In 12th century England, points out Rela Mazali, a serf wasn’t free until his master escorted him to a crossroad and showed him that, for the first time in his life, he could make his own decision on which way to go.
The serf’s wife, of course, was not privy to the decision-making process. She had to mind the house.
“The concept of freedom is very androcentric and deeply gendered in Western culture, and women are excluded from its roots, its imagery,” said Mazali, an Israeli author, educator and activist. “That has a lot of influence in how we play out our lives. That is why I looked at women who lived differently.”
In “Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings,” an oft-surreal hybrid of journalism and fiction, Mazali writes of a gathering at the ethereal “talking house” of a handful of screamingly non-traditional and highly mobile women. They include a nomadic veterinary surgeon, a psychologist who traveled to the mountains of Guatemala to engage in covert human rights work, and a photographer of pilgrimages who followed her subject matter around the globe, to name a few.
“These woman who travel extensively, usually on their own, are quite exceptional within standard Western culture,” said Mazali, a resident of Herzliya whose own travels will bring her to the Bay Area for several book-signings and speeches in the coming week. “I look at their travel and life stories, what drove them, what they achieved, what price they paid.”
Women are systematically instructed to live sedentary lives in subtle — and not-so-subtle — ways, according to Mazali, who co-founded “New Profile,” a feminist organization working to reduce the military’s influence in Israeli society.
As children in Israel, she points out, boys dominate the school soccer fields and basketball courts, while girls are forced to play in the margins. And, while “boys will be boys,” girls are constantly warned not to dirty their clothes or “get their skirts hiked up too high.”
Mazali cites a sociological study undertaken in a small American town, in which researchers found that young girls were consistently allowed to wander only half as far from home as young boys, with the discrepancy growing even larger after children reached the sixth grade.
“Also, there’s the element of having girls near the home to help out,” said Mazali, who lived for seven years in the American Midwest as a young child. (She still pronounces Missouri as ‘Missourah.’)
“Traditionally, the house was one of the most confining elements in women’s lives, and, to a large extent, still is.”
It was certainly a factor for Mazali. The mother of three admits that writing an article about globetrotting women was a method of dealing with her own, largely unfulfilled “wander wish.”
“Today, I have a very complex view of what I’m doing when I travel. A lot of the places where people travel and tour today are, to a large extent, places where colonial armies made their mark two or three or even only one generation ago,” she said.
“Today, the Western world rules the rest of the world through economy rather than through military means, and tourism is a part of that. Very often exotic places where people can come and enjoy and leave are populated by indigenous people who do not have that kind of freedom.”
Still, as her youngest child is now 15, Mazali may soon be able to fulfill her wander wish, despite reservations.
“When I travel across borders, for instance, when I went into Gaza for human rights work, even though it was human rights work I was doing, I could see traces of conquest in it,” she said. “That complexity is something I am not able to ignore. That’s not to say I won’t travel because of it, it just makes me more humble about traveling.”