‘I Got Married to Get Free of Home’: Young Women Living in Poverty in Israel

This article describes a life-story study of 13 women living in deep and long-term poverty in Israel. Most of the women married at a young age and became mothers a short time thereafter. A combination of narrative and feminist-critical analysis shows that the women perceive marriage as a kind of ‘fate’, and as the critical stage of their lives. Most of them were coerced into marriage whether by economic circumstances or by their families. Nevertheless, their stories give evidence of an interior dialogue concerning marriage as an expression of self-definition and as a struggle to escape distress. The article gives some directions for the ‘ methodological awareness’ necessary in such research and suggests some implications for social work.