12 - The Neglect of Women

Summary

Even before the rise of the feminist movement, anthropologists and sociologists had become ashamed of their neglect of the significance of women's work – of their inherent male bias. So a fair number of compilations resembling the pioneering Women of Tropical Africa have appeared in the past couple of decades and more anthropologists, especially women, have concentrated their research efforts on women's roles or ‘problems’, producing numerous chapters and doctoral theses with such titles as ‘Changing Sex Roles and Social Tensions in …’ – though few to such good effect as Phyllis Kaberry in Women of the Grassfields, or Mary Smith in Baba of Karo.

Following Ardener's Perceiving Women (1975), two of the most modern types of approach are perhaps best exemplified by an admirable socialist debate on feminism in Africa edited by Pepe Roberts (1984) and by a much more sober compilation Female and Male in West Africa which tries to ‘look at men's and women's behaviour symmetrically’, realizing that they have ‘similar potential abilities and patterns of responses to incentives.’ As for India, general books, such as The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization and Marriage and Family in India are found in every serious bookshop there; a National Committee on the Status of Women reported in 1975; and Leela Gulati's Profiles in Female Poverty (1981) is touchingly immediate in its detail.