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There is a great deal of confusion about the history of women's work outside the home and about the origin and meaning of women's traditional place within the home. Most interpretations of either of these questions depend on assumptions about the other. Usually, women at home in any time period are assumed to be non-productive, the antithesis of women at work. In addition, most general works on women and the family assume that the history of women's employment, like the history of women's legal and political rights, can be understood as a gradual evolution from a traditional place at home to a modern position in the world of work. Some historians cite changes in employment opportunities created by industrialization as the precursors of legal emancipation. Others stress political rights as the source of improved economic status. In both cases, legal-political and economic 'emancipation' usually are linked to changes in cultural values. Thus William Goode, whose World Revolution and Family Patterns makes temporal and geographic comparisons of family patterns, remarks on what he calls 'the statistically unusual status of western women today, that is their high participation in work outside of the home'. He maintains that previous civilizations did not use female labor because of restrictive cultural definitions. 'I believe', Goode writes, 'that the crucial crystallizing variable-i.e. the necessary but not sufficient cause of the betterment of the western woman's position-was ideological: the gradual logical philosophical extension to women of originally Protestant notions about the rights and responsibilities of the individual undermined the traditional idea of "women's proper place".' 1 Many people have helped us with comments on earlier drafts of this essay. We especially wish to thank Susan Rogers,
The voyage back to Haute Provence was harder than I had remembered.To begin with, there were the roads. One cannot yet pierce the Durance valley by autoroute; the high valleys of the upland French Mediterranean remain relatively inaccessible. Although the Durance river was canalized in the 1960s, and its floods pacified, the path into the backlands still winds along its torturous banks. Short distances required long stretches of time and memory to return. 1980 was my first working trip back to Montagnac, the village in which I did fieldwork in the summers of 1969, 1970, and in 1971-72.' I had returned once, briefly, in 1979 for a short visit hoping that people might remember a face, if not exactly a name. I was overwhelmed by the warmth of my reception during that brief return, and resolved to reclaim 'my' village. During the initial research, I had been a graduate student at the University of Michigan. My studying in Montagnac had allowed me to write a thesis which launched me on my academic path. The tension I experienced during fieldwork was continuous. No matter how unstintingly I answered their questions in return for the questions I posed, my exchanges with villagers always felt unequal. I knew that from our friendships would emerge my own career, the benefits of which could not be returned to the villagers who made them possible. Coming of age in the anthropological generation of the late 60s, I always felt socially, politically, culturally unaccountable while on French terrain, for nothing I gave to the villagers ever seemed as instrumentally useful as that which they gave me.2 2 These feelings were the central reason I had stayed away from Montagnac for so many years, blocked by the realities of lopsided friendships which fieldwork in a peasant community entails.
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