Shirley Ardener

Shirley G. Ardener (born 1 April 1926) is a pioneer of research on women (doing women’s studies more-or-less avant la lettre) and a committed anthropological researcher working with Bakweri people in Cameroon since the 1950s, initially with her husband Edwin Ardener (1927–1987).

Career In 1964, she published an important analysis of forms of credit (Rotating credit associations) that has been influential on subsequent work on the informal economy and microcredit systems: see Rotating savings and credit association. Her work as editor has seen the publication of many key texts such as Perceiving Women, 1975. This collection also includes her essay Sexual Insult and Female Militancy, a foundational text demonstrating how the personal can be made deeply political.

She helped found and was the founding director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women (CCCRW) at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford informally since 1973, formally since 1983 (Davies and Waldren 2007: 252). The CCCRW later became the International Gender Studies Centre (IGS) based at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

She was the minute taker at the meeting that Dag Hammarskjöld had in Cameroon in the run up to independence in Cameroon on 2 January 1959.

Awards and honours Ardener won the Welcome Medal for Anthropology in 1962. She was awarded the OBE in 1991.

Selected publications Perceiving Women (editor and contributor), Berg Publications, 1975 Defining Females (editor and contributor), Berg, 1978 Women and Space; ground rules and social maps (editor and contributor), Berg, 1981 The Incorporated Wife (co-editor and contributor) Berg, 1984 Visibility and Power, Essays on Women in Society and Development (co-editor, and contributor) OUP India, 1986 Persons and Powers of Women (ed. and contributor), Berg, 1992 Women and Missions, co-editor, Berg, 1993 Bilingual Women, co-editor, Berg, 1994 Money-Go-Rounds; women's use of rotating savings and credit associations (co-editor and contributor), 1995 Kingdom on Mount Cameroon (annotated edition of papers by Edwin Ardener) Berghahn Books, 1996 Swedish Ventures in Cameroon; trade and travel; people and politics, 1883-1923, annotated edition of Knutson's memoirs. Berghahn Books, 2002 Changing Sex and Bending Gender (co-editor, and contributor) Berghahn Books, 2005 Professional Identities; Policy and Practice in Business and Bureaucracy (co-editor) Berghahn Books, 2007 War and Women Across Continents (co-editor and contributor), Berghahn Books 2016