Pekelman was born in Mărculești in Bessarabia Governorate, Russian Empire (in present-day Moldova),[2] to a religious Jewish family of merchants that gave great importance to education and diligence.

In 1935 she self-published her autobiography, The Life of a Woman Laborer in The Homeland, in which she described her childhood, adolescence and first three years in Mandatory Palestine, including the rape affair.

She describes meeting, after the party, a fellow pioneer named Yeruham Mirkin, who insistently invited her to join him in his cousin's room, where she reported he beat her up and raped her.

A representative of the Histadrut bailed her out, but she described her freedom being "worse than hell": she was stared at by everybody, with no friends left to support her, as being a rape victim was considered by the conservative society of those days as a violation of modesty rules, and they suspected her of poisoning her daughter.

Most women felt that they were as qualified as men for this job and demanded their share in drying the marshes, not to show that they were strong, but to provide with bread to eat; I also attended such a meeting.

In 2007 the book was re-published with annotations, including an epilogue of two essays, one by David De Vries and Talia Pfefferman, and the second by Tamar Hess, all three of them from the Tel Aviv University.

[6] The re-publication was part of the "Critical Essays" series of the Heksherim Research Institute for Jewish & Israeli Literature & Culture, inin collaboration with the Ben-Gurion University.

Another importance of the book is found in the social and political contexts in which it was written: Although at the beginning women were considered equal to men in various sectors of the economy, by the time the British mandate had begun, there was an expectation that they return to their traditional roles: childbirth, childcare, education and home care.

In her insistence on continuing to perform duties outside the home, such as fruit picking, dairy farming or tobacco field work, Pekelman sounds the voices of women who were excluded by a society that was essentially run by men.