The Importance Of Feminist Anthropology

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Feminist anthropology was a reaction to how referring to women in the anthropology field was primarily limited to kinship, marriage, and family structures. Feminist anthropology looks at this disparity as causing a deficiency in fully understanding the significance of women in the overall study of the cultural experience.
In the early 1970s, anthropologist Sherry Ortner posed the question "Is female to male as nature is to culture? " (Moberg, 2013, p. 272). Ortner believed it to be a universal fact that women were considered secondary to men. Ortner stated that this disparity between genders spans across all societies in every social and economic situation (Moberg, 2013). Both Ortner and Simone De Beauvoir agree that a woman’s body and her reproductive system is one of the key causes of female subordination to the male gender (Moberg, 2013). This also falls into the …show more content…

Both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton [obviously we all know these are females] rose to the highest office in the US State Department. Secondly, Hillary Clinton has recently risen to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for the US presidency. The head of the US Department of Justice is Loretta Lynch [also a female]. These US political observations suggest that the glass ceiling no longer exists in the US, at least for government occupations. However, we should look beyond just one society. Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed are women who have all risen to presidential office and are currently in power in Germany, Liberia, Argentina, and Bangladesh respectively. Additionally, in 2012 in Myanmar (Burma), the female Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, rose to the top of Myanmar’s Democratic Party. Thus, again proving that the glass ceiling is not universal and providing support to prove my