uterine family

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

feminist anthropologist

innovator in the field of

feminism

feminist anthropology

is a maternal bond with children who are used to achieve various sorts of material and cultural goals.

bonds with children used to achieve various sorts of material and cultural goals. 'Margery Wolf's Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, for example, proposed that a focus on women revealed a hitherto invisible kinship form she called the ''uterine family'' (Wolf 1972). Although the Chinese patriarchal family gave no name to any such form, Wolf documented theways in which Chinese peasant women elaborated their bonds with children, using those bonds to achieve various sorts of material and cultural goals. Women gave no name to this activity, but its configuration was sufficiently stable for Wolf to argue persuasively that it was, in fact, part of the kinship system. (in Feminist anthropology: a reader p.13) . . . .This ethnography discusses the 'uterine family' in the context of the Chinese culture, specifically the Taiwanese culture. The uterine family is a woman's mother and her mother's children. In Taiwan, although men's concept of family remains fairly constant throughout their life, a woman's 'family' is constantly changing. A girl is never anything but a temporary member of her father's household. She cannot marry one of his sons... she must leave and go to another home where she will be regarded as a stranger. In her new home, her concept of who is her family will continue to change as her own children grow up and as her mother-in-law's sons take more wives, etc. (net)

Margery WolfThinkers

Margery Wolf