Anthropology
Author(s): Rayna Rapp
Source: Signs, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring, 1979), pp. 497-513
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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REVIEW ESSAY
Anthropology
Rayna Rapp
If the anthropology of women is not coming of age in the Englishspeaking
world, it is at least hitting an adolescent growth spurt. In the
last year, three review essays have appeared, and four journals have
produced special issues devoted to women. We have two new introductory
texts which focus on women, men, and gender stratification,
one collection of essays, a series of bibliographies, a directory of research
interests of feminist anthropologists, and a growing concern with the
status of female as compared to male anthropologists. At least one popular
magazine has also given supportive attention to our new paradigms
and research reports.1 All of this concern is very encouraging, but integration
of a fully developed body of literature still looms in the distance.
I want to thank Deborah Jay Stearns, who worked as my research assistant while I was
preparing this essay. Her own research questions have stimulated me to better define my
own.
1. The review essays are Naomi Quinn, "Anthropological Studies on Women's
Status," Annual Review of Anthropology6 (1977): 181-225; Susan Carol Rogers, "Woman's
Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory," ComparativeStudies in Societyand
History20, no. 1 (January 1978): 123-73; and Rayna Rapp Reiter, "The Search for Origins:
Unraveling the Threads of Gender Hierarchy," CritiqueofAnthropology3, no. 9-10 (Winter
1977): 5-24. Journals which have published special issues on women include WesternCanadianJournal
of Anthropology,vol. 6, no. 3 (1976); Rural Africana, no. 29 (Winter 1975-76);
LatinAmericanPerspectives4, nos. 1-2 and 4 (1977); and SouthernExposure,vol. 4, no. 4 (1977).
New texts include Rae Lesser Blumberg, Stratfcation: Socioeconomicand Sexual Inequality
(Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown Co., 1978); and Lila Leibowitz,Females, Males,Families:
A BiosocialApproach (North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press, 1978). Other new resources
[Signs:Journal of Womenin Cultureand Society 1979, vol. 4, no. 3 ]
? 1979 by The University of Chicago. 0097-9740/79/0403-0005$02.63
497
Review: Anthropology
In the last anthropology review essay (Signs,vol. 2, no. 3), Lamphere
carefully dissected the debates concerning the universality of sexual
asymmetry. New articles help us now to rephrase the question with attention
to its historical complexity. Leacock continues her reconstruction
of a precolonial, prestate ethnohistory for women, postulating kin-based
relations of production in which neither women nor the products of
their labor were privatized.2 But data that point to the subordination of
women in preclass societies continue to be produced. Webster questions
the role of violence (specifically, rape) as the cutting edge of primitive
subordination, and Shapiro gives us an analysis of sexual hierarchies
among a tribal people in which male domination proceeds through kinship
exchanges. As Webster, Shapiro, and Johnson remind us, we have
enormous emotional, political, and scientific investments in the continued
debate on sexual symmetry.3 I see the debate continuing in two
directions: (1) historical; and (2) focusing on a small number of contemporary
cultures, the better to investigate the ambiguous nature of
specific contexts of sexual subordination.
Some feminist anthropologists have returned to Engels's classic
work, The Origin of the Family, Private Propertyand the State (1884), in
which the rise of civilization is related to the increasing subjugation of
women. His argument provides a model for the origin of gender hierarchies
along with class formation. The intertwining of class and gender
can be examined in modern archaeological research on state origins and
in the ethnohistorical reconstructions of protostates and early civilizamentioned
are Alice Schlegel, ed., Sexual Stratification:A Cross-culturalView (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1977); Directoryof ResearchInterests(Austin, Tex.: Conference
for Women in Anthropology, 1978); Ruth S. Freed, Stanley A. Freed, and Susannah A.
Clark, "Male and Female Anthropologists," Annals of theNew YorkAcademyof Sciences293
(July 1977): 25-50; and the magazine Human Nature, vol. 1 (1978). Bibliographies include
Hamideh Sedghi, "Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Women in the Third
World,"ReadingLists in RadicalPoliticalEconomics3 (Winter 1977): 89-90; Heidi Hartmann
and Rayna Rapp Reiter, "The Cultural and Economic Roots of Women's Status," ibid., pp.
90-97; Meri Knaster, Womenin SpanishAmerica:An AnnotatedBibliographyfromPre-Conquest
to ContemporaryTimes (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1977); Beatrice Medicine, "The Role of
Women in Native American Societies: A Bibliography," Indian Historian 8, no. 3 (1975):
50-53; Elizabeth Weatherford, "Women's Traditional Arts: A Bibliography," Heresies1,no.
4 (Winter 1978): 124-25; "Women in the South: A Bibliography," SouthernExposure4, no.
4 (Winter 1977): 98-103; and Jocelyn Murray, "Women in Africa: A Select Bibliography,"
Rural Africana, no. 29 (Winter 1975-76), pp. 215-29.
2. Eleanor Leacock, "Women in Egalitarian Societies," in BecomingVisible:Womenin
European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1977).
3. Paula Webster, "The Politics of Rape in Primitive Societies," MichiganDiscussionsin
Anthropology 3 (Fall 1977): 99-106; Judith Shapiro, "Sexual Hierarchy among the
Yanomama," in Sexand Classin LatinAmerica,ed. June Nash and Helen I. Safa (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1976); Patricia Johnson, "A Note on Egalitarian Societies," Michigan
Discussionsin Anthropology3 (Fall 1977): 107-9.
