Association for Feminist Anthropology

Where We've Been,
What We've Done,
Where We're Going

(Excerpted from Voices, March 1997)

Phoenix, 1988: The meeting room was filled to capacity, mostly women, a few men, many of whose names were associated with the first published efforts to bring, in the beginning, an "anthropology of women" and later a feminist and gendered anthropology to the discipline. These anthropologists, their students, and others like-minded, under the leadership of the AFA's first Chair, Carole Hill, gave a unanimous vote to the establishment of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. The first few years of the AFA saw the establishment of several central themes that continue to form the core of members' interests. The late Sylvia Forman, a founding member of AFA, came up with the idea of "Working Commissions" as a way to organize and link feminist academic and policy work. Working Commissions were soon established on three subjects: Women's Body Control, Women and Human Rights, and Gender and the Curriculum. The first, renamed Commission on Women's Reproductive Rights and Bodily Autonomy, organized panels at AAA meetings, resulting in several publications. The Gender and the Curriculum Commission built on the three-year AAA Gender and Anthropology Project that culminated in Sandra Morgan's edited collection Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching. Sylvia Forman initiated, with the Association of Black Anthropologists, the annual Workshops on Teaching about Race and Gender.

A central purpose of the AFA has been the coordination of the many excellent panels presented at the AAA meetings under AFA sponsorship, but scholarship has been only one of the AFA's several concerns. The AFA has also supported a variety of efforts within the AAA to promote equity, inclusiveness, and human rights. The organization deputed Mary Moran to work on establishing child care at the AAA meetings. In 1990, at the New Orleans meetings, in response to the Louisiana state legislature's moves to restrict women's reproductive rights, the AFA Board wrote to then-President Jane Buikstra to make "a state's stance on women's reproductive rights an issue in its deliberations on where to hold annual meetings." In 1992, the AFA urged the AAA board "to address the issue of underemployment and exploitation of both faculty and graduate students in American colleges and universities."

Concrete efforts to promote networking and professional opportunites for AFA members have included, over the past several years, the creation of a mentoring program, prizes and travel grants for AFA members, the publication of several edited collections honoring the work of feminist anthropologists or documenting influential panels, and the publication of a newsletter, Voices.

AFA Goals

Each year, the AFA modifies and reaffirms our goals. At the 1998 Annual Meeting, we decided on the following:

1. To improve the outreach of AFA to feminists from all four fields of Anthropology;

2. To include U. S. women of color in all our activities, but especially to utilize our travel grants to assist women of color in attending the AAA meetings;

3. To increase outreach and mentoring to students at all levels;

4. To broaden our constituency, especially to include part-time feminist academics and feminists outside the academy;

5. To expand our membership to reach 2000 members by the year 2000;

6. To increase the visibility and leadership of feminist anthropology both within the discipline and the outside world;

7. To increase organization networking within the American Anthropological Association;

8. To focus more attention on teaching and feminist pedagogy.

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