- 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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