ABSTRACT
Weinbaum notes that the actual patriarchal relations of Romany culture belie much of the mythology surrounding gypsy women and their social and sexual freedom. Gypsy women are generally married and place a great deal of value on having and rearing children. Gypsy women function ontologically outside the main registers of the capitalist economy. Emerging as the feudal system collapses and previously sedentary populations are released into flows across Europe, the reintroduction of the gypsy as iconic in the mid-1970s occurs just as capitalism makes a new shift in production releasing new flows of immigration, but now on a global level. Weinbaum, however, argues that Oakley has missed both the intelligence and agency of gypsy women in their practice of fortune telling and reiterates the anti-mystical bias of European culture. She notes how this kind of rationalistic, anti-mystical thinking was developed in the absence of indigenous culture and women's ways of knowing.