498 Rapp
Spring 1979 499
tions. The methodological problems of such research are discussed in
my own work, which contrasts the questions archaeologists and anthropologists
have traditionally asked with those that feminists pose in
order to update Engels's problematic. We need to focus on changing
relations of kinship, cosmologies, warfare, and trade if we are to understand
how civilizational processes affected women.4 Ortner suggests an
intriguing relationship between the rise of archaic civilizations, marriage
systems, and the symbolic use of women's sexual purity to represent
interclass relations.5 Silverblatt's research on the Inca Empire shows us
how indigenous cosmologies divided female and male domains and deities.
As the empire expanded, sexual parallelism was redefined.
Femaleness was equated with conquered communities, while maleness
stood for the Inca rulers in religion and in marriage alliances.6 Nash
discusses the layering over of androgynous or bisexual gods by male
deities in the spread of the Aztec Empire, and Barstow provides an
interpretation of female religious iconography in neolithic archaeology.7
Rohrlich-Leavitt's comparison of Crete and Sumer uses archaeological
and written records to theorize the origin of male-dominant material
and institutional relations, and Muller presents a reconstruction of the
transition from chiefdoms to military states in Wales.8 Gailey's work on
Tonga in Oceania reveals a stratified, kin-based society in the process of
class formation.9 The historic contexts of state formation, especially its
ideological legitimation via religious systems that redefine male/female
relations, seem especially fruitful areas for future research.
Other researchers continue to explore sexual asymmetry or complementarity
in more contemporary groups. For example, Schlegel's
work on male/female symbolic domains among the Hopi analyzes the
interpenetration of kinship, political, and ritual contexts. In the ideological
relations between life-giving and life-taking forces, she sees the complementary
roles of male and female as equally valued.10 Nelson's study
of six native American Indian groups develops a typology of female
sodalities and compares the economic and social relations which foster
4. Rayna Rapp, "Gender and Class: An Archaeology of Knowledge concerning the
Origin of the State," DialecticalAnthropology2, no. 4 (December 1977): 309-16.
5. Sherry B. Ortner, "The Virgin and the State,"MichiganDiscussionsin Anthropology2
(Fall 1976): 1-24; reprinted in FeministStudies, vol. 4, no. 3 (October 1978).
6. Irene Silverblatt, "Andean Women: Gender and the Origin of the State," Feminist
Studies, vol. 4, no. 3 (October 1978).
7. June Nash, "The Aztecs and the Ideology of Male Dominance," Signs 4, no. 2
(Winter 1978): 349-62; Ann Barstow, "The Uses of Neolithic Archaeology for Women's
Prehistory," FeministStudies, vol. 4, no. 3 (October 1978).
8. Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt, "Women in Transition: Crete and Sumer," in Bridenthal
and Koonz; Viana Muller, "The Formation of the State and the Oppression of Women,"
Review of Radical Political Economics9, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 7-21.
9. Christine Gailey, "Women and the State in Tonga," DialecticalAnthropology,vol. 3,
no. 4 (Winter 1978).
10. Alice Schlegel, "Male and Female in Hopi Thought and Action," in Schlegel.
Signs
Review:Anthropology
female organization among them.11 Gender "status" is neither unitary
nor is it necessarily expressed similarly among cultures anthropologists
have grouped as similar. Examination of variations in a specific culture
may yield complex results.
For example, Sutton and Makiesky-Barrow attributed the sexual
egalitarianism they found in Barbados to an overlap between domestic
and community relations which permits a positive evaluation of female
sexuality and motherhood by both women and men. Additionally, slavery
deterred the development of differences in female/male economic
participation at the same time that race/class stratification kept dominant
(white) ideologies (including that of male superiority) from penetrating
popular culture.'2 Moses analyzes a neighboring island's cultural expressions
of male dominance. In Montserrat, middle-class women internalize
the ideology of male dominance more thoroughly than do working-class
women. But, in each generation, the working women most likely to have
to support themselves economically without male aid in their childbearing
years reproduce gender relations in which boys do not expect to aid
their wives and lovers in householding.13 Gender and class experiences
vary subtly, and we cannot speak easily of one form of "male dominance"
or "female autonomy" in such situations. Lewis's review of the literature
on Afro-American family and sex-role socialization suggests that age and
birth order, rather than gender polarities, are stressed for AfroAmericans.
Socialization for nonpolarity contradicts later experiences of
race/class stratification.14 Taken together, the three articles move us
away from a unitary discussion of gender as either egalitarian or hierarchical.
We are realizing the need for more subtle understandings of the
variety of female experiences both within and between cultures.
This search for analysis of more finely delineated female experience
informs a new use of the life cycle and the developmental cycle of
domestic groups. According to Lamphere, women's domestic strategies
may vary from those of men, depending on the relative autonomy or
merger of domestic and political arenas. Gmelch reminds us that women
may gain autonomy or power at different points in their life cycles from
men.15 These concerns are carried forward as foci in a number of new
11. Ann Thrift Nelson, "Women in Groups: Women's Ritual Sodalities in Native
North America," WesternCanadianJournal of Anthropology6, no. 3 (1976): 29-67.
12. Constance Sutton and Susan Makiesky-Barrow, "Social Inequality and Sexual
Status in Barbados," in Schlegel, Sexual Stratification.
13. Yolanda T. Moses, "Female Status, the Family, and Male Dominance in a West
Indian Community," Signs 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 142-51.
14. Diane K. Lewis, "The Black Family: Socialization and Sex Roles,"Phylon 36, no. 3
(Fall 1975): 221-37.
15. Louise Lamphere, "Strategies, Cooperation and Conflict among Women in
Domestic Groups," in Women,Cultureand Society, ed. Michele Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974); Sharon Bohn Gmelch, "Eco-
500 Rapp
Spring 1979 501
ethnographies and articles. Kelley relates the life histories of four Yaqui
women to the social and political events which shaped Yaqui culture, and
Bunster locates a female Mapuche leader in both the familial characteristics
and the historic experiences of her people in Chilean political life.16
Shostak emphasizes girlhood and early sexuality in her life history of a
!Kung woman; Jones and Jones analyze the relative marital independence
of Limbu women; and Roy's ethnography of Bengali women reveals
the affective relations in families of orientation and procreation.
