The feminist contribution to anthropology over the last fifteen years has been to put women back into the picture, and it has provided an important antidote to the prevailing androcentrism that envisaged society as almost exclusively concerned with relations between men, male groups and institutions. However an almost inevitable result of this development has been to treat women as a universal category, and thence to look beneath the surface variety in their situation in all the myriad historical and contemporary societies known to us, for an underlying reason for the universal features of women's existence.