The hospital close to where I was staying during the summers of 1988 and 1989 turned out to be an excellent location for meeting poor female wage labourers. Most of the women whose stories are presented in this chapter worked there as cleaners. Although their labour stories differ, they had all started working because of financial need. The girls were from impoverished families, the married women had spouses who were unable to provide for them, and the widows and divorced women had been left to their own devices to earn a living. Whereas rural women who had previously worked as agricultural labourers considered hospital cleaning an improvement, for those women from the camps who used to work in Israel, it was usually a negative choice to which they had to resort, since working in Israel was no longer possible after the intifada.

In this chapter, the focus is on two major fields of employment for poor women: agricultural wage labour and domestic service or cleaning. Processes of historical change have had major implications for these types of work. First examined are the wage labour of women, often poor rural widows, in dry-farming agriculture and the circumstances under which some of them have turned to institutional cleaning. This is contrasted with the very different work of refugee women in irrigated agriculture in the Jordan Valley on the one hand, and the work of domestic servants in the private houses of the better-off Nablusi on the other.