Their critique of what has come to be known as the "man the hunter" hypothesis is key here. Her interest in biological and cultural evolution was similarly stimulated by the work of feminist anthropologists in the 1970s who reflected on the economic role of women and female primates in the evolution of a characteristically human mode of adaptation. Haraway now recognizes that her understanding of this work would have been enhanced had she actually observed the work of the primatologists in the field rather than relying on interviews and documents, in the manner of historians. Her work on primates centers on her interest in the work of primatologists, often women, studying free-ranging monkeys and apes (Haraway 1989). Strictly speaking, Haraway is not an anthropologist, but much of her work has been influenced by anthropology, as in her interest in primates, race, indigenous knowledge, and other matters of concern to anthropologists, and indeed, specifically to feminist anthropologists. Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is identified as a "feminist historian of science," whose dissertation dealt with the history and philosophy of biology (176). Born in 1944, Haraway is the youngest of the fourteen women discussed here, and her own voice is most clearly and extensively heard. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Haraway's former student, identifies herself as a freelance writer.
How Like a Leaf is a lengthy interview-conversation that covers aspects of both Haraway's life and work. Haraway is currently an active scholar, as are most of the archaeologists discussed in Grit-Tempered Women, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict can only be seen in terms of history and of their lasting influences. The differences in the personal and intellectual orientations of both the subjects and the authors of these books are also striking and effects the presentations and the issues considered. They also provide a complex picture of anthropology as an interdisciplinary field. Together, these three books give a remarkable picture of women in American intellectual life through much of the twentieth century. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999, 416 pp., $49.95 hardcover. Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States edited by Nancy Marie White, Lynn P. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, 351 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women by Hilary Lapsley.
How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna J.
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