The Rise of Women’s Studies in Anthropology: Addressing Gender Bias in Research

For most of anthropology’s history, the people behind the research were men, and so were the people they wrote about. Women appeared in ethnographies, but usually in the background, defined by their relationship to husbands, fathers, or sons. In the 1970s, a wave of feminist scholars decided this was a serious problem. They argued that half the human story was missing, and that fixing it would require not just adding women to existing studies but rethinking how anthropology was done. This rethinking is what we now call women’s studies in anthropology, and its influence still shapes how researchers approach gender, culture, and society today.

Why women’s studies emerged in the 1970s 🔗

Anthropology before the 1970s had a quiet but powerful problem: androcentrism, or the habit of treating male experience as the default human experience. Male ethnographers typically interviewed male informants, observed male activities, and then generalised their findings to entire societies. Women’s lives were either ignored or filtered through what men said about them.

The 1970s changed this. As the second-wave feminist movement gained momentum in Western universities, more women entered graduate programmes in the social sciences and began to question the assumptions of their own discipline. A key early intervention was Sally Slocum’s 1970 paper “Woman the Gatherer: The Male Bias in Anthropology,” which challenged the long-standing “Man the Hunter” theory of human evolution. Slocum pointed out that gathering, child-rearing, and food sharing, activities largely performed by women, were just as important to early human survival as hunting.

This critique opened the floodgates. By the mid-1970s, two landmark anthologies, Woman, Culture, and Society (1974) edited by Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, and Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975) edited by Rayna Reiter, had defined a new subfield. According to scholarship from the University of Alabama, this subfield emerged specifically as a reaction to a perceived androcentric bias within the discipline.

What the early feminist anthropologists were trying to fix 🔗

The first generation of feminist anthropologists had three broad aims. First, they wanted to make women visible in ethnographic writing by interviewing female informants directly rather than relying on men to speak for them. Second, they wanted to question the universal claims of earlier studies, asking whether conclusions drawn from male experience really applied to everyone. Third, they wanted to explain why female subordination seemed to appear in so many different societies, even when its specific forms varied widely.

Sherry Ortner and the nature-culture argument 🔗

If there is one essay that defines this early period, it is Sherry B. Ortner’s “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?”, first published in 1972 and later included in Woman, Culture, and Society. Ortner asked a deceptively simple question: why do so many cultures across the world place women in a position secondary to men, even when the details of that subordination look very different from place to place?

Her answer drew on the structuralist tradition of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ortner argued that every human culture distinguishes itself from “nature,” the raw, unshaped world of biology and instinct. Culture is what humans build, language, religion, technology, art, and it is consistently valued above nature, which culture seeks to control. The trouble, Ortner suggested, is that women across societies tend to be symbolically associated with nature, while men are associated with culture.

Why women get linked to nature 🔗

Ortner offered three reasons for this symbolic association. The first is physiology. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation tie women’s bodies more visibly to biological processes than men’s bodies. The second is social role. Because women have historically been responsible for early child-rearing, they are linked to the domestic sphere, where the work of turning “animal-like infants into cultured beings” takes place. The third is psyche. The socialisation of women into nurturing roles is then read backwards as evidence that women are naturally closer to feeling and emotion than to abstract thought.

The crucial move in Ortner’s argument is that women are not actually closer to nature. They participate fully in culture, language, ritual, economic life, knowledge production. But they are perceived as occupying an intermediate position between nature and culture, and that perception becomes the ideological foundation for gender inequality. As Ortner herself later clarified, the universal devaluation of women could be explained by postulating that women are seen as closer to nature than men, with men occupying the higher ground of culture.

The political force of the argument 🔗

Ortner’s essay was politically powerful because it relocated the problem of women’s subordination. Earlier explanations had treated female inequality as either biological destiny or a matter of specific local customs. Ortner argued it was neither: it was a symbolic system, a way of thinking about the world that humans had constructed and could therefore deconstruct. If gender inequality is built on cultural perception rather than biological fact, then changing the perception becomes a legitimate political project.

