"I’m Used to Hearing the Pendulum Song"– Leah Goldberg Presents ‘Women’s Waiting’

Abstract

The article seeks to discuss a new term within the field of gender research in literature – “women’s waiting.” Waiting is a universal human condition that appears in the lives of women and men. The feminist discourse that began to develop in the 1970s centered around the question of gender diversity and wondered about the universality of how this situation is experienced: Do men and women experience waiting in a similar way? And if not, what is the difference between the descriptions of waiting in texts written by women?

The article will establish the term in the narrative aspect as influenced by a long tradition of male writing that shaped ‘the waiting woman’ theme according to patriarchal models, while undermining this tradition by presenting an alternative writing tradition with unique characteristics that illuminate the waiting theme from the perspective of the female experience.

For the purpose of examining the term in literature, a corpus of poems by the poet Leah Goldberg was chosen, focused on the waiting experience. The poems, presented in chronological order, reflect the change from descriptions that correspond to the classic model of the waiting woman to descriptions that reveal the inner personal space of the waiting woman.