Chamberlain's portrait of fenwomen in an English village illustrates the
consistency of their lives from youth to old age.17 Such a method does
not contribute to a new theory of women, but it provides better descriptions
of the cultural evaluation of sexuality, marriage, and women's perceptions
of other women as well as of men.
A "slice of life" approach, linking women's domestic experiences to
changing political-economic relations, is found in Elmendorf's description
of the village lives of a group of related Mayan women, Corelisen's
moving portrait of five women of a South Italian town, and the reprinted
edition of Hagood's 1939 study of North Carolina's white tenant-farm
women.l8 In each, a region's cultural context and economic hardships
are explored through the eyes of the women who make their lives in it.
The similarities and differences between women's and men's lives
are still the subject of much methodological searching. Weiner's ethnography
of the Trobriand Islanders from the female perspective is written
in continuous dialogue with the ghost of Malinowski. Treading his turf,
she inverted the life cycle and began by analyzing mortuary rituals in
which women's exchange networks are central. In the process, she developed
a theory of Trobriand matrilineality based on exchange and
symbolic regeneration. Weiner's restudy of Malinowski's classic, malecentered
ethnography is enormously valuable for its new data, new
theory, and the lesson in the limitations of male-centered
nomic and Power Relations among Urban Tinkers: The Role of Women," Urban Anthropology6,
no. 3 (Fall 1977): 237-47.
16. Jane Holden Kelley, YaquiWomen:ContemporaryLife Histories(Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1978); Ximena Bunster, "The Emergence of a Mapuche Leader:
Chile," in Nash and Safa (n. 3 above).
17. Marjorie Shostak, "Memories of a !Kung Girlhood," in KalahariHunter-Gatherers:
Studiesof the !Kung San and TheirNeighbors,ed. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), reprinted in Human Nature 1, no. 4 (June
1978): 80-88; Rex L. Jones and Shirley Kurz Jones, The Himalayan Woman (Palo Alto,
Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1976); Manisha Roy, Bengali Women(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1975); Mary Chamberlain, Fenwomen(London: Virago, 1975; distributed
in the United States by Horizon Press, New York).
18. Mary Lindsay Elmendorf, Nine Mayan Women(New York: Schenkman Publishing
Co., 1976); Ann Cornelisen, Womenof the Shadows (New York: Vintage Books, 1977);
Margaret Jarman Hagood, Mothersof theSouth (1939; reprint ed. New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., 1977).
Signs
Review: Anthropology
methodologies.19 A final contribution to methodology is made in Bunster's
"talking pictures," a description of use offoto-novela materials developed
to interview 200 working mothers in Lima, Peru.20 Responses to
photographs depicting pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood
were particularly revealing. Current discussions of demography and
underdevelopment too often tend to cost-account children without
exploring the subjective elements of alienation and productivity that
childbearing raises for many women.
Feminist researchers exploring biosocial questions can provide a
context for this theme. New interpretations of the biological basis for
human evolution are offered by Leibowitz in her introductory text,
Females, Males, Families: A Biosocial Approach. Half the book is devoted to
an examination of sex in nature and the evolution of sex differences
among primates. Leibowitz separates the notion of sex role from genetic
determination and variation.21 Lancaster stresses the importance of carrying
and sharing behaviors as central to hominid adaptation. Home
bases and interdependence of the sexes, rather than male hunting, become
keys to deciphering human evolution.22 Zihlman and Zihlman and
Tanner offer a critique of the centrality of hunting in human evolution,
which they see as having late origins. It is from mother-child and sibling
sharing that Zihlman derives protokinship and early economic relations.
Using the logic and data of contemporary physical anthropology, she
again raises questions of "the origin of the family" and "primitive promiscuity"
which so distressed nineteenth-century social theorists.23 While
these authors differ in their methodologies (notably, the value of a
sociobiological approach), they show us that female biology (the mothering
of neotenous offspring) has always had a social context (the sharing
of gathered foods and group socialization).
Exploration of the cultural contexts of female biological experiences
is central to other studies, which examine female sexuality and re-
19. Annette Weiner, Womenof Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectiveson Trobriand
Exchange (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).
20. Ximena Bunster B., "Talking Pictures: Field Method and Visual Mode," Signs 3,
no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 278-93.
21. Leibowitz (n. 1 above). The second half of the book focuses on varieties of human
families.
22. Jane Lancaster, "Carrying and Sharing in Human Evolution," Human Nature 1,
no. 2 (February 1978): 82-89. See also Jane Lancaster, PrimateBehaviorand theEmergenceof
Human Culture (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975).
23. Adrienne L. Zihlman, "Women in Evolution, Part II: Subsistence and Social Organization
among Early Hominids," Signs 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 4-20; Adrienne L.
Zihlman and Nancy Tanner, "Gathering and the Hominid Adaptation," in FemaleHierarchies,
ed. L. Tiger and B. Fowler (Chicago: Aldine, 1978); Adrienne L. Zihlman, "Motherhood
in Transition: From Ape to Human," in The First Child and FamilyFormation, ed.
Warren B. Miller and Lucile F. Newman (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Carolina Population Center,
1978).
502 Rapp
Spring 1979 503
productive experience in search of the social construction of gender
identity. Such works show that biology itself is mute; it speaks only
through cultural constructions that people make of their experiences.
When we look cross-culturally, sexuality takes on expanded meanings.
