ABSTRACT
Until recently women have been as invisible in geography as they have in history; there is a general recognition that they exist, but few efforts have been made to investigate the particular contributions they have made. Social sciences in general have been concerned with “man”; the use of that word, despite claims to the contrary, does imply the assumption of a male norm. Those institutions that express, or seem to express, a dominant male role are taken as expressive of the whole order of society, while women are assumed either to have no distinct role or to be in a state of continuous adjustment to this male-dominated and male-determined order. While this assumption may reflect the truth at many times and in many places, it by no means reflects the only truth. Women occupy space just as much as men do; with few and insignificant exceptions, they are found everywhere that men are found. But almost everywhere women's lives are different in nature from men's; their relations to the earth, to its resources, and to the productive systems that people have evolved for making use of those resources, are not the same as, nor even parallel with, those of men. For this reason it is useful to see women as forming a distinct geographical force. It is the purpose of this essay to outline some of the general elements of a geography of women, and to present some tentative ideas which might be useful in the further development of this area of study.
