'She was the first one...': Phyllis Mary Kaberry, a founding mother of feminist anthropology

Title: 'She was the first one...': Phyllis Mary Kaberry, a founding mother of feminist anthropology
Creator: Cheater, Christine
Relation: Lilith Vol. 14, p. 65-78
Relation: http://lilith.org.au/the-journal/lilith-14-2005
Publisher: University of Melbourne, Department of History
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2005
Description: In the history of Australian anthropology Phyllis Kaberry is a feminist icon. She was the first Australian woman to earn a doctorate in cultural anthropology and before the 1970s was one of only a few female anthropologists to specialise in the study of women. Her book Aboriginal Women Sacred and Profane (1939), demolished the myth that Australian Aboriginal women were little more than 'domesticated cows'. This stance was to become a common feature in all her work and helped to capture the imagination of feminist anthropologists in the 1970s. This paper looks at Kaberry's legacy and examines how and why Aboriginal Women Sacred and Profane has come to be considered a classic text in Australian feminist anthropology. I argue that when Kaberry wrote her ethnographies she used strategies that enabled her to negate some of the in-built gender biases found in contemporary anthropological texts.
Subject: feminism; cultural anthropology; study of women; ethnography
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/34786
Identifier: uon:3706
Identifier: ISSN:0813-8990
Language: eng
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