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point to the historic and natural roots of the subordination of women
were challenged. A great number of studies described the lives, cus–
toms, and values of women in their own right, and not as they were
described by male society . The specific forms of their oppression,
and any means of objective or subjective resistance they may have
devised, were also subjects of studies (for example,
Towards an An–
thropology of Women
edited by Rayna Reiter, and
Women, Culture and
Society
edited by Michelle Z . Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere). Like
the research that came out of the academic wing of the black move–
ment, the anthropology (and the sociology) of women took a skepti–
cal view of "value-free" science, arguing that it had too often been a
trick on the part of the power-holders to rationalize existing inequities.
The literature of women's anthropology is readily accessible and
familiar, and I will not try to review it here. I will confine myself to
one study that can serve as an illustration for the whole school. I am
choosing the example of Patricia Jeffery's study of Muslim women in
India,
Frogs in a Well, Indian Women in Purdah,
because she very ex–
plicitly dealt with the questions of partisanship and research. Jeffery
did not intend to study the situation of women at all; she was there to
document genealogies. The subject matter thrust itself upon her
when she "saw the trauma it was for these women even to cross the
street alone, their anxiety about running into men on the street, their
fear of going out in daylight." Unasked, these women complained to
Jeffery that their veils were hot and constricting, that their small
sons had to lead them about on the streets as though they were blind
because they could not see the pavement, that on the ceremonial oc–
casions so important to this traditional religious community the men
set up tents for themselves and left women to stand, heavily veiled,
in the sun beyond the boundaries of the actual celebrations. They
complained that their daughters, no matter how well they learned,
had to leave school at the onset of puberty, and that their husbands
would not allow them to stop having babies, even after fourteen or
fifteen births and even if the last births had been so hard that they
nearly died. Patricia Jeffery documents her own response to these
revelations and her struggle to hold on to scientific neutrality. "Male
social scientists like Goody talk blandly of the 'seclusion of women',"
she observes, "a fate which, I hazard, he would find unpalatable."
Feelings of personal involvement such as these were at the heart
of the women's anthropology of this period. But in the more recent
literature, they are absent. What one finds instead is a revival of the
notion of value-free science, updated for the 1980s by the linkage to
