(Re)constructing the Power of Activity
in Sally Cole's Women of the Praia

Taralee Alcock

In 1985, Sally Cole, a Canadian feminist anthropologist, did fieldwork amongst women in the Portuguese coastal community of Vila Cha. Based on this experience, Cole concludes that the introduction of wage labour and factory-based employment affected women in complex and various ways. Furthermore, she claims these effects are inadequately represented, given the paradigms for understanding the issues of women and development, in which women are generally described as victims of economic change. I will take up the argument that social spaces were opened up between various groups of Vila Cha women in the time between 1960-1985, and that some, but not all, of these spaces were locations of antagonism. That is, I shall analyze how various changes in the local means of production were sufficient to re-creating the identites of various women in equally various ways. Following on Cole's work, I will look at how different reactions to different idealized notions of 'woman' actually did affect how different generations of Portuguese maritime women saw, and lived, their own lives. I then take this analysis a step further, to explore how anthropology can inform feminism in general. Studies of women in society challenge a long androcentric tradition. The point of feminist anthropology is to provoke some radical rethinking of long-accepted anthropological 'truths', and to open up new areas for investigation (Nadel-Klein & Davis 1988: 1). The category 'woman' is one of these newly opened areas. As Mohanty reminds us: What the problem is about this kind of use of 'women' as a group, as a stable category of analysis, is that it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity between women based on a generalized notion of their subordination. Instead of analytically demonstrating the production of women as socioeconomic political groups within particular local contexts, this analytic move limits the definition of the female subject to gender identity (1991: 64). This, I believe, is a point at which anthropology, particularly feminist anthropology, can inform a politically active feminism in the 1990's. One which can begin to negotiat on the complex terrain of, for example, cultural difference. I hold that this is possible, even though, as Strathern (1981) has shown, the institutional relationship between feminism and anthropology is awkward. Using Cole's ethnography and analysis, I will explore some of the tensions and contradictions within the category of 'woman' at a particular historical moment in this small community in Northern Portugal. These contrary forces are evident in the distinct differences of outlook between elder fisherwomen and their daughters engaged in factory labour, particularly in respect to being housewives. This last names a gender ideal held up for women in Vila Cha, which fisherwomen often consciously opposed, but to which their daughters might aspire. I will look at these differences, with the intention of unpacking the categorical notion of 'woman', demonstrating that "women's status is neither a unitary construct in theoretical terms, nor is it necessarily internally consistent in any particular cultural setting" (Nadel-Klein & Davis 1988: 2) by considering how fisherwomen and their daughters were differently affected by the introduction of new economic forms. Certain questions thus arise. How, for example, does economic transition interact with such inter- and intra-cultural variables as, for example, the expectations embodied in the image of the dona da casa, or the age of the women involved? Further, what are some of the complex varieties of economic disempowerment, and how are these made manifest in uses of symbolic power, by women or by others? First, however, I will provide a brief overview of some of the theoretical points which lay at issue here. Second, informed by Cole's text, I will sketch three distinct and disjunctive images of women in Vila Cha. Finally, I will to examine how these disparities might have developed under the influence of factors falling roughly into three conceptual categories, based on age, income within a gender-group, and culture. The 'spaces' and differences within the proposed category of 'woman' at Vila Cha result from interplay between components of all of these categories, and yet are not reducible to any one of them. And, as I hope to show, it is recognition of the indeterminate and unfinished nature of changes in the (self-)definitions of women which reveals the positive possibilities in these changes. Theoretical Issues Both anthropology and feminism have shown us the problems inherent in the categorical acceptance of 'woman' as an unquestioned point of departure for analysis. Such simple acceptance presumes the prior categories of 'woman' and 'man', "already constituted as sexual-political subjects prior to their entry into the arena of social relations"(Mohanty 1991: 59), which, in turn, rests on the assumption of women as an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, or contradictions, [and] implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and cross-culturally(ibid:55). While we may soundly regard gender as one of the main axes along which identity is constructed, just so long as gender itself is also taken to be a culturally constructed category, this point is an empty one without an idea of how it is that gender is in fact constructed in a particular cultural context. Without close attention to the cultural particularities in various distinct situations, the monolithic figure of 'woman' dominates our accounts, acting as a sort of symbol, through which "absolute alterity or otherness is thus differed-deferred into an other self who resembles us, however minimally, and with whom we can communicate"(Spivak 1992: 179). In fact "the inevitable fact of biological difference between the sexes tells us nothing about the general social significance of that difference" (Moore 1988: 7), and ignorance of the cultural specifics of gender construction is often considered (Mohanty 1991) a flaw in feminism's conceptualization of 'Third world woman'. I would argue for equal caution in the application of categorical notions of gender-identity to peasant women, and even to women of lower socio-economic strata within or outside of a possible 'First world woman's' geographic area, as here in the case of coastal Portugal. Taking 'woman' as a natural category for applications presents problems, often leading to a "mode of defining women primarily in terms of their objective status (the way in