Anthropological Studies on Women's Status

on female an­ thropologists in this country. Apart from their personal interest in women's status, the movement itself has cast them in the key intellectual role of defining women's place in a revised theory of the evolution of human society. Beginning in the early 19 70s and rising to a current crescendo of books and articles, anthropologists represe nting all theoretical persuasions, most of them American and most of them women, have produced an entire new literature on the status of women cross­ culturally. This literature has proliferated so rapidly that apparently competing views, and in some cases compatible and mutually supporting ones, have gone unacknowledged; publication dates of some works are virtually simultaneous. The result is a bewildering number