.The 1966-68 Royal Commission on Medical Education (known as the Todd Commission) addressed Britain's future medical cadre, including the low rates of female students, and found that the claim 1952 1954 1956 1958 1960 1962   Total Number of Graduates  Total Number of Female Graduates  Female Graduate Ratio   1964 1966 1968 1970 1973 1975 1977  of "wasted resources" was based on the burden family life had placed on married women doctors.As a result, one's productive years were shorter for women than for their male counterparts.In addition, having spent years at home, returning to the profession proved difficult.To reduce this "waste" and render irrelevant the basis for gender discrimination in admittance to medical schools, the Todd Commission recommended day-care centers in hospitals, refreshment courses for doctors returning from a long maternity leave, and an increased supply of parttime jobs. 4esides Shkop-Frenkel's suggestions noted above, we could not find similar discussions in Israel for that period.Moreover, since Hebrew University had the only medical school in Israel, female candidates who were not admitted and insisted on studying medicine had no choice but to do so abroad, provided they could afford it.We now move to those who were admitted to Hebrew University Medical School.

The Women Medical Students' Social Background
The background stories of our interviewees revealed several differences between immigrants and locals.The immigrants provided rich details about their social background, described their entrance to Hebrew University as a major life change, and narrated their memories in ethnic (Eastern European) terms.By contrast, the locals preferred to begin their story after high school and described their academic period as a linear, almost natural continuation of their former life, using an ethnicity-free narrative.
The three immigrants we interviewed arrived from Eastern Europe in the late 1950s.Ronna was born to a physician father and a philologist mother.She started her medical studies in her birth town.Following her immigration, she studied Hebrew for several months, which eased her first year at the university as well as her adjustment to the new culture.Ronna described her entrance to medical school in individualistic terms: she was highly motivated and sure of her abilities. 5igh motivation also characterized Miri, who had immigrated at twelve.She argued that high school in Israel was relatively easy, because in her home country the level of science instruction was considerably superior."Until the final exams I hardly needed to study."Growing up in a low-class immigrant family, her main challenges were economic.Miri decided to apply to medical school right after high school instead of enlisting in the military for the mandatory two-year service, as that would have delayed her entry into academe. 6nabella immigrated at eleven.Her father was a hospital director."He was in love with the profession," she said, and added, "my mother used to say that he is married to her, but medicine is his lover."Anabella served in the military as a teacher of immigrant children."I didn't know I wanted to be a physician, I guess it just happened that way. . . .I used to say that I'd study history or literature."Yet the time she had spent as a teacher influenced her decision to work with people, "and if with people, then better as a doctor.That is how I got to study medicine." 7ther interviewees were born in pre-1948 Mandate Palestine.According to Dina, 8 studying medicine stemmed from her interest in biology and mathematics.This interest, along with the influence of female friends from the army who advised her to study medicine, led her to medical school.Later her family doctor also suggested she try medicine-advice that also had an impact.
Helen was born to an educated Palestinian-Arab family.She had wanted to be a doctor ever since childhood.Medicine attracted her because of her grandmother, "who knew more than others about medicines."Helen studied in a private Christian high school.Thanks to her achievements, she skipped two classes and graduated two years early.After graduation she tried to apply to medical school, but her highschool diploma was not recognized by the Israeli Ministry of Education.She did not give up but studied mathematics and biology for one year in a kibbutz.In return for the private lessons, she worked in fruit picking "every day until 8 am, and then the whole day was free for study." 9lla was born to a physicians' family.Her parents immigrated to Palestine in the early twentieth century.Her mother worked as a hospital pediatrician and her father was a biologist.Thus Ella knew the medical practice firsthand."I loved medicine. . . .My mother would receive children in our home and somehow I managed to let myself into the room in which she examined them." 10 Rose's father had studied medicine in Beirut and graduated in Paris.During high school she was in a Zionist youth movement, from which she planned a military service that would include founding a settlement in the Israeli southern frontier.For medical reasons, however, she was exempt from military service.Since medical school refused to admit females under twenty, she told us, she started studying medicine abroad and returned to Israel two years later to complete her medical studies at Hebrew University. 