Meigs, reporting on the Hua, a New Guinea Highland group characterized
by elaborate sexual oppositions, finds two schemes by which their
apparent gender antagonisms are mediated. One is through imitative,
envious behavior. Males express disgust at menstruation and childbirth,
but they symbolically appropriate both processes. Women eat maleassociated
foods to take on the dry, infertile characteristics of men when
they want to reduce menstrual flow or inhibit fertility. Such crossgendered
appropriation is one way to resolve symbolic sexual antagonism.
For the Hua, another way also exists. The concept of pollution
(widely reported to pertain to sexual and other bodily excretions in New
Guinea) is here conceptualized as an amount of gender which can flow
between males and females and between the old and the young. After
sufficient sexual intercourse and childbearing (which release pollution
onto men and children), older women can become social men, and,
conversely, older men can become social women. "Such a view permits
most persons to experience both genders before they die."24The example
of the Hua alerts us to the need to understand not only sexual
oppositions and resolutions but, again, the subtle and changing nature
of gender throughout the life cycle.
Newman explores "the lived body" for women in different cultures
by comparing the experiences of first menstruation and first childbirth
in India and the United States. In both cultures, women's self-concept is
conditioned by domestic and public evaluation of her reproductive processes.25
In addition, Dougherty studies black rural American girls
raised in strongly woman-centered descent groups and networks. Adolescent
sexuality for this subcultural group is playful and relaxed. Girls
are not pushed into marriage, but into the life crisis of pregnancy, from
which they emerge as adult women. Though older women supervise this
transition, the girls have a great deal of latitude in choosing their own
maturation, depending on what they do with babies and courting
partners after the birth.26There is evidently extensive subcultural variation
in the culture of sexuality which needs investigation.
Jordan's monograph, Birth in Four Cultures, gives us our first
participant-observer ethnography of childbirth. Trained by a Mayan
24. Anna S. Meigs, "Male Pregnancy and the Reduction of Sexual Opposition in a
New Guinea Highlands Society," Ethnology 15, no. 4 (October 1976): 393-407, quotation
from p. 406.
25. Lucile F. Newman, "Symbolism and Status Change: Fertility and the First Child in
India and the United States," in Miller and Newman.
26. Molly C. Dougherty, Becominga Womanin Rural Black Culture (New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, 1978).
Signs
Review:Anthropology
(Mexican) midwife, Jordan and her colleague Fuller observed and
worked delivering babies. The data from the Yucatan are compared with
information on the United States, Holland, and Sweden, and a set of
ecological, sociological, and symbolic relations is presented for each
birthing system.27 As Jordan points out, continuities and changes in
birth systems should neither be romanticized nor evaluated independently
of the political-economic relations in which they are em-
bedded.
Changing political and economic relations in traditional societies are
the topic of most new studies in the anthropology of women.28 Many
anthropologists writing on development subscribe to Boserup's nowclassic
model. In Women'sRole in EconomicDevelopment,she outlines the
detrimental effects which colonialism and then schemes for "modernization"
have had on the female populations of Subsaharan Africa, Southeast
Asia, and Latin America.29 Her model of underdevelopment for
women is illustrated in case histories from the Vicos project in Peru,
among Ghanaian women, and in the continuing analysis of the Igbo
Women's War in Nigeria (1929).30 Awe presents the history of female
political and ritual leaders among the precolonial Yoruba, and Okonjo
analyzes women's political institutions in traditional Igbo communities of
27. Brigitte Jordan, Birth in Four Cultures (Montreal: Eden Press, 1978), quotation
from p. 73.
28. Recent overviews of women and development are found in Irene Tinker and
Michele Bo Bramsen, eds., Womenand WorldDevelopment(Washington, D.C.: Overseas
Development Council, American Academy for the Advancement of Science, 1976); Elise
Boulding, Womenin theTwentiethCenturyWorld,pts. 1 and 2 (New York: Sage Publications,
1977; distributed by Halstead Press); Womenand National Development(special issue), Signs,
vol. 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1977); WomenandDevelopment:A WingspreadWorkshop(Racine, Wis.:
Johnson Foundation, 1976). Area overviews are available for Africa in Nancy J. Hafkin
and Edna G. Bay, eds., Womenin Africa: Studiesin Social and EconomicChange (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976), esp. Leith Mullings, "Women and Economic
Change in Africa"; Rural Women:Developmentor Underdevelopment?(special issue), Rural
Africana, no. 29 (Winter 1975-76), esp. Audrey Wipper, "Introduction: The Underside of
Development"; Nancy Leis, "West African Women and the Colonial Experience," Western
CanadianJournal of Anthropology6, no. 3 (1976): 123-32. For Latin America, see Nash and
Safa, eds. (n. 3 above), esp. June Nash, "A Critique of Social Science Roles in Latin
America"; "Women and Class Struggle" and "Women in Revolution" (special issues), Latin
AmericanPerspectives,vol. 4, nos. 1-2 and 4 (1977).
29. Ester Boserup, Women'sRole in EconomicDevelopment(London: Allen & Unwin,
1970; New York: St. Martin's Press).
30. Florence E. Babb, The Developmentof Sexual Inequality in Vicos, Peru, Special
Studies, no. 83 (Buffalo: Council on International Studies, State University of New York at
Buffalo, 1976); Audrey Chapman Smock, "The Impact of Modernization on Women's
Position in the Family in Ghana" in Schlegel, Sexual Stratification(n. 1 above). Judith Van
Allen, " 'Aba Riots' or Igbo 'Women's War'? Ideology, Stratification and the Invisibility of
Women," in Hafkin and Bay. See also Judith Van Allen, "'Sitting on a Man': Colonialism
and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women," CanadianJournal of African Studies 6
(1972): 165-80.
