ABSTRACT
The problem of women has not been solved by social anthropologists. Indeed the problem itself has been often examined only to be put aside again for want of a solution, for its intractability is genuine. The problem of women is not the problem of 'the position of women', although valuable attention has been paid to this subject by Professor Evans-Pritchard (1965). I refer to the problem that women present to social anthropologists. It falls into (I) a technical and (2) an analytical part. Here is a human group that forms about half of any population and is even in a majority at certain ages: particularly at those which for so many societies are the 'ruling' ages - the years after forty. Yet however apparently competently the female population has been studied in any particular society, the results in understanding are surprisingly slight, and even tedious. With rare exceptions, women anthropologists, of whom so much was hoped, have been among the first to retire from the problem. Dr Richards was one of the few to return to it at tIle height of her powers. In Chisungu (1956) she produced a study of a girls' rite that raised and anticipated many of the problems with which this paper will deal.! While I shall illustrate my central point by reference to a parallel set of rites anlong the Bakweri of Cameroon, through which women and girls join the \vorld of the mermaid spirits, this paper is less about ethnography than about the interpretation of such rites
through the symbolism of the relations between men and women.
