Woman, Culture, and Society
book by Michelle Rosaldo
Woman, Culture, and Society, first published in 1974 (Stanford University Press), is a book consisting of 16 papers contributed by female authors and an introduction by the editors Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. On the heels of the 1960s feminist movement, this book challenged anthropology's status quo of viewing studied cultures from a male perspective while diminishing female perspectives, even considering women as comparatively imperceptible. It is considered to be a pioneering work.
The book features a number of widely cited essays including:
In "Family Structure and Feminine Personality," Nancy Chodorow offers a psychoanalytic explanations for gender differences in personality, based on mother's primary role in raising small children and socializing girls into their gendered roles.
In "Is female to male as nature is to culture?," first published in Feminist Studies, Sherry Ortner argues that the universal (or near universal) subordination of women across cultures is explained in part by a common conception of women as "closer to nature than men" (73). The title describes a structuralist analogy between deep cultural structures, in the sense theorized by Claude Lévi-Strauss. It described cultural oppositions including culture/nature, man/woman, mind/body, public/private, civilized/primitive, and active/passive. In 1996, Ortner remembered it as "my first piece of feminist writing and my second professional publication."
The title of the book alludes to the gendered nature of a prior anthropological text, Man, Culture, and Society.
“Woman, Culture, and Society” enters the record as book by Michelle Rosaldo. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Woman, Culture and Society can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17020241. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Woman, Culture, and Society” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.