ABSTRACT
The term Gender Studies is a recent innovation in anthropological discourse, while sex roles and relationships were a traditional subject of investigation even before Malinowski's study of kinship and sex in the Trobriands, Ten years later, Phyllis Kaberry published her Australian Aboriginal Woman, Sacred and Profane. In 1968 Edwin Ardener wrote a paper on 'Belief and the Problems of Women'. First delivered in Phyllis Kaberry's seminar in London, it was appropriately published in a Festschrift for Audrey Richards in 1972, edited in turn by Jean La Fontaine. Womens' liberation as an aggressive egalitarian movement began in the 1960s in America, whence it later spread to Britain. An early result in the United States was to stimulate a lecture course on women at Stanford in 1971. In retrospect 1970 seems to have been a turning-point, after which came a regular stream of writing – some would call it a flood – by women on women.