The critiques that followed 🔗

Ortner’s framework attracted serious criticism almost immediately. Some anthropologists pointed out that the nature-culture binary itself is a Western construct and may not exist in every society. Marilyn Strathern’s research in Melanesia showed that some cultures do not divide the world into “nature” and “culture” at all, which weakens any claim that the binary is universal. Others, particularly anthropologists of colour, argued that Ortner’s framing risked ignoring how race, class, and colonialism shape women’s lives differently in different contexts. Ortner herself revisited her argument in a later essay to respond to these critiques, conceding that male dominance is not uniformly tied to the nature-culture opposition and that genders can hold separate but valued realms of power in different societies.

Even with these criticisms, the essay remains a foundational text. It taught a generation of researchers to ask not just “what do women do?” but “what does this culture say about what women do, and why?”

How women’s studies reshaped contemporary anthropology 🔗

The influence of women’s studies on anthropology runs deeper than the topics researchers choose. It has changed methods, theory, and the very politics of fieldwork.

New methods of fieldwork 🔗

Feminist anthropologists pushed for what is now called feminist ethnography, a research approach that takes women’s voices seriously and treats participants as collaborators rather than data points. According to a teaching resource from CUNY, feminist ethnography emerged as a response to the male-centric voices prevalent in traditional ethnographic studies and aimed to bring women’s voices and experiences to the forefront. In practical terms, this meant longer fieldwork periods, more attention to private and domestic spaces, and a willingness to let women set the research agenda where possible.

New questions and new categories 🔗

By the 1980s, women’s studies in anthropology had broadened into what most scholars now call the anthropology of gender. The shift was important: instead of just studying women, researchers began studying gender as a system of relationships that includes men, women, and other identities. This shift made it possible to ask new questions about masculinity, sexuality, kinship, and power. As scholarship documents, feminist anthropology has unfolded through three historical phases beginning in the 1970s: the anthropology of women, the anthropology of gender, and finally feminist anthropology proper.

Intersectionality and Indian scholarship 🔗

Contemporary feminist anthropology has also absorbed the concept of intersectionality, the recognition that gender always intersects with caste, class, religion, region, and race. This has been particularly important for Indian scholarship, where studying “women” as a single category misses the vast differences between, say, a Dalit agricultural labourer in Bihar and an upper-caste professional in Mumbai. IGNOU’s teaching material on feminist critique of ethnography highlights how Indian feminist anthropologists have used these tools to study widowhood, dowry, female-headed households, and women’s labour in the informal economy.

Influence beyond anthropology 🔗

The methodological innovations of feminist anthropology have spread to neighbouring disciplines. Public health researchers now routinely separate health data by sex to detect gender-specific patterns. Development economists pay closer attention to women’s unpaid labour. Population studies incorporate questions of reproductive autonomy and gendered access to resources. None of this would have been obvious without the persistent work of women’s studies scholars who insisted that gender is not a side topic but a central organising principle of social life.

What remains unfinished 🔗

Women’s studies in anthropology has accomplished a lot in fifty years, but it has not finished its work. Many ethnographic accounts still under-represent women’s voices. Fieldwork environments remain unsafe for many women researchers. And the binary categories of “man” and “woman” themselves are being questioned by newer scholarship on transgender, non-binary, and queer identities. The next generation of feminist anthropologists is taking on these questions while continuing to build on the foundations laid by Ortner, Rosaldo, Lamphere, Reiter, and others.

The broader lesson is methodological humility. Any discipline that studies human beings has to keep asking whose experiences it is centring and whose it is leaving out. Women’s studies showed anthropology how to ask that question, and the question is now a permanent part of the field.

What do you think? If Ortner is right that gender inequality rests on a symbolic association between women and nature, what cultural symbols around you reinforce that link today? And do you think the move from “women’s studies” to “gender studies” has strengthened or diluted the original feminist project?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/83682/1/Unit-14.pdf
2. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/feminist-anthropology/
3. https://markbwilson.com/courses/~readings/~/Ortner_Female-to-Male.pdf
4. https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas112pomonavalentine/chapter/ortner-sherry-b-1974-is-female-to-male-as-nature-is-to-culture/
5. https://tkcraig.wordpress.ncsu.edu/abstract-filing-cabinet/economic-hierarchy/is-female-to-male-as-nature-is-to-culture/
6. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/ethnography-made-simple/section/bda5d09b-35b7-437c-8d9d-8b429e5985a4
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_anthropology