Slave, come to my service!" "Yes, my master. Yes?" "I'll fall in love with a woman." "fall in love, my master. Fall in love! Who falls in love with a woman forgets his griefs and sorrows." "No, slave. I won't fall in love with a woman!" "Don't love, my master. Don't love.Woman is a snare, a trap, a dark pit.Woman is a sharp steel blade slitting a man's throat in darkness." Dialog between a master and his slave; Sumer, 10th century Be (12:23)The division of labor [in tribal society] is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest , the woman in the house. Engels, 1972Engels, [1884, p.218The overthrow of mother right [matrilineality I was the world historical defe at of the fe male sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.Engels [1884], 28:120 (emphasis in the original) That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me' Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a wuman? I cuuld wurk as much and eat as much as a man-when I could get it-and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? ...If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! Sojourner Truth [1851], 149:94--95 427 0084-6570/88/1015-0427$02.00 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1988.17:427-460. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of Washington on 02/05/15. For personal use only. Quick links to online content Further ANNUAL REVIEWS
SILVERBLATTThe problem,"women and the state," has deep, ambivalent, and subversive roots . I It emerged as an issue in the anthropology of the 1970s, when political and economic challenges to Western dominion began to invade scholarly consciousness. Feminist scholars called for a new look at the official record of past and present that had for so long denied women a voice and vision. They retrieved Sojourner Truth (third epigraph). Putting conventional wisdom on notice, fe minists began to tear apart its categories, which had muffled, trivialized, and degraded women's contributions to social process. While disturbed about how these categories had become the common sense of social science, feminist anthropologists also demanded that their discipline ...