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‘Four Mothers’: The Womb in the Public Sphere 127

fault, their disruptive character and their inability to get along with each other.
The recent growth of intimacy in news coverage, including intensified increased
attention to human interest stories and personalization of political behaviours
allows a growing visibility of women as news presenters, yet it does not guarantee
the recognition of private sphere feminine values and perspectives as appropriate
for a public sphere context (van Zoonen, 1991).
Given this framing of women’s marginality in the public sphere and their
relegation to the private one, the case of the Four Mothers movement is of parti-
cular interest. Here is a movement openly declaring itself as ‘mothers’ (rather
than ‘citizens’), although it has embraced interested fathers and encouraged
others to join in, claiming their space in the national discourse on one of the
burning issues on the public agenda – security of the northern border. How did
the media portray this movement? How did coverage of its members and their
messages present the ‘voice’ offered by motherhood in the rational debate over
the future of Israel’s presence in south Lebanon? What room is the female world
allowed in the masculine discourse of power and dominance? These are the
questions at the heart of this analysis on the portrayal of the Four Mothers
movement in the Israeli press.

The study

A retrospective search of news items making overt and detailed references
to Four Mothers resulted in a pool of 57 items, between February 1997 (time of
the triggering accident) and April 1998 (two months following the one-year
memorial and a period of public soul-searching). The news coverage included
17 news items, 16 in-depth articles and 24 personal commentaries and letters to
the editors, in the three major daily papers (two popular and one quality press,
44 items in all) and from various local papers (13 in all). While the sample is
clearly limited in scope and not all-inclusive (and therefore inappropriate for a
systematic quantitative content analysis), it serves amply to delineate the dominant
themes in the representation of Four Mothers in the public sphere.
Each item was analysed for the following: (1) the type of coverage (hard news;
article; personal commentary), placement in the newspaper and salience (hard
news/soft news sections; headline size; visuals; spread); (2) the main themes
discussed in relation to Four Mothers (information; political opinions; issues
of femininity and motherhood); (3) the nature of the discourse surrounding the
phenomenon (emotional/rational; descriptive/supportive/critical; personal/
structural); and (4) the main themes hinted at in the headline and sub-headline
and their relationship with the item as a whole (item expanding on the headline;
headline irrelevant to the item; item contradictory to the headline).
In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted by one of the authors with
the key leader of the group as well as with three additional central activists,
concerning their perceptions of the movement’s position in the general discussion
over Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon and their unique position as
women participants in this debate. Interviews were transcribed and analysed.