504 Rapp
Spring 1979 505
Midwestern Nigeria.31 What she labels "the dual-sex political system"
was extremely widespread in much of the precolonial tribal world, especially
in West Africa. A system of parallel social institutions grew out of
women's community, work, and ritual relations with one another (initiation
societies, age grades, title groups, marketing associations). Men had
their own organizations. Gender-specific groups were often linked ritually.
From an examination of gender-linked parallel social organization,
we learn that an analysis which begins with the male-female dyad may
not express the most central social or economic relations in which people
participate. The "nuclear family" only exists in a larger cultural context,
in these cases provided by gender, community, and often nationwide
associational forms. Such community and gender-based organizations
are often casualties of colonial penetration. Women then become more
dependent on men, and sexual antagonisms probably increase. This is
excellently illustrated in another case history by Etienne, who traces
women's loss of control over the cloth trade among the Baule of the
Ivory Coast. Her analysis includes not only the transformation of
production-distribution relations, but an explicit discussion of how a
sexually parallel system broke down.32 For Native American groups,
Rothenberg documents the rising "cultural conservatism" of Seneca
women after their land rights and political influence were threatened,
and Brown describes the deterioration of marital relations between
European men and native women in nineteenth-century Northwest
Canada.33 Colonial and imperial incursions are not simply "economic."
They reorganize many aspects of social relations and cultural meanings,
which in turn affect gender relations.
But changes brought about by colonialism, or, later, capitalist productive
relations, are not automatically detrimental to women. Deere
analyzes a transition from servile to wage-earning capitalist relations
among Peruvian hacienda women which is clearly beneficial.34 Nor can
we assume that colonialism affected all women in a given culture in the
31. Bolanle Awe, "The Iyalode in the Traditional Yoruba Political System," in
Schlegel, Sexual Stratification;Kamene Okonjo, "The Dual-Sex Political System in Operation:
Igbo Women and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria," in Hafkin and Bay.
32. Mona Etienne, "Women and Men, Cloth and Colonization: The Transformation
of Production-Distribution Relations among the Baule (Ivory Coast)," Cahiersdetudes africaines
65, no. 1 (1977): 41-64.
33. Diane Rothenberg, "Erosion of Power: An Economic Basis for the Selective Conservatism
of Seneca Women in the Nineteenth Century," WesternCanadianJournal of Anthropology6,
no. 3 (1976): 106-22; Jennifer S. H. Brown, "Changing Views of Fur Trade
Marriage and Domesticity," ibid., pp. 92-105.
34. Carmen Diana Deere, "Changing Social Relations of Production and Peruvian
Peasant Women's Work," Latin AmericanPerspectives4, nos. 1 and 2 (Winter 1977): 38-47.
See also Carmen Diana Deere, "Rural Women's Subsistence Production in the Capitalist
Periphery," Review of Radical Political Economics8, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 9-17.
Signs
Review:Anthropology
same way. Burkett contrasts the different experiences by class and race
of the female population in early colonial Peru, where some women were
more adversely affected than others by Hispanic sexual asymmetry.35
Our search for the cultural evaluation of women has sometimes led
us to underestimate the diverse experiences women have as members of
their class. In the Javanese village which Stoler studied, women linked by
bonds of neighborhood and kinship "exchange" labor in one another's
harvest, but they do so unequally. The potential horizontal unity of
women as givers and takers of labor is cut by the vertical disparity between
land-wealthy and land-poor households.36 In a similar vein, Kershaw
shows why husband/wife relations are different for landed and
less-landed households of Kikuyu (Kenya) farmers, and the Sanjeks give
us a case of class differentiation among marketing women in a Ghanaian
city.37The complex interpenetration of gender and class stratification is
also presented in three articles concerning female servants in Colombia,
Italy, and Hong Kong, where servile relations as well as female/male
relations are changing in response to a labor market which is ultimately
worldwide.38
Gender stratification is easily carried over into new modes of productive
relations, as case histories from Tanzania show. "Socialist villages"
often maintain inequities in access to and control of land. A
former division of labor-men doing cash cropping, women providing
household food-is reproduced under collective development.39 We
must pay careful attention to household relations of production and
consumption to understand how gender inequalities are reproduced in
socialist societies dedicated to an ideology of female/male equality.
Weinbaum's analysis of the Chinese case begins in the household, where
income pooling masks inequalities between men and women in the paid
labor force. Men work in the state (higher-paid) and women in the
collective (lower-paid) sectors. Division of labor by sex corresponds to
35. Elinor C. Burkett, "In Dubious Sisterhood: Class and Sex in Spanish Colonial
South America," Latin AmericanPerspectives4, nos. 1 and 2 (Winter 1977): 18-26.
36. Ann Stoler, "Class Structure and Female Autonomy in Rural Java,"Signs 3, no. 1
(Autumn 1977): 74-89.
37. Greet Kershaw, "The Changing Roles of Men and Women in the Kikuyu Family
by Socioeconomic Strata," Rural Africana, no. 29 (Winter 1975-76), pp. 173-94; Roger
Sanjek and Lani Morioka Sanjek, "Notes on Women and Work in Adabraka,"AfricanUrban
Notes 2, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 1-26.
38. Anna Rubbo and Michael Tausig, "Up off Their Knees: Servanthood in Southwest
Colombia," MichiganDiscussionsin Anthropology3 (Fall 1977): 41-65; Susan Berkowitz
Luton, "Female Servants in Southern Italy: The Changing Configuration of Honor and
Power," ibid., pp. 66-86; Andrea Sankar, "Female Domestic Service in Hong Kong," ibid.,
pp. 87-98.
39. Birgit Storgaard, "Women in Ujamaa Villages," Rural Africana, no. 29 (Winter
1975-76), pp. 135-36. See also James L. Brain, "Less than Second-Class: Women in Rural
Settlement Schemes in Tanzania," in Schlegel, Sexual Stratification.
