[3] Erminnie Platt Smith, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Frances Densmore—many of these women were self-taught anthropologists and their accomplishments faded and heritage erased by the professionalization of the discipline at the turn of the 20th century.
Margery Wolf, for example, wrote her classic ethnography "The House of Lim" from experiences she encountered following her husband to northern Taiwan during his own fieldwork.
Similarly, Zora Neale Hurston, a student of Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, experimented with narrative forms beyond the objective ethnography that characterized the proto/pseudo-scientific writings of the time.
Other African American women made similar moves at the junctions of ethnography and creativity, namely Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, both of whom studied dance in the 1940s.
[10] Following the rise of women of color feminism, the anthropology of gender critiqued the early goals of first-wave feminists and anthropologists as overly concerned with bourgeois social ambitions.
It did so through a move from documenting the experience of women as a universal population to interpreting the place of gender in broader patterns of meaning, interaction, and power.
Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector's 1984 paper Archaeology and the Study of Gender summed up the feminist critique of the discipline at that time: that archaeologists were unproblematically overlaying modern-day, Western gender norms onto past societies; for example in the sexual division of labor; that contexts and artifacts attributed to the activities of men, such as projectile point production and butchering at kill sites, were prioritized in research time and funding; and that the very character of the discipline was constructed around masculine values and norms.
For example, women were generally encouraged to pursue laboratory studies instead of fieldwork (although there were exceptions throughout the history of the discipline)[13] and the image of the archaeologist was centered around the rugged, masculine, "cowboy of science".
[14] Recently, feminists in archeology have started to confront the issue of sexual assault during "field work" through scholarly research on the social life of archeologists.
[18] Women entering the social science fields had such a large impact on the feminist anthropology movement because before the 1980s, female anthropologists mostly focused on aspects such as family, marriage, and kinship.
[17] Many female anthropologists reacted to this stereotype placed on them, as they wanted to focus on broader aspects of culture in the scholarly community.
The function of the family is child rearing, which is mapped onto a bounded set of people who share a place and love one another.
[21] One of the major problems that can arise is anthropologists often fail to provide what many feminist scholars are looking for in their work; the evidence of links and similarities through which to develop a politics of solidarity and connection.
From the feminist perspective, the political implications of moral relativism are potentially reactionary, as they preclude the definition of either oppression or liberation.
"[21] Others argue that in order to move forward society there must be more focus on relationships of both similarity and difference, as produce in western theoretical practice and people's daily lives.
[21] Hybridity is considered by Jackson to be an important point within complex subjectivity, as it "is the mixing that brings forth new forms from previously identified categories.
For some feminists, anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo wrote, this argument contradicted a core principle of their understanding of relations between men and women.
Rosaldo criticizes the tendency of feminists to treat other contemporary cultures as anachronistic, to see other parts of the world as representing other periods in western history - to say, for example, that gender relations in one country are somehow stuck at a past historical stage of those in another.