In Israel, a woman's place is not in the home--not at this stage.
    Here is where the girls are, starting in their teens:
     If they're 14 to 18 and going to school, they're very likely using their off time in Gadna, Israel's coed pre-military organization.
    If they're 18, they're in the army--earning how to handle a rifle or a sub-machine gun, how to throw a grenade or drive a jeep, or how to tend the "housekeeping" duties that free men for the front lines.

       If they're over their two-year army hitches but unmarried, they're working to chip into tight family budgets.
    If they're married, they're working to supplement their husbands thin pay checks.
    If they're in a kibbutz, they're doing their share of the chores in the fields or the community kitchen or the nursery.
    In the main, the woman who doesn't fit into any of those categories in the Jewish State can't work for one reason or another. Or she's content to sweat it out on her husband's salary alone. Or she has grown children helping out. Or she's one of the select circle married to a man making a pretty good living by Israeli standards--say $200 a month or more.
    There are 200,000 women in the working force. They are secretaries, telephone operators, factory hands, domestics, nurses or teachers, if they're not farming. They make from $15-a-week to $25 and some may make $40, give or take a few dollars on either side.
    If they have small children, kindergartens look after them, during the day for $6 to $8 a month--or for free in cases of need. Some women, but very few employ their own help. If they do, the margin between working and not working is narrow: help at home may cost a woman half a paycheck, say $35 a month out of about $70.

    I asked a married couple in Tel Aviv to break down their budget for me. The man was a white collar worker and his wife had a sales job. Between them they made $205 a month--$175 after taxes--and this is where it went:
    FOOD--$60 a month, including some non-rationed meat bought in the high-priced "free market" so that their son, who is five, can have meat a couple of times a week.
    CLOTHING, SHOES and REPAIRS--$30.
    RENT and LOCAL TAXES--$10.
    BUS FARES--$8.
    HELP (part time at 40 cents an hour)--$6.
    HEALTH INSURANCE--$6.
    NEWSPAPERS, BOOKS (paperbound) and RECORDS--$6.
    ENTERTAINING AT HOME (with wine)--$6.
    LAUNDRY--$5.
    MOVIES (in 50-cent seats)--$4.
    SCHOOL FEES (half-day kindergarten)--$3.50.
    ELECTRICITY--$2.
    THEATRE OR CONCERT (once)--$2.    
    DONATIONS--$l.    
    Without extras of any kind, that comes to $150 a month and leaves $25 but the woman of the house accounted for that--
    "We have some old debts," she said, "and some small payments on our sewing machine and our refrigerator. And sometimes, once in a great while, we treat ourselves to a meal in a restaurant, and that's about $5.
    "So there's almost nothing left. What there is left we try to put away. We want to move out of the city and get an apartment in the suburbs, but that's a long way off."
    (Israelis can buy into government-subsidized cooperatives at very low prices, The down payment is what takes some scraping--a two-room apartment costing $3,000 calls for half in cash, with 15 years to pay the balance.)
    I asked the couple how their (clothing costs break down and got these figures:    
    COAT (for the woman, once in three years)--$50.
    DRESSES (three a year)-$15 each.
    SHOES (for the woman, three pairs a year)--$5 each.
    SUIT (for the man, every three years)--$60.
    RAINCOAT (for the man, once in four years)--$30.
    SHOES (two pair a year for the man)--$l0 each.
    The baby's shoes--three pair a year--cost $5 each and other apparel and accessories for the family came to $30 a year.     The women in the kibbutzim have no such day-to-day worries as the women in the cities. They have no incomes and no budgets. What they need in the way of clothing, and it's not much, comes out of the settlements community funds
    And they may have no problem about bringing-up-baby either. In some of the kibbutizm, the children are in community nurseries for all but a few hours a day, spending only a little time in the evening with their parents.
    This is a matter of large debate in Israel. There's a growing school arguing with some force that the common nursery is a poor substitute for a mother and father, And they're winning the argument.
    More and more of the farm settlements tend to confine nursery time to the working hours of the day only. The children are with their parents the rest of the day and night.     The girls in the women's army corps, Chen, drafted for two years as against 2-1/2 for the boys, start with six weeks of basic training. It's rugged but the chances are they have been conditioned for it by years of part-time duty in Gadna, the pre-army outfit, or in youth movements.
    When their basic training is over they can handle small arms with as much ease as most American teenagers wield eyebrow pencils.
    After basic, some of the girls go into the border kibbutzim as soldier-farmers, some into special courses for such specialized assignments as radar operators, and the majority into the kind of auxiliary duties the WACs handle in the U. S. Army.
    The girls will be counted on for rear-guard duty if the Arab-Israeli showdown comes, but the Jewish State is so small there may be no rear guard.
    Israel is only a thin strip along the Middle Eastern coast, no more than 15 to 20 miles wide on the average; Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are within an hour or two of Egypt and the Gaza Strip, and other cities and settlements, even in the wide Negev, are within shooting distance of the other Arab borders.
      So the girls know that they may be something more than housekeepers if war comes. In 1948 the women of Irgun and Yaganah fought side by side with Israel's men against the Arabs.
   It could be that way again--though peace would be even better.
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