ABSTRACT
Like male social historians, the author borrowed analytical tools from anthropology, sociology, and psychology, but at the same time we remained critical of the insensitivity so many scholars in those disciplines had displayed toward women's experiences and perceptions. The author saw rituals of cohesion not as constructive social dramas but as potentially repressive of legitimate female protest and supportive of male hegemony. It did not take as a statement of inevitability Lvi-Strausss insight that families, and indeed civilization itself, are structured around male traffic in women, rather we transformed it into a fundamental criticism of social structures. The autrhor explores the complex ways language, transposed into myth, and distorts reality, so that what is too conflicted to be spoken directly can nevertheless be said. In Roland Barthess terminology, we became myth decipherers, skeptical of all institutions and processes that presented themselves as natural.
