Perceiving women

The book is a collection of papers. "Belief and the Problem of Women" (Edwin Ardener) was first presented in 1968 and published in 1972.' Some of the other papers developed out of an informal women's seminar in Oxford; all of them were designed for an unofficial session of the Association of Social Anthropologists' Decennial Conference in 1973. From this background comes a volume with unusual collective weight and coherence. The initial paper was clearly a fruitful impetus, and the other contributors have sometimes actualized some of its hypotheses as well as developing them critically. Shirley Ardener's thoughtful Introduction is of characteristic lucidity and careful courtesy. Perhaps modesty hampered her in applying the insights of her own paper, which seeks common features in different female self- models, and a common solution to the problems of articulating them, to the work of her fellow contributors (including her husband, for whose general theoretical position she provides an illuminating gloss). -- From http://www.jstor.org (Sep. 23, 2016).