ABSTRACT
Difference, in general, whether cultural, ethnic, or racial, has been a stumbling block for Western social science from its very inception. Nineteenth-century European ethnology and anthropology were established precisely to study different peoples and their institutions. However, regardless of the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological inadequacies and uncertainties in the works of many classical anthropologists and ethnologists, their interest in "difference" was a function of their desire to understand their own institutions better. Contemporary academic feminism appears to have forgotten this part of its intellectual heritage. There is a great continuity in the US feminist treatment of difference within gender whether the difference is within or outside of US society. The political bias in these representations of difference is best illustrated by the search of many feminists for the sensational and the uncouth. Feminism has provided a forum for these women to express themselves and on occasion for them to vent their anger at their societies.