506 Rapp
Spring 1979 507
unequal returns to labor, and this is both hidden and becomes the motor
force on which household economies operate.40 According to Bossen,
male/female income differences in Guatemala City allow households to
provide a labor reserve which responds rapidly to changing economic
conditions. Gender divisions then work against class solidarity.41 My own
work focuses on how relations of production and reproduction are constructed
within households for different classes in the contemporary
United States. The seemingly private experiences of different families
mask the shared experiences of households reproducing class re-
lations.42
Much recent Marxist work on women discusses relations of reproduction
and production which articulate households to larger economic
processes. A major work on the subject-Meillassoux's Femmes,
greniers et capitaux-is still only available in its original French, but reviews
and responses to the book make its arguments accessible to
English-speaking readers.43 Reduced, Meillassoux's argument is this:
Horticultural communities organize themselves around relations between
generations and across genders. Such relations of reproduction
require the control of women, whose precious fertility must be made
demographically available. Exchange of women is elaborated into a
complex ideology justifying authority of the male elders of the tribe.
Domestic communities, organized through relations of reproduction,
become a pool of cheap labor power once colonialism and later forms of
capitalism penetrate them. The argument is a complex one, both valuable
and deeply flawed. As Edholm, Harris, and Young point out, the
term "reproduction" is ambiguous and covers three different topics:
demography (having babies), maintenance of existent laborers (household
and subsistence work), and all relations outside productive relations
40. Batya Weinbaum, "Women in Transition to Socialism: Perspectives on the
Chinese Case," Radical Review of Political Economics8, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 34-58. See also
Batya Weinbaum, "Redefining the Question of Revolution," Review of Radical Political
Economics9, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 54-78.
41. Laurel Bossen, "Household Work Patterns in an Urban Shantytown in
Guatemala," WesternCanadianJournal of Anthropology6, no. 3 (1976): 270-76.
42. Rayna Rapp, "Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes toward an
Understanding of Ideology," MichiganPapersin Women'sStudies (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1978), reprinted in Scienceand Society42, no. 3 (1978): 278-300.
43. Claude Meillassoux, Femmes,grenierset capitaux (Paris: Maspero, 1975). The book
is reviewed by Bridget O'Laughlin, Critiqueof Anthropology2, no. 8 (Spring 1977): 3-32;
Maureen Macintosh, Capital and Class 1, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 119-27; Rayna Rapp,
DialecticalAnthropology2, no. 4 (December 1977): 317-23. It is discussed and utilized in
Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris, and Kate Young, "Conceptualising Women," Critiqueof
Anthropology 3, nos. 9 and 10 (Winter 1977): 101-30; and Peter Aaby, "Engels and
Women," ibid., pp. 25-54. Jack Goody (Productionand Reproduction:A ComparativeStudyof
theDomesticDomain [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976]) provides
an analysis of Eurasia compared to Africa in terms of transmission of property, but
does not discuss relations of reproduction.
Signs
Review: Anthropology
which are required to maintain the entire capitalist mode. To sort out
relations of reproduction so that they are neither reduced to biological
imperatives nor made a cover for functionalism (e.g., "babies are reproduced
for capitalism because the mode of production requires wagelaborers")
is the task which lies ahead of us.
Many feminist anthropologists continue to explore ideologies of
sexual stratification which assign women to domestic, or private, and
men to public, or politicized, domains. The domestic/public dichotomy
has often been taken as a description of social reality, rather than as a
cultural statement masking relations which are highly problematic and
expressed ideologically. The distinction between the domestic and the
public has long existed in the anthropological literature, but it was
Rosaldo who engendered it and theorized a universal separation between
the activities and symbolic values of females and males, spatially as
well as hierarchically organized.44 Others inverted the scheme, carving
out arenas for female power allegedly based in the domestic sphere.45
The dichotomy is sometimes criticized as falsely universal.46Debate over
the scheme and its application is continuous and highly productive.
The domestic/public distinction is used to legitimize the investigation
of social relations among women and, then, between women and
men. The Fallerses, for example, use the model to present their data on
sex roles in a Turkish town. Extreme sex segregation creates a women's
world in which female-centered kinship networks and rituals exist. A
parallel world is pictured for men.47 The "safety nets" which Moroccan
women construct through patron-client relations, the fostering of children,
and kinship manipulations all assure mutual obligations for support
among women restricted to the private domain.48 Dwyer describes
the role of the female legal Moroccan intermediary who presides over
jural interactions in which male/female domains must intersect.49
44. Michele Z. Rosaldo, "Woman, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview," in
Rosaldo and Lamphere (n. 15 above). See also Peggy Sanday, "Female Status in the Public
Domain," ibid.
45. Ernestine Friedl, "The Position of Women: Appearance and Reality,"Anthropological
Quarterly40, no. 3 (July 1967): 98-105; Susan Carol Rogers, "Female Forms of Power
and the Myth of Male Dominance: A Model of Female/Male Interaction in Peasant Society,"
AmericanEthnologist2 (1975): 741-54.
46. Eleanor Leacock and June Nash, "Ideologies of Sex: Archetypes and
Stereotypes," Annals of theNew YorkAcademyof Science285 (1977): 618-45; Rogers, "Woman's
Place" (n. 1 above).
47. Lloyd A. Fallers and Margaret C. Fallers, "Sex Roles in Edremit," in Mediterranean
Family Structures,ed. J. G. Peristiany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1976).
48. Vanessa Maher, "Kin, Clients and Accomplices: Relationships among Women in
Morocco," in SexualDivisionsand Society:Processand Change,ed. Diana Leonard Barker and
Sheila Allen (London: Tavistock, 1976).
49. Daisy Hilse Dwyer, "Bridging the Gap between the Sexes in Moroccan Legal
Practice," in Schlegel, Sexual Stratification.