which they are affected or not affected by certain institutions and systems)"(Mohanty 1991b: 57). And, as we shall see, some of the implications of this way of looking at things become evident within the context of the body of 'women and development' literature. The effects of development on women have been of interest to both anthropologists and feminists. It is frequently argued that industrialization created the separation of home and work...diminished women's roles in economic production...and [led to] the gradual disappearance of the earlier unifying features of women's work, with its coherent link between domestic and non-domestic activities (Hudson & Lee 1990: 19). And while "for some time feminists doing research within the area of the anthropology of work have concentrated on making women's work visible within existing models" (Cole 1995: 7), the limitations of this sort of approach become clear soon enough. As Cole describes it, a primary way of conceptualizing women within this traditional conceptual framework has been to emphasis external conditions and their causes (1991: 40). Thus, economic development and the introduction of wage labour is often interpreted as one of the primary motors for the intensification of women's oppression and when "the roles of rural women in the new international division of labour are analyzed...women invariably are portrayed as victims of forces beyond their control"(ibid). While it may be the case that engagement in a wage economy does tend to lead to the atomization of women in the household (ibid) and a loss of their economic autonomy, the actual extent to which this holds true for women within various contexts of culture, class, race, and so forth, remains undetermined. Perhaps as a result of this indeterminacy, there seems to be a leveling of the effects of development on the categorical 'woman', although this likely holds true only so far as "the discursively consensual homogeneity of 'woman' as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women"(Mohanty 1991: 56). Thus women are restricted to playing the role of victim, consigned to passivity even where "the collary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage"(Haraway 1991: 157). Such analyses place limits upon individual agency, and this constraint allows rural women neither a voice in the interpretation of the development process nor the possibility of constructing their own gender identity in terms that originate outside the frames of reference of feminist scholars from advanced industrial societies (Cole 1991:126). In fact, as Spivak reminds us, "tracking commonality [the confrontation between women and wage labour]...can lead us into areas of difference and different differentiation"(Spivak 1992: 191). Indeed, tracking this confrontation can show us that the development of industrial capitalism was not a linear process and the gap between the prevailing ideology and the reality of women's economic roles was often very wide indeed... [so that] the process of industrialization needs to be examined as a highly diverse regional phenomenon (Hudson & Lee 1990: 33) The problem of economic reductionism in the liberal 'Women in development' literature (Mohanty 1991: 63) may be alleviated by means of a reconsideration of certain founding premises, so to better serve both feminist and anthropological analyses. The very notion of 'women in development', I would suggest, should be considered in light of Gayatri Spivak's (1993) concept of 'catachresis'; that is, we might see 'woman', not as a natural category, but, rather, as "a concept-metaphor without an adequate referent" (ibid: 60), thus leaving the agenda for action and interpretation essentially open. Thus, the subject is taken to inhabit a category like 'woman' not simply because of the biology of her sexed-body, but also for the critical potential of working from within the referent for the purpose of deconstruction. Opened up to the critical gaze, "these presumably 'objective' indicators by no means exhaust the meaning of women's day-to-day lives... [nor their] everyday, fluid, fundamentally historical and dynamic nature" (Mohanty 1991: 6), and we should not insist otherwise. Leacock states that "[a]rguements about universal female subordination gloss over the structure of women's oppression in capitalist society"(Leacock 1981: 314). That is, like 'woman', 'woman's oppression' homogenizes and oversimplifies. As we will see, in Vila Cha, a preconceived notion of 'women's oppression' might very well lead one to see these maritime women in the way their own daughters often do, as slaves, but when these women speak of their own experience they view their position as powerful and preferred. The focus shifts, then, from the sameness between women to the rethinking the differences among them (Cole 1995: 6). The emergent focus on the differences within, as opposed to the differences between, does pose a problem for feminisms, however, since "the concept of difference threatens to deconstruct this isomorphism ['woman' as a sociological category], this 'sameness', and with it the whole edifice on which feminist politics is based"(Moore 1988: 11). But eulogies for feminism are premature; if we take the received notions of 'bases' as catachreses, we can advance an active feminist agenda, as strategically political as any dominant power-play. Thus, we may find that the value of analyzing 'man' and 'woman' as symbolic categories or constructs lies in the identification of the expectations and values which individual cultures associate with being male or female... [and] in understanding how men and women are socially constructed, and how these constructions define and redefine social activities (ibid: 15). At last, we might use Mohanty's concept of 'relationality' to lend greater usefulness to categorical concepts such as 'woman', 'development', or 'oppression'. In other words, a consideration of how these concepts, or these concepts as catachresis, work in relation to each other within socio-cultural and even personal contexts may provide us with a more fruitful way of looking at the realities of women in society. Donas de Casa (Housewives) Historically, land in Vila Cha was cultivated and privately owned along patrilines and women's economic activity was centred around the home, particularly in households of higher socio-economic status, and "Lavradores [land-owning farmers] were proud to assert that women in their households did not have to work in the fields" (Cole 1991:103). Within these land-based households, women were donas de casa. Ideally, they did not perform any manual labour, did