11fter high school Michelle considered studying either the arts or medicine.Her final decision was influenced by her emerging feminist consciousness: she identified the medical profession with economic autonomy: "I expressed it in terms of economic independence, and painting, sculpting and art in general didn't seem, then and even now, as a profession that could lead me to independence."Although Michelle was the only interviewee who narrated her way to medical school in clear gender terms, most of those born in the country, whether part of the Israeli mainstream or not, marked other women as an encouraging factor in their professional choices.Thus, for example, Helen was influenced by her grandmother's traditional medicinal knowledge; Dina consulted her female friends about her academic future; and Ella used to watch her pediatrician mother at home.Like Rose, Michelle and Judith also noted that medical school did not admit female candidates under twenty years of age.While male students younger than twenty gained admittance as soldier-students in a special military program, their female counterparts could be admitted to the program in any discipline but medi-cine, and women who were not drafted had to wait for two years.Rose explained: "Prywes was of the opinion that a nineteen-year-old girl is not mature enough and is most likely to drop out." Moshe Prywes, the charismatic vice dean of the Faculty of Medicine, was central to the admission process and the school's decision making.His figure was omnipresent in our interviews.Born in Poland, Prywes graduated from medical school in Warsaw in 1939 and immigrated in 1951 after winning the position offered by the medical school (Prywes and Chertok 1966).His ability to forge strong alliances with high-ranking officials at the university and in the Ministry of Health made him extremely influential in determining the medical students' social profile.
Other interviewees started their studies immediately after high school.Judith completed a bachelor's degree in the humanities before medical school.Ella did not enlist in the army because of low physical fitness and started a degree in the sciences before transferring to medicine a year later.Anabella, one of our youngest interviewees, started studying medicine at Hebrew University when she was nineteen, a fact that might indicate a change of policy around the mid-1960s.
In summary, we saw different types of gendered narratives about the medical school.While those farther from the Israeli mainstream concentrated on their individual hardship, locally born Jewish interviewees described it as a natural, classand ethnicity-neutral step forward, and made more explicit references to gender.In the following section, we show that most of the interviewees articulated their experiences in medical school according to their social status (as immigrants, Israeli mainstream, and feminists), and detail how the admission interview shaped and reflected their gendered experience in school.

The Admission Interview: First Encounter with Medical School
The medical school screened interviewees by gender but also differentiated between immigrants and nonimmigrant female candidates and deemed them less worthy candidates than male immigrants.Its leaders argued that the latter should be favored.Yet, under the pressure of state officials to admit immigrants from Eastern Europe, the school tried to direct them to less prestigious, neighboring professions, such as nursing, dentistry, and biology.By contrast the female candidates born in Palestine enjoyed none of the state support granted to immigrants, and the school's tendency was, again, to exclude those who applied immediately after high school and admit only a small percentage after military service or after a cooling-off period.
In the 1950s, argues Uri Cohen (2006), Hebrew University was, among other things, a class and ethnic project.It became a powerful actor in shaping the Israeli middle class, which was Jewish, urban, Ashkenazi (i.e., of European descent), and mostly born in Palestine.Its graduates became high officials and bureaucrats of the new state institutions.Hence the selection process to medical school targeted an already limited hegemonic group.No formal statistics are available as to the students' ethnic composition.Our tentative estimate, based on family names, places the proportion of Mizrahi men at around 10 percent of each cohort.Most cohorts had no Mizrahi women.
Admission to medical school was based on three parameters: high-school graduation grades, admission exams, and an interview with several faculty members.The interview, unique to the medical school at Hebrew University, granted the admissions committee considerable power in determining the school's composition and that of the medical profession in Israel in general.The subjective nature of the interview, which relied on personal impressions and unwritten criteria, enabled the application of ethnic, gender, and class criteria.