508 Rapp
Spring 1979 509
Women are active, not passive, participants in their social relations,
creating mechanisms for mediating the demands of extreme sex segre-
gation.
Increasingly, researchers play with the paradigm to test its meaning
and limitations. Rogers postulates four possible patterns for behavioral
and ideological differentiation of the sexes, and in only one does she see
female-male spheres as culturally articulated and expressive of power
differences. She feels this pattern characterizes our own culture and is
erroneously pinned on the ethnographic globe.50 Fazel discusses the
conversion of resources between public and private domains among
pastoral nomads in Iran, where women control herds, brideprice, and
goods destined for both market and tribal levies. Yet they are not recognized
as power holders, so what does "public" mean in such a situation?51
Analyzing women and kinship in Sumatra, Jayawardena poses a
definitional problem: women organize interhousehold relations of marriage,
divorce, and production which "expand" into areas classified by
anthropologists as "public."52Sudarkasa feels that many of the political
and economic activities anthropologists discuss as public were inseparably
embedded inside households in precolonial West Africa. It
may be that the public only exists as a sometimes-expansion of the
domestic and is not defined as an exclusive realm of men.53 O'Brien
points out that, for example, in many southern Bantu societies women
become political leaders in part by becoming female husbands. Women
can act in "male" positions, but to do so they give up some amount of
their cultural "womanness."54 Mueller describes women in contemporary
Lesotho as full participants in village-wide activities, without political
power. "Public"is not a concept which describes power between men
and women because it lies beyond the village in South Africa, for which
Lesotho functions as a labor reserve. The public activities of women are
neither exceptional nor politically valuable under apartheid/
imperialism.55 Among the outcast Tinkers Gmelch studied, women are
political brokers with Irish society, but they do not have power in relation
to Tinker men.56 What is "public" and what is "gender" in these
examples?
50. Rogers, "Woman's Place."
51. G. Reza Fazel, "Social and Political Status of Women among Pastoral Nomads:
The Boyr Ahmad of Southwest Iran,"AnthropologicalQuarterly50, no. 2 (1977): 77-88.
52. Chandra Jayawardena, "Women and Kinship in Acheh Besar, Northern
Sumatra," Ethnology 16, no. 1 (1977): 21-38.
53. Niara Sudarkasa, "Female Employment and Family Organization in West Africa,"
in New Researchon Womenand Sex Roles, ed. Dorothy G. McGuigan (Ann Arbor, Mich.:
Center for Continuing Education of Women, 1976).
54. Denise O'Brien, "Female Husbands in Southern Bantu Societies," in Schlegel,
Sexual Stratification.
55. Martha Mueller, "Women and Men, Power and Powerlessness in Lesotho," Signs
3, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 154-66.
56. Gmelch (n. 15 above).
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Review:Anthropology
Such cases warp the tight fit between women/domestic powerlessness
and men/public powerfulness and make us question the universality
of the model. They should alert us to the essentially ideological nature of
the distinctions we are applying. I use the concept of ideology here in a
specific sense. Ideologies are powerful cultural statements which simultaneously
mask and reveal contradictions that grow out of necessary
productive social relations. I do not think that such contradictions are
universal between domestic and public domains. Rather, they are
created in historically specific times and places when resource relations
between households and larger political-economic arenas become problematic.
Where a distinction is made between domestic and public
spheres, it is not the separation of domains, but their problematic interdependencies
I would analyze. For instance, throughout the Middle East
and the Mediterranean, segregation of sexual domains is the subject of
constant comment by both natives and anthropologists. The female domain
appears as a structure to oversee women's sexual purity. The "private"
here is not reducible to a general "domestic": its cultural specificity
is based on control of women's sexuality. As Ortner, Schneider, and
Pitt-Rivers suggest, the politics of sex are inseparably muddled with the
politics of state formation in the Mediterranean. Pitt-Rivers postulates
that a transition out of elementary systems of marriage exchange into a
politicized use of marriage as an idiom of status and power occurred
here.57 Historically, the domestic/public dichotomy has a specific cultural
meaning in light of the sexual politics of state formation.
In other times and places, it may gloss different cultural contradictions
and values. For example, the distinction between domestic
and public in our own cultural experience does not rest on an ideology in
which women's sexual purity is primary. Rather, it is the privatization of
family life that the dichotomy calls forth. The distinction between private
and public corresponds to the distinction between love and
money-one is normatively the subject of the woman-centered family,
the other is the focus of male-centered economic activities. We experience
those domains and activities as distinct, but, of course, they are
interpenetrating. Without secure economic relations ("money"), the
households in which nuclear families are expected to live (for "love")are
hard to form and keep functioning. It is women's job to mediate the
contradictions between love and money in the private domain. Discussing
the literature on woman-centered kinship. Yanagisako analyzes
women's various activities in ministering to intra- and interhousehold
relations. While the work women do is assumed to be an extension of
their biological role ("mothering"), which is done privately (for "love"),
57. Ortner (n. 5 above); Jane Schneider, "Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame
and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Society,"Ethnology 10, no. 1 (1971): 1-24; Julian
Pitt-Rivers, TheFate of Sheckem,orthePoliticsof Sex:Essaysin theAnthropologyof theMediterranean
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), esp. chap. 7.
510 Rapp
Spring 1979 511
the connections women maintain are ideologically charged and quite
political. They allow men to represent the autonomy of the wagedependent
nuclear family unit, while women symbolically absorb the
pressures that contradict that autonomy in extended kinship and neighborhood
relations.58 Our lives embody the cultural contradictions between
social production and private reproduction, between public power
and private powerlessness, in which the symbolic work of mediating the
effects of capitalism on household relations is culturally assigned to
women.59 In the ancient Mediterranean, relations of reproduction were
problematic in the formation of a public (state-organized) domain. In
contemporary America, relations of production are problematic as they
create or deny the possibilities for a private domain. It is tempting to
universalize both as instances of domestic/public dichotomies, but I have
tried to show why they are built out of different cultural contradictions,
each demanding analysis.
