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defined and seemingly vague, possibly repressed, alternative ideas
which women may have about the world."
I
Some militant work
came out of this period, with feminist anthropologists hot on the trail
of a postulated matriarchal past and volumes of work being done on
alternate interpretations of menstrual taboos, segregation practices
and prevailing divisions of labor.
But recently, the pendulum has seemed to be swinging back
again. I had been noticing over the past few years that some rather
puzzling hypotheses were being forwarded by female anthropologists;
hypotheses that made me suspect Phyllis Schlafly had taken over the
anthropology departments of a few leading universities. This was
underscored for me when a feminist journal proposed to me that I
ought to consider, in an article reporting the health problems of
women in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, some of them re–
sulting directly from the cultural values and practices enforced by
these men, whether improvements in the relative status of women
might not threaten to bring about a "sissification" (their word) of
Afghan Pashtun warrior society. While the notion that women have
to die in childbirth and remain illiterate for a society to retain its
authenticity is certainly thought-provoking, I was equally interested
in discovering what this question revealed about the present state
and thinking of feminist social science. To this purpose, I have re–
viewed some of the work done by Western women on one other kind
of society, the Islamic, and I believe an interesting pattern emerges.
The first women to travel to the Orient and leave a written re–
port behind were not feminists, though their adventurousness and
unconventionality often distinguished them from the mainstream
women of their times. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
numerous women toured the East, most often accompanying their
husbands but sometimes on their own initiative. Their reports are
•
marked by a profound ambivalence between fascination and protest,
between finding these other women's lives colorful and intriguing,
and finding them appalling and outrageously unfair. Early works
suffered from a strong class bias - it was only the wealthy women
that the European ladies got to see. Lady Montagu, for example,
speculated in the year 1718 on whether the harem might not com-
pare favorably to Western marriage practices where, if one had an
1.
Shirley Ardener (ed.),
Perceiving Women,
London 1975,
p.
xxi.