Comparison between the admission interviews of male and female candidates, and of immigrant and nonimmigrant women, highlights gender biases.While some male interviewees described friendly or businesslike interviews, most women recalled being asked about their family and child-rearing plans, about which men were never asked.Furthermore, contrary to the participants' reports in the last section of our interview, where immigrants described their path to medical school at length, here the women closer to Israeli hegemonic culture elaborated on their encounter with the admissions committee, with most criticizing its gendered questions.By contrast, the immigrants focused on their personal experience and used gender-neutral terms.We do not have direct evidence from candidates who were not accepted to medical school, and this would have shed more light on the biases of the admission interview.Some of our female interviewees firmly denied any gender bias in the personal interview.For Miri, the admission process went smoothly.She was partly aware of the factors shaping the ways students were admitted, yet she excluded her personal case and constructed it in meritocratic terms.Miri argued that admission criteria included some informal aspects that no one really knew.She also speculated that some students were admitted thanks to connections with faculty members, while some others found their way in by sectarian quotas, by which she referred to what she believed a minimum quota for Arab students.Nevertheless, she was admitted by the criterion of excellence: "There were rumors.Favoritism exists all the time, of course.But I had no such thing, and that's it." For Dina as well, the interview was yet another short and friendly phase on her way to medical school."I even remember that when the committee asked me why I came, I told them it was because my family doctor had thought it would be great if I did."Dina chose to refer, in her interview, to her doctor's advice rather than that of her fellow female soldiers.She is the exception among the interviewees born in Mandate Palestine, and we found her experience of the interview to resemble that of male candidates.The interviews we conducted with male graduates also taught us about the extent of the interviews' gender bias.Ari, for example, told us that "without a personal interview I would have never been admitted," since his high-school grades were relatively low.He recalled a friendly and cheerful interview: One of them, a nice professor, asked me if I read the papers.I replied, "My brother subscribed to Scientific American."Then he asked, "Say, do you solve the riddle section?"I said, "I don't understand their solution.""Me either," he replied, "… do you build what they suggest?"And I replied, "Are you asking me whether I built an electron microscope from a soda bottle or something?"He replied, "Me either." 12t all interviews were entertaining.Others were concrete and tested the candidate's level of credibility.Yoav told us that Aviva Zukerman, one of the very few female faculty members, tried to check his trustworthiness, which was tied to the cultural capital Yoav claimed to possess-his knowledge in botany: She asked me about my hobbies.I thought that the meeting was going in a good direction.I told her that I travel the country and identify plant species.Then she took out a flowerpot and asked if I could identify the plant.I replied saying that I didn't know anything about cultured plants, but I could try.The leaf belongs to that group, from this family, etc.She said OK.They tested my credibility. 13e interviews with most female candidates took a different course and carried a significant gendered character.Ella had started her studies in the sciences and applied to transfer to medicine a year later.In the interview the admissions committee urged her to pursue a degree in biology, because "you will be taking somebody else's place . . .and since you already spent time elsewhere, why don't you continue your studies?" Similarly, former military teacher Anabella was encouraged to study education.She did not recall her answer.Ronna told us that Prywes asked her if she was certain she wanted to study medicine, since it was "a very difficult profession for women."David recalled that Prywes asked his spouse, "When you'll have to choose, what will you pick-a career or having children?"She chose children and did not pass that interview.A year later she was admitted to dentistry, and from there she transferred to medicine.
Judith told us that the committee members tried to refer her to nursing school, an attempt she described as "sexist."According to Judith, her assertive reaction paid off: Michelle shared a similar narrative.She described an alienating scene in which she sat in front of four men and one woman, who asked questions that fixated her in an inferior gendered position.It infuriated her: They were nameless, total strangers . . .asking all kinds of questions, like what would happen when you have babies, how would you pursue your profession, something like that.It felt like they'd thrown a bomb at me, and it irritated me, and I didn't have any answer.So I asked, like in the old Jewish method-answer a question with a question -I told them, "Each and every one of you managed to solve this problem, so why wouldn't I?" Rose told us about another method, designed specifically to rank female candidates: applying pressure on the candidate to see whether she cracked and cried.If the candidate remained composed, she was admitted; if she cried, she was admitted to dental school, which was administratively a part of the medical school.In Rose's case, Prywes asked her about her boyfriend who had died a few weeks before, during his military service: Then he pulls out a handkerchief.He waited for the tears to come.And while we are talking, he writes a letter, gives it to me and says, "Go to the administrative office."I was admitted.I cannot forget this horrible experience.I had many friends in dentistry.
They told me that in their interview with Prywes, at some point he said something that made them cry, and when they did, he stopped the interview and said-"Bobaleh [sweetheart], relax, everything is okay, you are admitted to dental school."The moment they started crying determined their fate.