We cannot write an accurate history of the West in relation to the
Rest until we stop assuming that our experiences subsume everyone
else's.60Our public/private conflicts are not necessarily the same as those
of other times and places. The specific oppression of women cannot be
documented if our categories are so broad as to decontextualize what
"womanness" means as we struggle to change that definition. A Tanzanian
female farmer, a Mapuche woman leader, and an American
working-class housewife do not live in the same domestic domain, nor
will the social upheavals necessary to give them power over their lives be
the same. We must simultaneously understand the differences and the
similarities, but not by reducing them to one simple pattern.
The final topic in this review concerns the description and evaluation
of female traditions and activities inside the sexually segregated
domains discussed above. With appreciation of the complexities of gender
organization has come a corresponding search for the arts, forms of
knowledge, rituals, and expressive genres which develop in "women's
culture." An overview of women's traditional expressive arts is provided
by Hollister and Weatherford, and Weatherford also surveys women's
contributions to built environments.61 Green provides a short course in
58. Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, "Women-centered Kin Networks in Urban Bilateral
Kinship," AmericanEthnologist 4, no. 2 (1977): 1-19. See also Rayna Rapp, "Family and
Class" (n. 42 above).
59. My thoughts on families and social reproduction have been considerably
sharpened by collaboration with Renate Bridenthal and Ellen Ross, to whom I owe my
thanks. The three of us have jointly authored "Toward a Critique of Family History,"
FeministStudies, vol. 5, no. 1 (February 1979).
60. The phrase is borrowed from Chinweizu, The Westand theRest of Us (New York:
Random House, 1975).
61. Valerie Hollister and Elizabeth Weatherford, "'By the Lakeside There Is an
Echo': Towards a History of Women's Traditional Arts,"Heresies 1, no. 4 (1978): 119-23;
Elizabeth Weatherford, "Women's Traditional Architecture," Heresies 1, no. 2 (May 1977):
35-39.
Signs
Review:Anthropology
traditional Southern women's bawdy lore which teaches women "...
what they can expect in private out of the men and institutions they are
taught to praise in public."62Women's music can reveal contexts and
contradictions in their lives. McLeod and Herndon describe the preservation
of a Maltese song form that is transmitted by women who sing in
public, and Shumsky reports on women's music in the Balkans which
records both the beauty and the hardships of the female life cycle.63
Women's traditions raise fundamental political issues in their
analysis. MacCormack's discussion of the Sande society of Sierra Leone
centers on the ritual relations through which women culturalize their
biological experience. Sande lore and medicine are the collective knowledge
through which older women socialize younger ones.64 Mernissi
reports on female participation at saints' sanctuaries in Morocco, where
woman-centered healing systems are dramatically employed. The value
of female experiences in sanctuaries is great, but Mernissi sees a connection
between the strengths which the rituals encourage and the lack of
progressive movements which might contribute to the eradication of
both "tradition" and oppression.65
When MacCormack and Mernissi delivered their papers at the
Wellesley conference on women and development (1976), the discussion
which followed was both exciting and distressing. The strong collective
tradition which women transmit through the Sande society is based, in
part, on ritual clitoridectomy. In such an example, we are confronted
dramatically with the politics of tradition. Traditions may simultaneously
give strength and provide insulation against radical revisions in women's
often-contradictory position. The limits of cultural relativism are approached
in such cases. As researchers and teachers, our work may
identify women's traditional social relations and may potentially romanticize
relations of oppression as well. The Mexican Indian women Friedlander
studied remain more "Indian" than their men. Their crafts and
rituals are promoted by the Mexican government. Being Indian is
ideologically glorified and materially devalued. It is impossible to speak
only of the traditions women preserve, without simultaneously analyzing
how those traditions set them apart as oppressed. Friedlander provides a
series of women's recipes for traditional foods, explaining the origins of
62. Rayna Green, "Magnolias Grow in Dirt: The Bawdy Lore of Southern Women,"
SouthernExposure4, no. 3-4 (Winter 1977): 29-33.
63. Norma McLeod and Marcia Herndon, "The Bormliza:Maltese Folksong Style and
Women," in Womenand Folklore,ed. Claire R. Farrer (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1975). The book first appeared as a special issue of theJournal ofAmericanFolklore,vol. 88,
no. 347 (1975); Ellen Shumsky, "Women's Songs from the Balkans and Eastern Europe,"
Balkan Arts Traditions3, no. 1 (1977): 14-24.
64. Carol P. MacCormack, "Biological Events and Cultural Control," Signs 3, no. 1
(Autumn 1977): 93-102.
65. Fatima Mernissi, "Women, Saints, and Sanctuaries,"Signs 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1977):
101-12.
512 Rapp
Signs Spring 1979 513
each ingredient and the labor processes needed for each dish. In the
ingredients are reflected Hispanic and Mexican national domination; in
the work processes are reflected the economic burdens of women.66
Such an article raises political questions about identification with the
culture of oppression. As we excavate and legitimize women's history,
social organization, and cultural forms, we must not allow our own need
for models of strong female collectivities to blind us to the dialectic of
tradition. It will be our intellectual as well as political task to separate
these strands as we grow more confident about the existence and value
of female experiences in society and culture.
Anthropology,GraduateFaculty
New Schoolfor Social Research
66. Judith Friedlander, "The Aesthetics of Oppression: Traditional Arts of Women
in Mexico," Heresies 1, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 3-9.