not move about the parish, did not manage the inter-household economy, and "were thought to be more rooted in the ground and the home and therefore less mobile" (ibid). But few households were able to attain to this position, and dona da casa represented an 'ideal' social space, associated with wealth and status. Such gender ideals were often promoted by both state and church, and were directed toward defining relations between men and women within marriage. Under the Civil Code, the husband was the head of the household, and a wife was her husband's legal dependent. In the Portuguese Roman Catholic church, the family was defined as based upon paternal authority, and a wife's duty was to serve her husband (ibid: 102). Attempts to emulate these familial ideals by lavoradore households were also, in part, efforts to forge symbolic links between the household and the institutions of power. Keeping the ideal of the dona da casa in mind, and looking ahead to 1985, the year of Cole's field work, we still find the domestic sphere relegated to women. But, in fact, the home-bound ideal remains inaccessible to most women in the villages, often available only to those whose husbands occupy stable, high paying positions in the community. At the same time, although dona da casa have symbolic power within the wider community, they have the least real control over their own work and household (ibid:146), and their isolation in the home leads to their isolation from other women. The household, and the domestic sphere in general, is the primary source of pride and identity, as well as being "a center of consumption and a place to display manufactured goods"(ibid: 144). For one of these women, then, all work is bound by the limits of the home, and involves childcare, housework, and the preparation of family meals. Women who participate solely in this home-based, non-wage work must further depend upon their husbands to provide those funds necessary to maintain the household. Women of the Praia (beach) The hamlets of Lugar da Praia and Lugar do Facho emerged within Vila Cha in the fairly recent past due to complex socio-economic shifts within the greater farming community. Those who stood not to inherit land, usually the younger members of the family, moved to the sea to take advantage of the economic opportunities it offered, selling fresh fish and harvesting seaweed for commercial sale as fertilizer. In time, these maritime households came to represent both a particular way of life and a cultural form of the parish [and] by inverting local systems of status...the pescadores [fishers] redefined their way of life and asserted its superiority to an agricultural way of life. They constructed a positive social identity and cultural system of meaning for themselves from their relations of production and from the relations of everyday life... [in the shape of] a 'culture of opposition', a counter-hegemonic cultural form emerging in opposition to the hegemony of the local lavradores(Cole 1991: 42). While the lavoradores adhered to state- and church-approved gender definitions, in order to retain the approval of authority and thus increase their status, maritime householders formed their own definitions of gender, often in direct opposition to the status quo. Fishing communities negotiated gender identities on their own terms, in keeping with the context of their maritime households and, going so far as to "employ a strategy of avoidance to resist state intervention in household affairs... they mobilized a strong tradition of anti-clericalism to impede the realization of church doctrine in local gender relations" (ibid: 102). One of these challenges to social and religious hegemony, which may have led to certain stigmatization of the pescadores, visibly inverted local systems of status by promoting the comparatively public lifestyle of maritime women. Women in Vila Cha, unlike the wives of lavradores, were not only publicly visible figures, but were also actively engaged in the fishing economy. Cole describes maritime households during this period as 'women-centered' (ibid: 63); such private economic structures developed in the context of interrelated cultural, social, and economic conditions and cannot be attributed to any single factor. Many factors...operated together to shape [this] character of the maritime household, and to foster the oppositional culture of the pescadores. Most important, however, was the gendered division of labour and the role of women in the household economy (ibid:64). The strict divisions of 'sea/land' and 'man/woman' often assumed in literature on maritime economies (Nadel-Klein 1988) are blurred here, since women work both on land and at sea. One of Cole's interviewees, Alvina, and 53 other women as well, took out fishing licenses between 1920 and 1940, others owned boats, and, Cole reports, "not only do women go to sea with men, but men often share domestic tasks with women"(Cole 1991: 65). Although the sea remains a male-dominated ecomonic location, women are better able to negotiate it as their participation in the economy moves out from its traditional center in the home, which in turn becomes less important to defining women's identities. The involvement of women in a traditionally male domain allows them to retain their control over the domestic sphere, at the same time as it increases their economic power. This increase, for its own part, coincided with high rates of male out-migration to participate in the Grand Banks cod fishery. Woman-centered maritime households did not arise in complete isolation from the circumstances of lavradores, then, and in fact a large part of the pescadores' motivation consisted in opposition to the ideals of their land-based relations. In turn, this opposition led to increases in the power of fisherwomen, and allowed them to renegotiate and reinscribe such traditional roles as the ideal of the dona da casa. The houses which the pescadores built were often only small stone shacks on the beach, and they took more pride in their accomplishments in the area of work, rather than in their households. As a result, housework was of little importance to maritime women...