So I got involved in feminism, into feminism
in two ways.
One was through local groups - consciousness
raising groups, book-reading groups - with
women who were in kind of the same boat as
me, they weren’t anthropologists, but they’d
all got degrees, and they’d got children
the same age as mine, and so that was one
thing.
But on the other side several of us formed
the London Women’s Anthropology Group, which
met for a number of years, and produced a
collection at one stage, and ran a few conferences,
and that was very, very important, because
we talked about anthropology, and we began
to realise some of the kind of biases that
it had built in, although, I suppose if I’d
thought about it, which I didn’t very much,
anthropology was attractive as a career, because
there were some women who’d clearly made
it.
When you actually looked at what kind of recognition
they’d had, we began to realise that for
example, Margaret Mead never had a tenured
post.
Audrey Richards, who was also a pioneer anthropologist,
never got a professorship, and so on and so
forth.
So that there were limitations, and it was
much harder to do whatever you wanted to do.
So that was very, very important for me, being
involved in that group, and really re-thinking
who I was, what I was, what it meant being
a woman anthropologist, and so when I started
to think about what I would do on the next
research project, I wanted to do something
connected with gender, or “women” I suppose
we would have called it, in those days.
And we had the very strong feeling that women
were under-represented, not only in the profession,
but also as subjects for study in both sociology
and anthropology.
