Women and the Study of Folklore

Folkloristics is a field that tends to overlap with several other fields of study, most notably cultural anthropology and literary studies. This combining of scholarly interests and methodologies has created a multiplicity of perspectives on the material, and the result has been a notable willingness among American folklorists to study a wide range of cultural activities and products. Definitions of folklore are often broadly inclusive, and papers presented at recent scholarly folklore meetings have dealt with quite various forms of human behavior and belief, such as gambling, baseball, unidentified flying objects, and flea markets. In this review, however, we shall confine our comments mostly to areas that have been traditionally central to folklore studies, what William Bascom termed verbal art: tales, folk song and poetry, proverbs, riddles, and the like. We shall largely bypass some areas of study, such as witchcraft and ritual-which, though certainly relevant to folklore studies, belong at least as much, if not more, to other disciplines-and material folk traditions, to which Englishspeaking folklorists have directed much attention only in the last two decades.1