[who] spent little time on meal preparation and laundry and housecleaning because, unlike fish selling, seaweed harvesting, and gardening, these were relatively simple chores, not time-consuming, and usually shared among household members(ibid: 75). Alvina, a longtime fisherwoman, tells Cole that a "good wife is a good manager of the household, tidy, thrifty, and industrious"(Alvina, ibid: 36). These virtues are at once derived from and at the same time opposed to lavoradore ideals. In maritime communities, the household itself was the primary unit of production and women engaged in diverse activities in order to procure subsistence, "including both commodity production and subsistence production, as well as occasional wage labour"(ibid: 65). Women's roles came to be closely identified with the material well-being of the maritime household, and they not only inherited property but also bought and improved property and saved money. As Alvina describes, 'a good woman' was one who thriftily managed the household's resources and who saved money by intensifying her own labour(ibid:57). Girls in maritime households were socialized to this role of the trabalhadeira. The term trabalhadeira translates literally as 'hardworking woman" and represents a woman who was industrious, thrifty, and skillful at the management of household resources (ibid: 80). Still, it would be simply false to portray maritime women as a cooperative group. Indeed, household control over the organization of labour often leads to an intensification of competition between households (ibid; see also Sider 1988). As Cole reports, [w]omen's property relations and their responsibility for the efficient management of the economic resources of the household contributed to relations of conflict among nonconsanguineally related women. Inheritance, for example, often created conflict in the relationship between a woman and her mother-in-law (ibid: 56). Internal conflicts were created by this new economic and social organization, not only within the fishing hamlets, but also within the wider context of the parish as a whole, where fishing was considered a low status occupation, dismissively relegated to "those who lacked the sufficient land to farm"(ibid:43). This stigmatization is not uncommon to fishing communities embedded in a wider socio-economic structure, to which they provide both a component support and an exceptional case. Just this kind of social stratification also created the conditions that gave rise to the consciousness of maritime women: on the one hand, maritime women were proud to identify themselves as workers, trabalhadeiras; on the other hand, they knew their productive work denoted their membership in the lowest social class of the parish (ibid: 102). So, while both women and men of maritime households celebrated women's roles, lavoradore households continued to exist in close proximity to the maritime households, and with them the ideal image of women as 'dona da casa'. In fact, the term trabalhadeira also connoted the maritime woman's low status, and women's awareness of the stigma contributed to the fragmentation of consciousness, and provided the conflict necessary to motivate change in local gender roles and ideals in the post-1960 period of economic development (ibid: 106). Thus, in many ways, the powerful role created for Vila Cha women also served to remind them of their relative social and economic subjugation, and resulting tensions led to many more changes. That roles have again been reconstructed is evidenced by two of Cole's reports from the trabalhadeira Alvina, who expresses both dissatisfaction with current states of affairs among younger women and a certain yearning for her own past: All women gave the breast to their babies in those days. Today women don't want to breastfeed because they want to preserve their bodies: they want to stay beautiful. So they buy a formula at the pharmacy. But it used to be that all women breastfed (ibid: 35). I am a maritime women. My happiest days were the days of my youth when I worked on the sea. I have so much nostalgia (tantas saudades, tantas saudades) for those days, for the days when I was young and healthy and able to work hard. But it's over now (ibid: 37). Young women with low income In the 1960's, after years of opposing the introduction of factories into rural Portugal, the government's policy shifted, resulting in a rapid industrial influx, particulary in the form of food processing plants, as well as those directed to the garment and electronics industries. All of these industries preferred to offer positions to women both because of high rates of male out-migration and because women were thought to be more suitable to the tasks at hand. Women are thought to make better factory workers, since these are jobs...perceived to be extensions of women's tasks in the home, such as sewing or cooking, and are thought to require the same skills; in addition, in the social construction of women in industrial capitalism, women are seen as more tolerant of tedium, better able to work under supervision, and naturally endowed with the 'nimble fingers' required in these kinds of manufacturing...[and] Low wages...are justified by a model that portrays the household under capitalism as based on...a model that assumes a woman's earnings are supplementary to her husbands" (Cole 1991: 131; see also Haraway 1991: 166). Yet, as we have seen, this view of the household economy was not true of these maritime households of Vila Cha during the time prior to industrial expansion in the 1960's. Here, I will concentrate mainly on those women employed by food plants, often the daughters of trabhaldeiras of low socio-economic status within the parish, although Cole describes at length the different effects of wage labour in the parish, with regard to the different types of factory work performed. Electronics industry workers, for example, worked in relatively clean conditions, derived a certain degree of economic autonomy from their relatively high earnings, and often gained in social status since they were able to contribute to the household economy (ibid: 132). In the food plants, on the other hand, work is unpleasant and cold, often leading to illness, and pays very badly. Furthermore, permanent employment is available only for women, and men often only find seasonal employment, so that their households depend upon the women's income. According to Cole, a major impact of industrialization in Portugal has been this change in the social construction of rural women... [d]espite the fact that women, as factory workers, continue to be engaged in economically productive work (Cole 1991: 147). In other words, rural women of low socio-economic status find themselves in a double bind, caught between the reality of their everyday work lives and the symbolic power of the dona da casa. In fact, in Cole's opinion, these women more often than not choose, to remain in their bind, accepting and striving toward the dona da casa ideal, even though it be an unrealistic goal which may well