Daughters of the Dreaming

"Daughters of the Dreaming" is not only a work of ethnographic importance. It also explores the nature of the changes in gender relations in Aboriginal society. Diane Bell was accepted as an adult woman who might be given ritual instruction, who participated in their ceremonies, and visited their sacred sites. But she was faced with an enigma: here was a group of Aboriginal women proud and knowledgeable in the ways of the "jukurrpa" (Dreaming Law) who were regarded by anthropologists as second class citizens, as the pawns in the games of the male polygynous gerontocracy, the exploited and excluded, the substance of symbols but never the makers of their own social reality. Who was fooling whom? Was it the orientation of the fieldworker, the bias of the discipline of anthropology, an imposition of middle-class notions of male/female relations onto Aboriginal society? This study of Aboriginal women's lives from a feminist perspective is been long overdue.