Darwin, los antropólogos sociales y las mujeres. Algunas consideraciones desde la antropología social en perspectiva de género

Abstract

«Darwin, the social anthropologists and women». This article presents the criticisms made by feminist theory and gender perspective in social anthropology regarding 19th century evolutionist anthropologists. To this end, we propose to review what Darwin thought about women, as reflected in his book The Origin of Man and Natural Selection, where he enters into a dialogue with John Stuart Mill. We shall deal with matriarchy as well: according to some anthropologists, humanity passed through a matriarchal stage before reaching the patriarchal one, intimately linked to the stage of civilization. This concept, outdated at the beginning of the 20th century, gains importance in the seventies and eighties thanks to the debate within feminist anthropology at that moment, which opened new paths for studying the anthropology of gender.