never be achieved (ibid). Instead, these women are often consigned to an area of unresolvable tension between the lived experience of their economic circumstances linked with local consumerism and the quest to attain the ideal of the dona da casa, and between productive and reproductive work, between limited achievements and idealized aspirations (ibid: 139). Consequently, in this space most women are caught in a double work-day, where a full day's labour at the factory coincicides with the demands and duties of managing a household and caring for children. Unlike those in the maritime households, these women take little or no pride in their work outside the home. Instead, they see employment as an indication of their low socio-economic status and take pride in the home, regarding factory labour as merely a temporary means to an end. These factors, Cole claims (ibid: 147), directly contribute to the distinct lack of solidarity between women, and the resulting failure to demand improvements in working or wages. Conflict then arises between factory-working daughters and their mothers "over the structure and management of the household, and their different constructions of women's identity"(ibid: 138). These factory labourers view themselves as trabhaldeiras like their mothers, but with less sense of pride in identity, and "this attribution is contingent..[with being seen as] industrious and respectful of family and community values, and not to be seeking self-gratification" (ibid: 132). There are, however, distinct differences between how these maritime women view their daughters, and how these daughters view themselves. Unmarried women, for example, "use cosmetics...wear fashionable, colorful, tightfitting jeans and sweaters", and often upset expectations as to their sexual knowledge and conduct (ibid: 133). While the rise of the trabhaldeira identity was, in part, a reaction against the impositions of the traditional role of dona da casa, young unmarried factory workers now re-construct themselves in similar opposition to the role of the trabalhadeira. This is at once to be expected, as the mothers' own role becomes the calcified and traditional one against which the daughters react, but it is also indexed to the relative wages of these younger women. While those who earn more are seemingly freer to choose new identities, "women who work in fish processing tend to remain more rooted in the values and self-image of the trabalhadeira"(ibid: 133). Still, as Cole concludes, it is too soon to say how these tensions will play themselves out, since "it is only recently that the maritime women of Vila Cha have begun to be defined and to define themselves in terms of their reproductive work as wives and mothers"(ibid: 147). Conclusions and Analysis So, if the goal of feminism is ultimately to initiate, or at least to foster changes in women's positions, that is to foster women's agency, then I hope this discussion of Cole's ethnography has pointed out ways in which it is necessary to reexamine the very concept of change itself, and to reconsider how referents like 'women' or 'development' are to be understood within the context of change. As Sider explains: to begin the task of constructing an alternative, we must do more than look for the tensions, disjunctions, paradoxes, and contradictions within a culture, or between different elements of a culture: the points where culture does not form a functionally integrated whole. We must, rather, seek to discover how these disjunctions and contradictions are continually restructured within a culture -- how they are generated and formed by the same processes that generate and form culture; how they are connected to the material and social realities of social life...From this perspective we may then better understand how time and history come also to be embedded in culture and class (1986: 10, emphasis mine). This understanding not only problematizes the universality of the categorical definition of 'woman', as numerous subaltern feminists have shown, but also reminds us that there is "nothing about being 'female' that necessarily binds women" (Haraway 1991: 155). An analysis such as the one we have been considering goes one step further and finds the disjunctive nature of the category of 'woman' not only between various cultures, but even within a single village, with its own multiple constructions of subjectivity. Rather than assume that the effects on all women in all circumstances of all economic changes are much the same, we might, by analyzing the sexualization...of women's work in multinational factories, and relating this to women's own ideas of their work and daily life, we can attempt a definition of self and collective agency which takes apart the idea of 'women's work' as a naturalized category (Mohanty 1991a:30). This deconstruction of reified notions of women's work and the effects of development could then, I would conclude, lead us to reconceive our notions of agency and its relation to the structures of economic forms. With regards to feminist ethnography, Cole writes that we hope to recognize, understand and make visible women's struggles within their particular social and historical contexts, and to consider the ideological and material places within which women have been able to work toward a better life for themselves (Cole 1995: 281). The relationship between feminism and anthropology remains an awkward one, since intersections of politics and practice in our work requires that feminist anthropologists negotiate theoretical space between the cultural relativism that is a hallmark of anthropology and the universalism that tends to circumscribe academic feminism (ibid: 280). Cole's book ends on a note of eminent possibility, and it is in a similar vein that I would like to conclude my discussion. That is, the reconstruction, and continuing reconstructions, of women within local and international, gender-specific domestic or class frameworks must be viewed finally as a process of negotiation and positive action. The emergence of maritime households can not and should not be viewed, "as an 'and,' 'but', or 'however'"(Leacock 1981: 13), but rather as an affirmative and active process which is part of greater changes, rather than in spite of them. If we reveal 'the story of women' for the catachresis which it is, we may also be forced to see analytic categories as coming into being rather than simply being, and as rooted not in oppression, but in dynamic possibility. Like the women of Vila Cha, we can participate in the construction of women's identities and recognize the power of the activity.