Helen's admission echoed another informal policy, this time with regard to Palestinian students.She told us that the personal interview included only one faculty member, with whom she had a friendly meeting."There was Doctor Pollak, such a nice professor.He did the exam and then admitted me.Back then, they admitted only one, two, maybe three Arabs to medicine and dentistry.So, in that year we were two."Though we could not determine the school's actual policy, it is safe to assume that, living under a highly restrictive military government until late 1966, most Palestinians in Israel faced scarce economic resources, and only a handful managed to meet the admission criteria.It seems that their presence in the student body, however marginal, was important for the school's self-image as a liberal institution capable of producing medical practitioners for Israel's Palestinian minority.
Finally, the immigrants' narratives were also gendered but focused on the school's specific dilemma around immigrant students.Ronna said, "They made some kind of selection. . . .For instance, a friend of mine, we grew up together, immigrated after me.She studied dentistry in Poland and here they sent her to bacteriology."Documents from the university archives corroborate Ronna's claims regarding the selection applied to female students from Eastern Europe.In 1957 the medical school faced a new challenge of medical students who had immigrated from Poland and Romania and applied for admission in advanced years.Israeli immigration authorities demanded that the medical school admit a few dozen of them, inasmuch as their decision to immigrate was based on the promise that they would be able to continue studying in Israel. 14he school's administration, particularly Prywes, was very apprehensive about this development.It added a new set of pressures to a school that had already been swamped with candidates beyond capacity and faced political and public pressures to admit more.This immigration wave, Prywes proclaimed, created an oversupply of doctors and thus called for a decrease, rather than an increase, of the school's cohorts.Admitting those immigrants would lead to resentment among Israeli candidates, he explained: Israelis applied to school after military service, whereas the immigrants, particularly the women, had not contributed to the country (Yanai 1959).Whereas the male immigrants might be conscripted to the reserves, the female immigrants over eighteen were exempt.Prywes explained, moreover, that most immigrant medical students were "very young girls," since in Eastern Europe one could start her academic education at sixteen or seventeen, while Israeli women were required by law to serve in the military, and only later, at twenty, could start studying.Furthermore, he claimed that these students' academic level was low: "Only a handful of talented students are found among them." 15The best course of action, he concluded, would be to direct these students, particularly women, to neighboring professions. 16ubsequently, medical-school leaders applied restrictions on immigrant candidates.A 1959 meeting of representatives of the medical school, the university administration, and the Ministry of Health decided as follows: candidates who studied up to two years abroad would apply the same way as Israeli high-school graduates.Others, who completed more than two years, would be directed to neighboring professions such as biology, nursing, laboratory, and radiography (Al  Hamishmar 1959: 4).In practice, Prywes introduced a policy under which mainly female immigrants were directed to nursing school, biology, and bacteriology (Yanai  1959).This policy followed the logic that most resources should be invested in male students.Hence immigrant female candidates had the lowest chances of being admitted.

Student Life
The interviewees' sociopolitical status affected their student experience.Immigrants tended to reflect on the local environment in outsider individualistic terms, which emphasized their lower socioeconomic background, or in group terms, emphasizing alienation from Israelis, especially when compared to the vibrant student life in Eastern Europe.By contrast, the narratives of the Palestinian-born ranged from individualism and the denial of the gender factor to feminist critiques of the patriarchal culture they faced in school.
Miri said that gender had never been significant to her experience at the medical school: "This thing never bothered me.I think this thing is entirely in one's head."She argued that in school, male and female students were treated equally.Yet, in retrospect, she knew her experience was influenced by the fact that during school days it was obvious that female students were present in lower numbers."It didn't seem odd, but maybe because it was the norm."Growing up in a poor immigrant family, the most important thing for her was to get into the most prestigious academic club in Israel."For a newcomer, from the East, not the West, the aspiration to get into medical school in Jerusalem, even to go to Hebrew University, was the top of the world.There was nothing to complain about, everybody was happy, couldn't be better."Ronna focused on coping with a new language and mentality that kept her and her immigrant peers distant from the local students.She remembers how one of their challenges was translating lectures from Hebrew to Polish before exams."I used to write in Polish.Hebrew was difficult."She criticized her fellow Israelis for being "a very tightknit society": "They didn't notice us. . . .They used to laugh at us, at me at least.They laughed at my Hebrew, my education, the fact that I didn't eat street food, that I avoided eating hummus with my hands.It shocked me.And they called me 'the Pollack.'"The alienation she felt and the lack of social life were antithetical to her former student life in Poland."Student life there was so rich.We had a student club, and a Bridge room, so I learned to play the game. . . .We used to have ball nights all the time with the medical school's orchestra.I mean, it was fun being a student and I partied, yes.I was even prom queen once."Helen and Dina had a very different experience from Ronna's.Helen narrated a conflict-free story, filled with references to friendships with her fellow Jewish female students, accompanied by tacit hints that she would rather avoid getting into politics.She recalled one of her friends, a government minister's daughter.Helen used to visit her at her parents' home and enjoyed the sandwiches the minister made for both of them.The Israeli-Palestinian conflict came up neither in the minister's home nor in medical school, which she characterized as blind to ascribed statuses such as religion or ethnicity."I was a good student so there was no reason for such issues."Beyond that, interactions with students were limited: "only four or five friends, you don't need more."If there were other tensions, Helen did not share them with us.
Dina's story was also conflict-free and explicitly denied a gendered experience.She recalled her school days as pleasant and filled with solidarity and friendship, which has lasted to this very day.When asked about being part of a gender minority, she answered in subjective and experiential terms: "I've never had a gender problem. . . .It wasn't my mindset, no.There are women who feel discriminated against, but not me, never."Yet, paradoxically, Dina articulated her supposed lack of gendered experience in explicitly gendered terms.She used an example from her military service, where she demonstrated her physical superiority to fellow male soldiers: "When I was young, they used to say that I'm a 'real man,' that I'm capable of doing boy stuff, not just girl things.In the army, I was the only one who could lift the huge olive boxes." Sociologists of gender and the medical profession have noted that women's experiences during training and the early years in the profession are marked by subtle discrimination, which takes the form of microaggressions, sexist jokes, and sexual advances that may accumulate to create a hostile work environment.Consequently, they may feel that they do not belong, forcing them to engage in additional work to navigate hostile settings and demonstrate their competence (Kwon  and Adams 2018).
Very seldom did our female interviewees refer to sexist remarks and sexual harassment, whether because this is a topic one hesitates to raise in a short interview or because this was not talked about in the 1950s and 1960s.Anabella, for example, told us that her oral exam in anatomy included questions about male genitalia: "It was because I got married just a month before, so I was supposedly an expert now. . . .I thought it was extremely rude.I felt they were giggling.A slight abuse, I thought."She ended this anecdote by noting that she kept cool: "Cold fish.I was no expert, but what I studied I knew well."Some of the male graduates, too, were bothered by chauvinistic remarks faculty members used against female students.For instance, Ilan mentioned a professor who tried to befriend students "inappropriately" by making sexist jokes that he, a male student, found embarrassing.He also cited a common joke about the supposedly crooked legs of female medical students. 17hese forms of harassment, however, pale in comparison to the student journals, which regularly featured explicit sexual jokes, including specific jokes regarding female medical students and patients.In the 1960s the medical students founded two magazines, Statoscope and Midnight Medicine.The former dealt with issues related to medical students' lives and published columns on a variety of subjects, from the level of teaching to film and book reviews.By contrast, Midnight Medicine published mainly jokes and gossip about students, using explicitly sexist and misogynistic language to refer to women and medical students in particular.Women were described as sex objects, and the magazine articulated male superiority and portrayed women as blockheaded.For example, the front page in a 1961 issue morosely stated that transferring the nursing school to the new Ein Karem Hospital disrupted male medical students' sex lives.The symptoms were disorientation and "damage to the lower organs." 18In the same issue a limerick was published, about a man who with a "knightly gesture invited a golden-braided maiden to work on his corpse." 19Another limerick from 1962 tells of a maiden who pushed away a guy and strained her knee.Since then, however, she could not close her legs. 20ichelle and Judith attributed some of the organizational context of gender exclusion and discrimination to the masculine atmosphere in school.Michelle told us about her struggles against masculine norms.She fought, in her words, as an "outsider," against the masculine culture entrenched in the school, sometimes, as the following anecdote reveals, enforced by other women: There was this lady doctor.One winter morning, she told me, "Hey, student, go home and change, then come back dressed appropriately." Question: What did you do?I wore pants, during [a typically cold] winter in Jerusalem.Who had a skirt anyway?So, she expelled me from class until I'd dress properly.So I raised hell.I went to the school board and said that this was unacceptable.You can't tell anyone what to wear.This is discrimination, and I will not comply with this dictate.You won't believe it, but eventually they let me wear pants.