References Cited

Cole, Sally 1991. Women of the Praia: Work and Lives in a Portuguese Coastal Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cole, Sally & Lynne P. Phillips, eds. 1995. Ethnographic Feminisms. Carleton University Press: Ottawa.

Haraway, Donna 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.

Hudson, Pat & W.R. Lee, eds. 1990. Women's work and the family economy in historical perspective. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Leacock, Eleanor B. 1981. Myths of Male Dominance. New York: Monthy Review Press.

MacCormack, Carol & Marilyn Strathern, eds 1980. Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 1991. "Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminsim" in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, & Lourdes Torres, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mukhopadhyay, Carol C. & Patricia Higgins 1988. "Anthropological Studies of Women's Status Revisited: 1977- 1987", Annual Review of Anthropology v.17: 461-522.

Nadel-Klein, Jane & Dona Lee Davis 1988. "Introduction: Gender in the Maritime Arena" in To Work and To Weep: Women in Fishing Economies,

Nadel-Klein, Jane & Do Davis, eds.St. John's, NFLD.: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Sider, Gerald M. 1986. Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: a Newfoundland Illustration. Paris: Cambridge University Press.

Silverblatt, Irene 1988. "Women in States" Annual Review of Anthropology v.17: 427-460.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1992. "The Politics of Translation" in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, M. Barrett & A. Phillips eds.

Strathern, Marilyn 1981. "Culture in a Netbag: The Manfacture of a Subdiscipline in Anthropology" Man 16: 665-88.