Other interviewees similarly talked about conflicts with senior male students and referred to the patriarchal work culture.They described competitiveness, abuse, and moral indifference to patients.Rose, for example, told us about an instructor who abused younger students in the clinical years.When she stood up assertively to his male authority, she was referred to a disciplinary committee: He tyrannized us from day one and tried to continue doing so in the clinical years. . . .He intervened in things he shouldn't have.One day I tried to enter a lab result on a patient's sheet, and while he was occupied with his patient, he told me, "It's about time you updated your patient's sheet."At first, I ignored him, but when he said another thing, I said, "You idiot!," in the patient's room. 21la referred to the school's elitism.The professors seemed to her as "not entirely human.I don't like self-importance.It really bothered me."It was only in this context that she offered a critique of the men in school.Both Ella and Judith described condescending, even demeaning, behavior toward women, particularly hospital patients and visitors.Ella, for example, recalled a pediatrician who entered the ward "in the morning, when it seemed that the parents were not there, saying, 'Kids, how nice you are, but why do you have mothers?'"Judith explicitly defined medical school as having a patriarchal organizational culture, in which the codes produced advantages for men at the expense of women.That is how she described her first clinical years: I saw this entourage, when you walk around the patient's bed and the professor asks the students. . . .This awfully patriarchal way made me think that I don't want to practice this kind of medicine.Question: Why "patriarchal"?
Well, the patient lying the bed is ignored, a professor stands and talks with his students above the patient's head, the room is filled with men, and some women doctors, but "I," the male professor, know best, saying, "Hello grandma, hello auntie"really!I used to come home saying, "This is a classic scene in which I don't want to be." This "entourage" was mentioned by male interviewees, however with an admiring tone toward the same professor, reflecting a clear gender gap.One of them told us that "the teachers walk along the beds and give orders.It's a work, as well as a teaching and explanation, visit.The professor is an exceptional figure, near which everyone stood with awe and reverence.He discounted no one.When he needed to cut someone, he would cut like an ax, for your professional calling was far more important than your personal insults." 22Doctors' visits at the hospital, then, were a daily ritual with clear, rigid, hierarchical rules.Professional authority turned the male professor into the "host" of patients and their relatives, and the evaluator of medical students, whom he sometimes publicly humiliated.This dynamic created gendered tensions between the male professor and his female students and patients, as well as between him and his male students.This dynamic empowered male students and sidelined their female counterparts.In the next section the interviewees narrate the organizational masculine culture that enabled those daily rituals.

Marriage and Motherhood
Goldie, a Tel Aviv-born physician of a middle-class family, emphasized that all women in her cohort except one ended up working as doctors.She also mentioned that only one of them pursued an academic career: a woman who was widowed at a young age and never had children.These statements seemed to us out of context: an answer to a question we had not asked, which led us to question how significant the accusation of "wasted training" was in shaping women's experience of medical school and professional careers.Similarly, David proudly emphasized that his wife, who was at first not admitted into medical school because she confessed her commitment to future motherhood, ended up giving birth to four children during medical school and pursued a successful medical career. 23Like Goldie, interviewees such as Ella and Anabella mentioned a woman-a more senior physician or a peer-who married late or had no children and thus could dedicate her time and energy to her work.They sometimes used these women as examples of what they themselves could not or chose not to do.

KOZMA and NURIELY • Hebrew University Medical School as a Gendered Experience
A study published in 1973 regarding the dropout rate from medical school found a substantial gender gap.Its premise was that "female students may find it difficult to accept the essentially masculine definition of the physician's role in Israel and to conform to it."The article confirmed its premise with data that showed that 17.7 percent of the women dropped out, compared to 9.3 percent of the men (Sarell,  Hertz, and Prywes 1973).By masculine definition Shuval referred mainly to adherence to workplace hierarchies as well as to work hours that were particularly unfriendly to parenthood.
Many male and female students married and became parents during their studies, but only our female interviewees narrated at length the challenges of romance, marriage, and parenthood during studentship.They were the only ones to speak about the effects of children and family on their choice of specialization.For some, marriage was a ticket out of the parental home or from a rented room to an apartment.Others spoke about the ways romantic relations and marriage shaped their social milieu and student life.Having children was described as a constant effort to navigate professional and personal duties and sometimes as a struggle against a medical school that made their lives more difficult.
The question of whether women students could keep up with their studies despite marriage and children arose in some of the interviews.Anabella, for one, emphasized that she never took a sick leave when her little boy was ill.On the other hand, Oren and Judith, a couple we interviewed together, emphasized the burden these expectations placed on their family life, and their constant attempts to change them and to refuse to play by these rules.
Those who got married while still at school stated that marriage changed their social position in various ways.Ella, Anabella, and Ronna married outside medical school, which distanced them from their fellow medical students, as they socialized mainly with their husbands and their husbands' friends.Ronna, for example, said that "I was not part of the singles' market, because I already started medical school with a boyfriend I had met in Hebrew class."While some of her women friends had a rich social and romantic life, she was content with her relationship and later marriage.Dina and Ilan, on the other hand, married within their peer group and told us that marriage made them the center of their social group.Unlike their peers, who lived with their parents, shared a room with other students, or rented a room from a family or an older woman, they had their own apartment and could host study sessions.
For some of our interviewees, an intimate relationship or marriage during medical school, particularly to a fellow medical student, was a valuable resource.Ruth, an African guest student, became friends with fellow African student Gabi during her first year of medical school, and the two later fell in love and got married.Ruth describes this marriage as a resource, which enabled her to concentrate her efforts more effectively, skip classes that she did not have to attend, and prepare for the emotionally overwhelming experience of anatomy classes. 24For Anabella, on the other hand, the relationship with her boyfriend from outside medical school consumed 80 percent of her energy, "and what was left was dedicated to medical school.Fortunately, that was enough." It is in the marital context as well that Judith articulated the most radical critique of the masculine culture in medical school.Judith married Oren in their second year of medical school, and they became parents in the third.First, she told us about the gendered favoritism in scholarships: after she got married, the school decided to give an excellence award only to her husband.The official reason was that "since you're a family, we don't think both of you deserve it."When Judith insisted on getting her award, she was asked why she needed the money.She framed her need in terms of maternal duties, and the school decided to give her a loan instead."I told him [the professor in charge of the awards] that I wash the diapers on a gas boiler, I want a washing machine!I don't have the money for it. . . .So he tells me, 'You know what?I can't give you a scholarship, but I'm willing to give you a loan.'I've never heard of such a thing.In the end, they gave that loan.We went to buy the machine right away."Judith's critique also addressed the duty roster in the hospital.She explained how the organizational culture students had adopted in the clinical years made it difficult for women to combine motherhood and medical studies.When she insisted on seeing her child at the end of the day, she was penalized.Judith told us that her male peers could stay long hours in the hospital because their wives took care of the children.Other female students were helped by their mothers, who sometimes stayed over for days.For example, one of Judith's peers saw her child only on weekends, while her mother helped her during the week.As a young mother, Ella lived with her mother herself, and David and his wife hired a nanny, who spent the entire day with the children.Judith, by contrast, was helped by her single female peers, who sometimes took over her shift in the maternity ward, for example.
In the 1970s Judith Shuval (1978: 25) found that Israeli students' socialization for medicine is identical, regardless of gender or class, and that any such differences KOZMA and NURIELY • Hebrew University Medical School as a Gendered Experience "disappear fairly rapidly in the course of socialization."Gender differences reemerge, however, when women make their career choices and opt for low-status community practice or pediatrics.Their choice, she emphasized, "may be less voluntary than meets the eye," since husbands' careers are usually given preference; the system, Shuval concludes, "has not adapted itself to the expectation of equality that women had developed during their training." Motherhood indeed affected women's choice of specialization.Dina, for example, told us that since she was the mother of an infant, she did not see herself specializing in internal medicine due to the heavy burden of hospital rotations.Throughout her interview Judith emphasized that it was her own choice, one she insisted on during her early motherhood years, to spend a few hours with her children every day.This choice had its professional price, in medical school as well as in later phases.The medical organizational culture made Judith and Oren leave Jerusalem for their specialization.They, too, found some doors closed to Judith for being a mother who insisted on active motherhood.Oren, who joined the interview, also mentioned the difficulties involved in active fatherhood, at least in the terms of that time.As a doctor who worked full-time, he insisted on getting up at night whenever the children needed attention; "otherwise I would have never seen them."

Conclusion
When Anabella summed up the results of her choice of the medical profession, she described its empowering effects in gender terms: "Medicine, at the end of the day, was a wonderful thing.It enabled me to get divorced, it allowed me to support myself.It allowed me to go abroad with a child, it allowed me to remarry." 25 In this article we have examined the multiple tensions and pressures that shaped women's experiences at Hebrew University Medical School and, in turn, shaped the early cadres of Israeli physicians.The uniqueness of the Israeli case during the 1950s and 1960s stems from the reliance on a single medical school, whose policy affected the gender composition of the local medical profession.Since we found no "smoking gun," no document instituting or abolishing a quota on women admitted to medical school, we do not know whether, when, or how such a quota has been imposed, and we have to settle for anecdotal evidence.We showed here that as a minority group at school,women shared unique experiences, starting with the admissions interview designed to screen out, first and foremost, women who might quit the profession and devote themselves exclusively to motherhood.We then examined the patriarchal work and study culture in the clinical years.Finally, we showed how intimate relationships and parenthood were deeply embedded in women's narratives of medical-school experience while almost absent from their male counterparts' .
Our interviewees expressed various stances about the practices they confronted before and after admission.As the data from the archives and Israeli press show, immigrant female candidates were directed to neighboring professions, whereas nonimmigrants were admitted in small numbers.In addition, the school's social atmosphere was associated with women's exclusion by age (those under twenty) and sexism.The interviews show that Israeli insiders were the most explicit about gender power relations in school, whether in negative terms (denying the category of gender) or positive (using feminist critique).By contrast, those who were outsiders to the Israeli mainstream framed their experience in individualistic, gender-neutral terms, as the ascribed status forced on them at the gates of medical school intervened in the ways they articulated their experience.
Today women make up more than half the student body in Israeli medical schools.Sociologists have noted a marked increase, from 24 percent in 1969 to 46 percent in 1989 (Notzer and Brown 1995).It is reasonable to assume that these quantitative changes involved qualitative changes as well.Future studies can examine whether and to what extent women's status in Israeli society intervened in admission procedures and differentiation among students in more recent decades, and investigate the impact of the growing female presence on power relations between the school's administration and male and female students.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Total Hebrew University Medical School graduates compared to female graduates, 1952-79.Hebrew University Archives, graduation ceremony, 1952-79.The year 1971 is missing from the archival data.

Four
men sat in front of me, and I was very confused and stressed.Then one of them posed a question I cannot forget, because similar questions were raised all the time later KOZMA and NURIELY • Hebrew University Medical School as a Gendered Experience on: Why don't you go to nursing school?So I told them, I don't know how I pulled it off, but I did . . .what I felt about this sexist question.I told them that "I want to tell others what to do instead of being told what to do."After I got out, I thought that they would reject me.A girl comes, puts her foot in the door, and says what she feels, straightaway, with no filters.

I
had a little girl at home.My husband was busy at work, and I had to take my child from her nanny.At the hospital, they made evening rounds.First, they would hang around and chitchat, wasting time, competing among themselves who would stay longer in the hospital. . . .No one left the hospital before 7-8 p.m.All had kids at home.So, . . .I told them in advance, I'm going to my kid, I'm not staying.Two weeks later they summoned me and asked why I leave early.I answered that I needed to see my child. . . .Later I found out that they lowered my grade in the internal department, since I had not stayed for the evening rounds in immunology or endocrinology.
LIAT KOZMA is associate professor in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.She is author of Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (2011) and Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (2017).Her current European Research Council-funded project is titled "A Regional History of Medicine in the Middle East, 1830-1960."Contact: liat.kozma@mail.huji.ac.il.BENNY NURIELY is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University.Nuriely studies the production of medical knowledge and Jewish politics in the Middle East and North Africa from the midtwentieth century on.Contact: snarck@gmail.com.Notes